In their 1985 paper “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Henry Mintzberg and James A. Waters describe strategic planning as a continuum. There is deliberate strategic planning on one end and emergent strategic planning on the opposite.
Deliberate strategic planning represents a structured, systematic approach to strategy development that emphasizes a planned, intentional, and coherent process whereby organizations set clear objectives and design strategies to achieve them. This approach presupposes a stable environment where goals and actions align closely.
On the other hand, an emergent strategy is more adaptive, arising from patterns of action rather than premeditated plans. While emergent strategies thrive on flexibility and responsiveness, deliberate strategies emphasize clarity, predictability, and alignment with long-term objectives.
Despite the growing popularity of emergent strategic planning, the deliberate approach remains vital for corporations aiming for sustainable success. One of its core strengths lies in the distinct roles it ascribes to top management and middle managers. In the deliberate process, top management acts as architects of the strategy, setting overarching goals and ensuring alignment with the organization’s vision, while middle managers focus on operationalizing these strategies and managing their implementation.
As outlined by J. Scott Armstrong in his paper on the importance of value planning in making strategic decisions, deliberate strategic planning unfolds in four distinct phases, with each phase contributing to securing stakeholder commitment. Before diving into these phases, it is important to recognize that historical data serves as one of the cornerstones of the process. Organizations rely on their data repository to provide past performance metrics and external trends.
Top management can utilize historical data to identify patterns, trends, and benchmarks, which they can then use to design actionable plans. Meanwhile, middle managers can use this data to refine tactical operations, ensuring that daily activities align with strategic objectives. Having a robust data architecture not only allows a company to more accurately analyze what has happened but also to forecast future trends, mitigate risks, and design strategies grounded in evidence rather than conjecture. With this foundation, organizations can proceed through the deliberate strategic planning phases with clear direction.
Defining Long-Term Objectives: The first phase involves defining the company’s long-term goals or ultimate objectives. These goals must align with the aspirations and priorities of various stakeholders, such as employees, investors, and customers. Tools like stakeholder analysis can identify key interests and concerns, while SWOT analysis evaluates the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Furthermore, in later stages of this planning process, the use of SMART criteria—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—ensures the clear statement and actionability of goals. By integrating these tools, companies create a foundation for a cohesive strategic vision that resonates across all stakeholder groups.
Generating Strategies: The second phase centers on generating strategies and alternative approaches to achieving these long-term goals. Companies must consider comprehensive strategies that incorporate slack resources—such as additional time, finances, or facilities—to account for uncertainty and enhance the plan’s flexibility. Generating alternative strategies is a crucial practice that bolsters adaptability. Techniques such as brainstorming sessions, unstructured group meetings, and scenario planning encourage creativity and provide contingency options. This phase ensures that the organization has a repertoire of well-thought-out strategies ready to deploy, even in dynamic or unpredictable environments.
Evaluating Strategies: After developing strategies and alternatives, the third phase evaluates their feasibility in relation to the first phase’s objectives. This evaluation process ensures that the proposed strategies are realistic, effective, and aligned with the company’s mission. Methods such as checklists, the Delphi technique, and the Devil’s Advocate approach provide structured ways to scrutinize strategies. For instance, a checklist can ensure that all critical factors, such as resource availability and market conditions, are considered. The Delphi technique harnesses internal expert consensus, whereas the Devil’s Advocate method identifies potential flaws or risks. This rigorous evaluation phase narrows down the list of strategies to those most likely to succeed.
Strategy Monitoring and Implementation: The final phase involves systematically monitoring the results of implemented strategies. Companies should establish a feedback system with clearly defined intervals—such as quarterly or semi-annual reviews—to assess performance and make necessary adjustments. This system must account for changes in external factors, such as economic, technological, geopolitical, and social shifts, as well as internal factors like evolving strengths, weaknesses, and competitive actions. Key performance indicators (KPIs) serve as a critical tool for monitoring progress, enabling organizations to measure outcomes against predefined benchmarks. Integrating KPIs into the company’s performance management system and linking them to the organizational incentive system ensures accountability and motivates stakeholders to align their efforts with strategic goals.
