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Is “strategic planning” an oxymoron? Asking that question and considering an answer gives us a clearer way to look at strategic thinking that will make our planning more effective and make our businesses more profitable. Strategic thinking involves considering the probability of future events, while planning involves detailed descriptions of actions to be taken with current resources to achieve certain goals. How do strategy and planning combine to form a strategic plan? Or do they?

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that pairs two opposing words. Examples of an oxymoron are: old news, deafening silence, organized chaos, friendly fight, completely unfinished, absent presence, and alone together. To reach oxymoron status, strategy must not just be different, it must be the opposite of planning – actions to be taken to reach goals.

Strategy is deciding what is important. It is determining where you want to be. Strategy asks: in what arena will you will do best? Strategy requires computing the probability of future events. None of this is planning. The plan narrative describes how to move toward where you want to be – how to take actions toward accomplishing certain goals – with resources that you now have.

What is important to an owner is determined by the owner’s values, and, for the business, the owner’s values with respect to the business. For an owner, the success of the business will not only be the profitability of the business, but also the receipt personally of the direct benefit of owning the business. An owner’s strategy will define what is important and what needs to be done to deliver the benefit of owning the business to the owner. A statement of an owner’s strategy might be, for example, to own the business not more than five years with a sale for maximum value of the business interest placing the sale proceeds out of business risk and into the owner’s investment account.

Yet, even when owners do strategic planning, which is not often, I do not find a statement of owner strategy in the strategic plan. There are goals, presumably based on strategy, and the “strategic plan” is drafted as a long-term plan for the business with stated goals based on unexpressed assumptions about strategy. Many times when I review such a plan, the goals reflect no strategy other than a purpose to be as profitable as possible. I think this lack of thinking about strategy occurs because thinking about strategy is hard to do. But it is well worth doing.

Creating a strategy need not take a long time but it does take some contemplative thinking – that is the hard part and the part that invokes procrastination. For the sake of clarity, I recommend taking things in order of importance. Start with the values of the owner. Can the owner articulate the owner’s values? If not, the determination of what is important becomes impossible. What are the owner’s values with respect to the business? These of course will be determined by the values of the owner.

Once the owner can make a statement about what is important about the business to the owner, the owner should share these values with respect to the business with the other owners. This sharing requires the other owners also to have the ability to articulate their values with respect to the business. This process of the owners deciding about what is important about what the business does and where it does it is strategy, not planning. Most of the time it is not done, because the strategy step is skipped and the initial step begins with the planning process. What appears to be urgent (“we need a plan”) is attended to while determining and recognizing what is important (determining strategy) is ignored.

Returning to semantics, where the phrase “strategic planning” describes a situation where there is no strategic thinking and a plan narrative is written containing goals based on assumptions, then the phrase is an oxymoron. There is no strategy in that strategic plan. On the other hand, in the sadly unique case, where strategy and planning are two separate functions and documentation of strategy is a prerequisite for setting plan goals, “strategic planning” is not an oxymoron.

Most of us do not wear our values on our sleeves. There are many reasons for this – most of them social. Regardless of social norms, in the arena of business ownership, each of the owners of a business should be able to articulate to the other owners their personal values with respect to the business principles by which the business is planned.

The planning process is well recognized. A business principle is determined by an owner from that owner’s personal values. Your personal values will control your business principles. These values with respect to the business, your business principles, are brought to your perceptions of the marketplace. From that examination, strategy planning goals are set. To implement the strategy, the planning goals are used to determine actions to accomplish those goals, initiate those actions, monitor the effect of those actions, and evaluate the results. As the need to revise the strategy and goals becomes apparent through monitoring, the process repeats.

What work needs to be done to define your values and determine business principles?

The strategic planning process begins with personal values. A value is a personal principle that informs and shapes thoughts, desires, feelings, choices, and behavior. A value is not a preference, but an enduring and essential attribute of character. Most owners are only vaguely aware of the standards and concerns that compose their personal value systems. Most unthinkingly embrace an array of normative standards to which they assume most caring and intelligent people adhere. Few have consciously attempted to resolve the tension that inevitably arises when those standards conflict with situations involving business principles and planning.

It is axiomatic that if you exercise personal choice in the development, management, consumption, and disposition of personal and community resources in harmony with your core values, you will likely experience a sense of self-fulfillment and personal well-being.

For each owner to agree with and support a strategic plan, the business principles identified from the owners’ personal values should appear to that owner to enhance the owner’s sense of well-being, including a sense of self fulfillment. Even if values that identify business principles are not articulated, owners will still have a sense of what they are. Plans which conflict with these values will not seem right and not be satisfying to the owner. To avoid this conflict and unease, it is essential for each owner to think about their values with respect to the business when identifying business principles and make these values known to the other owners. The initial and primary task of the owners must be to think about values and define their personal values.

For the corroborative effort of the owners to determine principles and plan based on values, they must engage in serious conversations and in so doing be able to articulate their values such that the principles upon which the strategic plan is based are considering each owner’s articulation of values. Doing this will provide a sense of personal well-being and self-fulfillment for all owners. For this to happen, there are two requisites. The first is that the owners have done the thinking to define their values. The second is that the owners can articulate their values to one another.

If an owner’s value system is to serve effectively as the framework for the formulation of the succession plan, the owner must do the thinking to define the owner’s values – to clarify and prioritize the components of the personal value system. To bring clarity and order to the owner’s personal value system, the owner should reflect on the circumstances and experiences that have informed and shaped the owner’s hopes, fears, and perspectives. The product of this reflection should be memorialized in writing. The writing should be reviewed and altered from time to time to reflect changing circumstances and perspectives.

Once there is a writing describing the personal value system of an owner, that system should be applied to the business and what it represents to that value system to identify the business principles. These business principles are the owner’s values with respect to the business and its specific activities. One owner may want to own the business for their entire working life. Another owner might want a family enterprise. An owner may want to build value and sell within a time frame. There are as many possibilities as there are owners.

Each owner should define that owner’s personal value system and be able to bring an articulation of that value system into conversations regarding the conduct and ownership of the business. Each owner should be aware of the principles of conducting a critical and difficult conversation so that those conversations result in increased understanding about the values and feelings of the other owners. With this competency in place, the initiation of the planning process becomes a source of cohesion among the owners and the basis for corroborative group decision making resulting in sustaining and effective business decisions.