The Case Against the Five Year Strategy Document

A genre of strategy document, the multi-year plan that runs to seventy or eighty pages and that organizations across the public and private sectors have treated as the gold standard for serious planning, has, in most of its current applications, outlived the design lifespan it was originally built for. The genre is still produced on a predictable cadence and is still discussed with the gravitas the format requires, but the gap between the document's intended function and the use the organizations actually put it to has widened to a point where the format itself is, in my view, the part of the planning ritual that deserves a candid reconsideration.

What the genre was originally designed to do

It was designed to align senior leadership, the operating units, and the external stakeholders on a coherent narrative about where the organization was going and how it intended to get there. The five year horizon was chosen because it matched, more or less, the planning horizons of the capital cycle the larger organizations ran on, and the document length was a function of the technologies available for distributing complex information across geographically distributed teams in the era when the format was developed. The original use case was real and the document, in that context, served it.

The context has changed in ways the format has not kept up with. The pace of operational change has accelerated to the point where the five year horizon is, in most categories, longer than the planning horizon the operating teams can credibly reason about. The information-distribution tools available to modern organizations make the seventy-page document a less efficient vehicle for the alignment work it used to be the primary vehicle for. The external stakeholders, in most cases, no longer read the document with the seriousness the format presumes. The document still gets produced because the production has become a ritual rather than a tool, and the ritual carries internal political functions that the organizations have not figured out how to discharge through any other mechanism.

What the alternative would look like

It would be a tighter document, on a shorter horizon, refreshed on a cadence that matches the actual rate of consequential change in the organization's operating environment. It would be paired with an operating-cadence layer that does the work of translating the strategic frame into the quarterly priorities that the operating teams plan against. It would invest the leadership attention that currently goes into the document-production ritual into a smaller set of clearer decisions about resource allocation, organizational structure, and the trade-offs the leadership is willing to defend over the next planning window. The alternative is, in most respects, what good organizations actually do alongside the official document. The official document, increasingly, exists as a parallel artifact that consumes leadership attention without doing the planning work the alternative quietly handles.

Retiring the genre would be uncomfortable. The ritual carries enough internal weight that an organization that abandons it has to compensate with a credible substitute, and substitutes are harder to invent than to retain. The discomfort is, in the long run, less costly than the continued investment in a planning artifact that no longer earns its keep. The organizations that figure out how to retire the format gracefully will, in my view, free up a meaningful share of leadership attention for the decisions that actually move the institutions they run.