Securing Stakeholder Commitment
A deliberate plan significantly enhances a company’s ability to secure stakeholder commitments throughout the process. A well-structured plan not only communicates the company’s long-term objectives but also fosters a sense of ownership among stakeholders. For instance, engaging stakeholders in the development of alternative strategies allows them to voice their concerns and align their interests with the organization’s goals.
Similarly, an accurate feedback and monitoring system ensures transparency, showing stakeholders how their contributions influence outcomes and incentivizing them to remain invested in the strategy’s success. This is especially crucial in large corporations where the different parts of the organization must work in alignment with the organization’s objective.
Strategic Foundation
Deliberate strategic planning remains an indispensable tool for organizations, offering clarity, structure, and alignment in an increasingly complex business environment. While emergent strategies provide flexibility and responsiveness, deliberate strategies establish a solid foundation that guides decision-making and ensures consistency.
Technology such as big data further enhances this process by equipping organizations with more comprehensive and timely datasets to generate actionable insights, maintain advantages, and refine strategies with greater precision. Furthermore, many companies could benefit from leveraging both approaches, enabling top management to define clear objectives while empowering all levels of management to adapt and innovate. This integrated approach ensures that organizations remain resilient, adaptable, and primed for success in the face of evolving challenges.
Putting up a business in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is a journey of navigating unique opportunities and challenges. The MENA region presents a dynamic environment for entrepreneurs and established corporations due to its diverse markets, rich cultural heritage, and fast-growing economies. However, thriving in this region requires more than looking outward. It starts with internal clarity—a well-crafted strategy that seamlessly integrates planning, measurement, and execution.
Strategy Planning
According to the State of Strategy Management Practice – 2024 MENA Region Report, 76% of organizations in the region utilize a formal approach to strategic planning and 56% of respondents review strategy annually or every three years. However, while 39% employ a consistent process without relying on a specific methodology, 37% adopt a structured approach based on established techniques and tools.
Based on these statistics, Cristina Mihăiloaie, a Strategy and Performance Management Expert and Chief Operating Officer at The KPI Institute, explained in a webinar that deliberate strategy planning is the predominant approach in the MENA region. Deliberate strategy planning is a structured process in organizations, where a clear strategy is developed through a strong top-down and bottom-up engagement, ensuring high strategy awareness and effective communication.
However, Bori Péntek, a Management Consultant at Systaems who specializes in organizational development and human resource management, believes that deliberate strategy planning is too complicated to achieve success on its own, “Mostly, it offers an illusion of stability that is not there anymore in the external or internal environment. A lot of things have to work very well for the deliberate strategy to work.” Thus, achieving effective strategy planning in the MENA region requires balancing structured formal methods with adaptable informal approaches or emergent strategic planning. Emergent strategic planning allows organizations to adapt to change by prioritizing flexibility and iterative processes over traditional linear methods. Implementing such an approach is also shaped by the organization’s size and unique industry characteristics.
Moreover, identifying potential obstacles early enables proactive risk management. This approach allows organizations to create effective contingency plans that minimize risks and enhance their strategies. Once the plan is established, the focus shifts to strategy measurement—monitoring progress using key performance indicators (KPIs), frameworks, target setting, and automation to ensure objectives are met.
In the MENA region, the balanced scorecard (BSC) continues to be the most widely used performance management system (PMS) with 40% of respondents claiming their organization uses the framework. It is followed by objectives and key results (OKRs) at 34%, which has grown by 70% in popularity compared to last year due to its short-term focus that boosts agility and flexibility. However, many still claim that there is no formal PMS in place (36%), a significant increase from 24% in 2023.
Moreover, a large proportion of organizations in MENA continue to face challenges in working with KPIs, with 32% struggling to select the right KPIs, 20% having difficulty aligning KPIs and targets across the organization, and 17% encountering issues in collecting performance results for KPIs.
