Strategic planning helps you define where you’re going, what matters most, and how you’ll actually get results. It turns long-term direction into clear priorities, measurable goals, and practical action, so you can make decisions with confidence and track progress over time.
In this guide, you’ll learn 8 clear steps to improve your strategic planning process. You’ll start by assessing your current reality, set a future direction that’s easy to align around, and choose the actions that move you forward.
Let’s get into it.
What is a strategic plan?
A strategic plan is a document (or shared playbook) that captures your organization’s direction, priorities, and goals. It also explains how you’ll execute the work and measure progress over time, so the strategy stays practical rather than aspirational.
Most strategic plans include your mission, vision, and values, along with a current-state analysis such as a SWOT.
From there, it outlines strategic priorities and objectives, converts them into SMART goals, and maps out the initiatives, owners and KPIs that will drive delivery, supported by a clear review cadence to keep everything on track.
How do you do strategic planning step by step?
When you’re planning strategic planning sessions, the most helpful thing you can do is keep the steps consistent. Here’s a practical sequence you can run with.
Step 1: Set scope, timeline and cadence
Start by defining the scope of the planning process. Decide whether it applies to a single team, a business unit, or the entire organization. Next, set a clear planning horizon, which is often three to five years for strategic work. Finally, agree on how often progress will be reviewed. Review moments may happen weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on how quickly priorities and conditions are expected to change.
Step 2: Clarify mission, vision and values
Next, clarify the mission, vision and values that guide the organization. Your mission explains why you exist and what you are here to do; your vision defines what you’re working toward over the long term, giving the strategy a clear direction; your values set the standards for how decisions get made along the way, helping teams stay consistent as priorities evolve.
Step 3: Analyze the current situation
Start by running a SWOT analysis to get a clear view of your current position. This means identifying your strengths and weaknesses internally, alongside the external opportunities and threats that could shape your next moves. To make the analysis more useful, you can also include supporting inputs such as customer insights, competitor activity, market shifts, and regulatory changes that may affect your strategy.
Step 4: Choose your strategic priorities
Once you understand your position, choose a small set of strategic priorities that can guide real decisions across the organization. Keep the list short and specific so teams know what matters most and what trade-offs to make. Strong priorities could include improving retention in a core customer segment, expanding into a particular market or region, reducing delivery time for a core product, or building capability in a key function that supports long-term growth.
Step 5: Define strategic objectives
Now turn each strategic priority into clear strategic objectives that describe what success looks like. These objectives should be specific enough to guide planning and performance, while still broad enough to stay relevant over time. For example, you might aim to improve time-to-value for new customers, increase retention in your highest-value segment, or grow revenue from market expansion within mid-market accounts.
Step 6: Convert objectives into SMART goals
To make your strategy trackable, convert each objective into SMART goals that your team can measure and review consistently. Start by confirming you have a baseline, so you know where performance stands today. Set a clear target that feels achievable within your constraints, and include a deadline so progress can be evaluated over time. Assign ownership so it’s clear who is accountable, and make sure the goal can be measured reliably using consistent data and reporting.
Step 7: Build initiatives and action plans
For each SMART goal, build an action plan that makes delivery realistic and coordinated. Define the key initiatives that will drive progress, then assign a clear owner along with contributors who will support execution. Add a timeline with milestones so teams can track progress over time, and confirm the budget and capacity assumptions needed to deliver the work. Finally, document the main risks and dependencies so potential blockers are visible early and can be managed proactively.
Step 8: Pick KPIs and set your monitoring rhythm
To keep your strategy on track, define the KPIs you’ll measure and how often you’ll review them. A practical monitoring rhythm usually includes weekly or biweekly check-ins to stay close to execution, monthly performance reviews to spot trends and unblock issues, and quarterly strategic reviews to refresh goals and priorities as conditions change. This is also where planning and strategy become a consistent management process, helping you review progress, learn quickly, and adjust course while staying aligned with the larger direction.
How to improve your strategic planning?
If you want to get better at strategic planning, you need to practice making decisions in real conditions. Our International MBA at IE Business School trains you to think strategically while dealing with uncertainty, speed, and competing priorities. You build a strong business foundation and apply it directly to complex, real-world challenges.
You sharpen your strategic judgment through hands-on projects, case work and collaboration with an international cohort. And you’ll also be challenged to test your ideas and learn how decisions ripple across functions, markets and teams. That constant application turns strategy from theory into a working skill.
If you want to move into roles where you shape direction and drive outcomes, the International MBA prepares you to do exactly that. Follow the link below to find out more information
Benjamin is the editor of Uncover IE. His writing is featured in the LAMDA Verse and Prose Anthology Vol. 19, The Primer and Moonflake Press. Benjamin provided translation for “FalseStuff: La Muerte de las Musas”, winner of Best Theatre Show at the Max Awards 2024.
Benjamin was shortlisted for the Bristol Old Vic Open Sessions 2016 and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2023.
