Strategy vs. Strategic Planning: Why Winning Requires Deliberate Choice

This is the first in a series of essays on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. It is intentionally diagnostic by naming the problem and sets up the question the subsequent pieces work through. If you want the framework first, start with Sequence Is Everything and return here for the fuller context.

There is a fundamental difference between strategy and strategic planning, yet too often institutions conflate the two. Strategy is about winning - making deliberate choices to position a university, school, or research unit for success in an unpredictable and competitive environment. Strategic planning, as it is typically practiced, is something different: a structured process for coordinating activities, aligning stakeholders, and producing a document that reflects institutional consensus.

Both have value. The problem is not that institutions plan. The problem is that planning is being asked to do work that only strategy can do - and the result is neither good planning nor real strategy.

Any research administrator knows that a grant budget submitted today will look drastically different by year five of the project. If we accept this reality in research administration, why do universities continue to rely on long-term planning documents as substitutes for strategic direction in a world that is anything but predictable?

Institutions that treat a well-constructed planning document as a strategy risk falling behind as federal research priorities shift, reliance on the private sector increases, enrollment decreases, and public trust in academia continues to erode.

What Planning Does Well & Where It Falls Short

Planning is not the enemy of strategy. Done well, it is strategy's most essential companion. Planning excels at managing near-term execution: coordinating resources, sequencing activities, establishing accountability, and translating decisions into action. When the destination is clear and the terrain is reasonably predictable, disciplined planning is exactly what an organization needs.

The mode of failure is not planning itself. It is planning that substitutes for the strategic question rather than following from it. When institutions launch a planning process before the hard directional choices have been made, the plan ends up making those choices by default - through resource allocation, through the initiatives that get named, through the priorities that emerge from committee consensus. The result looks like strategy but lacks its essential feature: a clear, testable answer to where you are trying to go and why.

Planning asks how we execute well. Strategy asks what is worth executing in the first place. Institutions that collapse these into a single process tend to answer neither question well.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, draws this distinction precisely: a plan is a set of activities an organization commits to; a strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions you to win on a specific playing field. Plans are comfortable because you control them. You decide what to build, who to hire, what to launch. Strategy is harder because it requires specifying outcomes that depend on conditions you do not control, and committing to a theory about how you will achieve them.

That discomfort is not a design flaw. It is the point. An institution unwilling to sit with the uncertainty that genuine strategic choice requires will default to planning, because planning produces the reassuring artifact of a document, a timeline, and a list of things everyone agreed to.

What This Looks Like in Higher Education

In higher education, strategic planning has become the primary mechanism through which institutions set direction. The typical process involves broad consultation, a series of retreats, and the eventual production of a document organized around five to seven aspirational themes that encompass everything the institution values.

The result is a document designed to generate consensus rather than surface trade-offs. It describes connection to values, not direction. And because strategy requires visible choices about what you will not do as much as what you will, a document that tries to honor every constituency ends up making no hard choices at all.

This becomes visible through a simple test: ask five members of your leadership team, separately and without the document in front of them, what your institution is specifically betting on for the next three years. Not what the pillars are - what the bets are. What you have decided not to pursue. What you would stop funding if resources required a real trade-off.

If the answers are consistent and specific, you have a strategy. If they are vague, divergent, or require someone to pull up a document, you have a planning artifact; a well-intentioned one, probably, but not a strategy.

Institutions do not succeed or fail by pillar. They win or lose based on a focused set of choices that change how the organization operates over time.

Instead of fixating on planning exercises that may soon be irrelevant, institutions should be asking: how do we remain essential in a world where enrollment is shrinking? How do we make the case for publicly funded research when skepticism is growing? How do we structure research operations to succeed when federal support is increasingly uncertain? These are strategic questions. They require deliberate choice, not comprehensive planning.

Planning Has a Role, Just Not This One

None of this is an argument against planning. It is an argument for sequencing. The discipline of planning: real planning, with named owners, measurable outcomes, explicit hypotheses, and real resource allocation is indispensable once the strategic question is settled. The failure in higher education is not that institutions plan. It is that they plan before the strategic question has been honestly answered, and then mistake the plan for the answer.

The essays that follow in this series work through what that sequencing looks like in practice: how to distinguish strategy from planning in the decisions you make every day, how to run pilots and place bets rather than launch initiatives, how to build the operational capacity that makes any of it executable, and how to navigate the governance structures that make honest strategic choice so difficult in academic institutions.

The question this piece is meant to leave you with is a simple one: in your school or research unit, has the strategic question actually been answered. Or has a planning process been allowed to answer it by default?

Further Reading

A Plan Is Not a Strategy  |  Roger Martin, HBR On Strategy Podcast, 2023
The clearest short treatment of the strategy-planning distinction available. Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, explains why planning feels comfortable but rarely produces the competitive positioning that strategy requires. His Southwest Airlines example is instructive for any leader thinking about what a genuine bet looks like versus a list of activities. Available at hbr.org.

How Big Things Get Done  |  Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, 2023
Flyvbjerg's data-driven account of why large initiatives fail and what the ones that succeed actually have in common. His argument that the sequence between strategic commitment and execution planning is where most organizations go wrong is the backbone of the later essays in this series.