With Bori’s experience as a management consultant, she shared, “Irrespective of whether you use BSC or OKRs, you’re going to have these challenges. It’s not about selecting one system and just going along with it. It’s about leveraging the strength of each system by thinking wisely about where they can be used.”
Thus, it is recommended that organizations consider creating a hybrid PMS to overcome challenges related to KPI selection, target setting, and aligning strategic initiatives with broader organizational goals. A hybrid system combines KPIs to track routine business activities with OKRs to assess the success of strategic initiatives. This approach ensures that day-to-day operations are efficiently managed while strategic goals are clearly defined and actively pursued.
Building on strategy measurement, the focus now shifts to execution, where organizations turn plans into results. This phase involves overcoming challenges such as fostering collaboration, integrating new technologies, and adapting to market changes. As globalization and digital transformation reshape industries, translating strategy into results has become more complex. Effective execution also relies on strong project management, initiative prioritization, and organizational agility, ensuring businesses remain adaptable in a dynamic environment.
In the MENA region, most organizations (39%) report success in strategy execution, while a substantial number (44%) remain neutral about their execution capabilities. When asked about the reasons for strategy failure, the top three responses were ineffective cross-functional collaboration (42%), lack of leadership support (40%), slow decision-making and approval (33%), and insufficient resources for projects to succeed (33%).
To address cross-functional collaboration, Cristina advised nurturing the right rituals. “Procedures become quickly obsolete, but rituals are what we do and how we do it, are the unwritten rules that govern the workplace. It’s not necessarily about the work procedure, it is more about how people come together and get things done.”
She also added that it’s important to create multidisciplinary teams rather than work in silos, to have regular performance meetings and use KPIs to understand the business better, to challenge selves constructively, and to promote transparency and collaboration in problem-solving.
The State of Strategy Management Practice – 2024 MENA Region Report can serve as a starting point—a guide to navigating the complexities of strategy planning, measurement, and execution. This report, a collaboration between The KPI Institute and Systaems, explores challenges and success factors in business planning, strategic transparency, performance management systems, KPI deployment, project management, organizational agility, AI adoption, automation, and more. It gathers insights from executives, managers, and strategy experts, while also featuring best practices shared by professionals in the field. Click HERE to download the full report.
With new trends and disruptions arising every day, companies are focusing now on coming up with new innovative ideas before their competitors do. Sometimes, this is done without ensuring whether strategies, operations, people, organizational capabilities, and resources are all aligned together and directed toward the purpose for which they started their businesses.
Of course, companies do know that all of their business elements should be organized and aligned together to reach their purposes. However, some could get lost in the new trending concepts without reviewing strategies and ensuring that their employees’ behaviors and actions are directed by the company’s strategy.
Having a well-documented strategy that looks great in meetings and presentations is not enough. Company leaders and managers should make sure that the strategy is well-communicated throughout the organizations, starting from the CEO of the company to the most junior person in the company; in other words, it should be aligned vertically and horizontally.
Understanding the definition of strategic alignment
Strategic alignment “is the process in which the formerly developed strategy is executed and cascaded throughout the organization. It includes the calibration of the organization’s culture, staff, structure and governance with the strategy.” This means that employees need to witness and become aware of their contributions to the organization’s strategy.
Having all business aspects aligned together is a fundamental state for organizational effectiveness. A common agreement about goals and processes is present in a well-aligned company which occurs at two levels: horizontally and vertically. Horizontal alignment refers to the harmonization of strategic goals and performance measures employed in the different business units. Meanwhile, vertical alignment refers to the transfer of the company’s vision and mission with certain strategic goals down the hierarchy.
Not having a strategic alignment within your business is highly costly; you could lose your key talent employees, valuable customers, resources, and time. Moreover, departments might even work in an isolated zone from the company’s road map wherein each department or entity will be working and making decisions based on their own departmental strategies. Setting a strategy or having a strategic meeting is not a waste of time.
