The 9 Steps of Strategic Planning

Updated December 15, 2025

Strategic planning can be intimidating in the best of circumstances. But when business, political, and global environments are in flux and the pace of change is accelerating, it can seem downright overwhelming. A few of today’s significant business changes include:

• Evolving employee expectations: In the last decade, employees have reset their preferences for how and where they do their jobs, causing employers to rethink the benefits and potential challenges of remote and onsite work.
• Rapid technological advancement: Digital tools and resources alter the face of how and where work gets done, and with artificial intelligence (AI) dominating business processes, traditional methods for accomplishing tasks are falling away.
• Shifting federal regulations and political relationships: As long-held government requirements and global collaborations evolve, businesses need to build flexible, resilient plans to respond to unexpected changes.

Despite their challenges, these trends present opportunities for the strategic planning process. With a more diverse and geographically dispersed workforce, powerful digital tools and resources, and an adaptive mindset, strategic planning can support, enhance, and accelerate your strategies for the greatest possible impact.

Strategic planning fundamentals are strong enough to be applied across many circumstances and can help set a clear direction amid multiple changing factors. These nine successive stages can help bring out the best in your business, whatever you’re facing.

Step 1: Situation Analysis

Define the current state of your organization: its challenges, environment, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Alongside existing data (surveys, interviews, focus groups), talk with a selection of people who can provide a diverse range of perspectives on what the business looks like across functions, geographies, levels of the organization, and tenure. Be careful, though, not to overburden this part of the process. Choose a few methods appropriate for your organization and dive into a more detailed inquiry if you need clarification.

Step 2: Future State Vision

Envision the ideal future — how your communication environment should look, feel and operate a year from now. Consider messaging, content, tools and channels, processes, leader and manager communication, reputation, culture, roles, your team, partnerships, and measurement. Thinking longer-term, reflect on how you will adapt in each of these areas if something unexpected happens.

Step 3: Prioritize Vision Elements

Looking at your vision, identify three to five key elements that should be addressed first to arrive at your desired future. Does your team operate in a silo? Focus on building stronger partnerships across the organization. Are your digital communication tools outdated? Upgrading can provide a level of efficiency and capability that justifies the investment. Do your managers undervalue their communication role? Ensure they have the content and support to do it well.

Step 4: Develop Communication Objectives

Translate your vision elements into specific objectives that can be achieved through your concrete actions. For instance, in building partnerships, objectives might include better understanding a specific area of the organization or enhancing your team’s overall business knowledge.

Step 5: Develop Strategies and Tactics

Brainstorm a range of potential strategies to achieve each objective and a short list of tactics to support each strategy. To create stronger partnerships, for example, a strategy might be to increase regular interaction or gather feedback from communicators across regions. Tactics could include creating or updating a list of global communicators, inviting them to join your communication advisory team, or developing schedules and topics for regular meetings.

Step 6: Prioritize Strategies and Tactics

Develop a consensus and finalize the chosen strategies and tactics to pursue. This is the time to socialize your plan with people who will need to review or provide input. Getting feedback on the overall direction before you develop the execution details can provide valuable insight and save time later on.

Step 7: Define Metrics, Timelines and Responsibilities

Establish a shared expectation on end goals and align on the who, the when, and the how of their execution. A key component of this step is to articulate how success will be measured. For our partnerships example, that might be something like, “An average of 10 global partners participated in each communications advisory team meeting,” or “Leaders provided positive feedback on communications about their departments.”

Step 8: Develop Strategic and Tactical Plans

Capture the content in a written plan to share with appropriate stakeholders, and incorporate their input as needed. For instance, if a senior reviewer has suggested that you ask global managers to recommend people for the communication advisory board, define the tactics needed and who will be responsible for them, and adjust the timeline accordingly.

Step 9: Implementation and Beyond

With the final plan in hand, you can begin executing. Make sure to review any significant factors that may have changed and adapt your approach as needed. Measure your success on a quarterly or semiannual basis, make necessary adjustments, and report out regularly to partners and other stakeholders, sharing the results and any recommended improvements.

Bringing Your Goals to Life

More than ever, strategic planning requires flexibility, adaptability, and a future-oriented mindset. Communicators and strategists must merge the overarching, longer-term goals of their organizations with both the realities of the present moment and the understanding that circumstances are changing more rapidly than ever. Following these nine steps is an accessible way to bring your goals to life and maintain their relevance and effectiveness for your organization.

With more than two decades of strategic planning experience helping global organizations, our deep insights and time-tested process can help you clarify your vision, design the steps to achieve it and bring your business goals to life.

For additional information and support, reach out ROI.

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