Brightline conducted a survey in 2017 of 100 respondents from large companies and explained that communication throughout the organization and in all directions is fundamental for strategic evolution. The survey illustrated that leaders bolster the two-way flow of information between top executives and people in the company because it is very effective in delivering strategy across the company. David Kamenetzky, Chief Strategy & External Affairs Officer at brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, explained that “Vertical communication within the business cannot fall into the trap of flowing one way—from the top, it is actually about tapping expertise throughout the organization. You have to do a certain element of consultation and even co-creation. It is about making sure the strategy is and remains right.”
So, what could be done to have a strategic alignment?Below are a few tips that could help in developing a strategic alignment within your organization:
Revisit your strategy and make sure it is well-developed and serves the main purpose of the company. The KPI Institute certified course on Strategy and Business Planning Professional can help with this issue.
Conduct a strategy/strategic meeting that includes all relevant stakeholders(leaders, managers, seniors) for developing/updating and executing your strategy.
Make sure that your leadership and managerial styles serve your strategy. You don’t want to have styles that block the execution of your strategy.
Make sure that communication is clear within your organization and it flows in both directions (top-down and down-top).
Make sure that there is coordination between departments through conducting meetings to ensure that their processes, strategies, and priorities are aligned with the company’s overall business strategy.
Events and company meetings that gather all employees across the organization are important. Those events or meetings could remind the employees of the company’s purpose and strategy as well as their future plans, just to make sure that they are seeing the big picture of their roles.
In conclusion, strategic alignment is a crucial element for business success. Business owners should be aware of its importance and this is the most important step for executing it internally. Making sure from time to time that all your employees are aware of the firm’s main purpose, is not a waste of time. It has a direct positive impact not only on your employees but on your overall business as well.
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Editor’s Note: This article was first published on December 9, 2023 and was last updated on November 9, 2024.
A hundred billion tons of materials enter the global economy every year. Only 8.6% of the total amount of the materials are cycled back into the economy. This is the result of the linear economic model. In a case study written by Thibaut Wautelet, he refers to the linear economic model as a production and consumption model based on the “take-make-waste” scheme. He explained that raw materials are collected, then transformed into goods that are used and finally discarded in landfills or incinerated as waste. This approach turned out to be broken, enabling overconsumption to the detriment of planetary health.
Governments and businesses are looking to adopt the circular economy model and start repairing the damage created by unsustainable production and consumption. According to published research in “Cleaner Environmental Systems Journal”, authors define the circular economy as a catalyst for sustainable business. Moreover, the circular model promotes “…the use of resources within closed-loop systems, reducing pollution or avoiding resource leakage while sustaining economic growth.”
The pressure to adopt sustainability compels companies to implement the “reduce, reuse, and recycle” practices from the design stage to post-sales activities. Based on the same research, “Circular economy as a driver to sustainable businesses”, the influence of the circular economy can be seen in many business areas:
Cost management – The circular model leads to the transformation of products at the end-of-life cycles into resources for new products. Integrating material recycling into new component production can close the loop, reducing waste and the usage of more expensive raw materials.
Supply chain – The circular management of the supply chain is based on the coordination across the different members in closing, slowing, or narrowing energy and material flows. Additionally, the packaging system is an important aspect of the distribution process circularity.
Process management – The business processes are rebuilt to make them more circular, facilitating the reusing and recycling out of the desire to extend product life and reduce environmental impact.
Service management – The Product-Service system is considered an enabler of the circular economy by offering services instead of products aiming at pro-environmental outcomes.
Research and development – The achievement of circular goals relies heavily on design, which determines the circular potential. The life-cycle-based research and development allows the selection of the type and quantity of materials and determining how they are combined – a process that affects the product’s life and the possibility of repairing and recycling it.
Figure 1. Product Lifecycle in Circular Economy Model | News European Parliament
Companies embrace the concept of circularity in response to the growing interest of customers in green practices and concerns about the global waste problem. Philips is one of the companies that are successfully paving the way toward the circular economy in their industry.
Philipswas one of the largest electronics companies in the world. But it has changed its focus on health technology, looking to improve people’s health and well-being. Its products include large-scale and small medical equipment and home care products. The company developed new business models to adapt to the circular principles organized on seven strategic pillars:
Close the loop with current products through take-back, refurbishment, and recycling
Further circular practices across Philips sites, including zero waste to landfill policy
The circular design of products and business models
Technical competence building
Driving change with external coalitions and supply chain
Embedding in the Philips Business System
In 2016, the company set goals to generate 15% of revenues from circular products and services and send zero waste to landfills in internal operations. At the end of 2020, Philips achieved their circular goals. Therefore, they set three greater targets for 2025: to generate 25% of revenue from circular solutions, send no waste to landfills, and close the loop by offering a trade-in on all professional medical equipment.
The Benefits of Adopting the Circular Model
The Circular Model and its principles are still new to the business ecosystem, and the market penetration of circular business models remains limited. However, the potential to scale up the model is considerable in many industries.
Besides the environmental impact that the circular model creates through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or the use of fewer nonrenewable resources, or achieving zero waste, shifting toward circularity can help companies secure a competitive advantage and create long-term value.
The circular model enables new revenue streams by accessing new markets or cutting off costs from waste generation. It reduces the dependency on raw material suppliers and increases resilience in the face of supply chain disruption.
Additionally, by implementing a circular model, businesses can attract new clients and improve the retention of old ones, as sustainable practices are becoming an influencing factor in customers’ buying decisions. Also, customer loyalty is favored due to servitization, product-as-a-service offerings, or take-back programs.
Based on the survey conducted by Deloitte, more consumers this year are pursuing a better sustainable lifestyle. Results show that 40% of consumers choose brands that promote sustainable values and practices, which increased by six points compared to 2021. The number of consumers who stopped purchasing from a specific brand due to their ethical or sustainable issues and concerns towards the company has also increased by six points in 2022, which is 34%.
Going in circles is the way forward. It is time for companies to rethink how they do business, considering industrialization’s impact on the environment, relevant international initiatives, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, and the increasing importance of sustainability to everyday customers. The change may be difficult for organizations used to operating in the linear economy but not impossible as seen in the above examples. In order to thrive in the market, companies must establish circular business models and adapt their strategies to the circular economy.
To widen your expertise in establishing effective strategies and organizational planning, read more comprehensive articles here.
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Editor’s Note: This article was first published on May 26, 2022 and last updated on September 16, 2024.
Democratizing strategy planning refers to the process of involving various stakeholders of all organizational levels in the strategy formulation process. In the traditional approach, strategy planning is a top-down process formulated by selected stakeholders like the senior management and key decision makers. So, to make the process more inclusive and participatory, democratizing strategy planning comes into account.
One of the main advantages of democratizing strategy planning is that it increases employee engagement. Thomas, K. W. (2009) discussed in his paper “Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What drives employee engagement” that when employees feel that their voice is heard within the organization, they are more likely to feel connected and invested in the organizational success, which increases their motivation, commitment, and job satisfaction, and that means a lot for them as they feel more valued in the organization.
Another advantage of democratizing strategy planning is that it enhances ownership and accountability, which will be reflected in improved employee engagement, as employees who participate in the strategy planning feel a stronger sense of ownership and responsibility, which leads to extra accountability and willingness to go the extra mile in achieving the organizational objectives as per the psychological ownership theory, which emphasizes on the role of psychological ownership in influencing employee attitude and behavior which lead them to be more engaged, motivated and committed to their organization.
To implement democratized strategy planning, having and securing the leadership buy-in is crucial to its success, so it is necessary to present the benefits and potential of increasing employee engagement and fostering innovation in the organization.
After getting leadership buy-in, we need to define a clear scope of where employee inputs would be more valuable, which is recommended to be initiative-specific in the beginning to avoid any potential analysis paralysis. In addition, it is vital to develop a precise feedback mechanism to capture different stakeholders’ diverse perspectives and ideas and recognize and reward participation.
This process will take time to be implemented correctly without any issues, so it is essential to mention that continuous improvement is critical to reach a practical approach. To read more comprehensive articles on strategy, click HERE.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on November 30, 2023 and last updated on September 17, 2024.
