The Step Before Strategy
The pattern your planning process misses.
TL;DR: When you give leaders the right questions and the space to answer them individually, what emerges is a remarkably clear picture of where the organization actually stands. That picture is the foundation a strategic plan should be built on, but most planning processes skip it.
Most strategic planning processes start in the wrong place.
A board decides it’s time. A head hires a consultant. Committees get formed. Community input gets gathered. And before anyone has diagnosed what’s actually going on inside the organization, the process is already building toward a document full of aspirations.
I’ve written before about why strategic plans produce documents instead of change—too many goals, too little subtraction, and too much aspiration without operational follow-through. But over the past two years, working with independent schools and mission-driven organizations of varying size and complexity, I’ve become convinced that the gap opens even earlier than I thought. It starts with how we enter the process.
So we built something at MehtaCognition. A pre-planning diagnostic that every member of the leadership team—and, separately, board leadership—completes individually before any group conversation or interview happens. The questions are framed differently for each audience (a director of admissions and a board chair see the institution from different vantage points, and the diagnostic should reflect that), but the underlying architecture is the same. No committee discussions. No comparing notes with the person down the hall. Just each leader, answering the same set of questions about what they actually see from where they sit.
What comes back is consistently more useful than anything that emerges from a group brainstorming session.
Everyone Is Circling the Same Question
When we ask leaders to name the one question the strategic plan should answer, something worth noting happens. Across divisions, across functions—admissions, advancement, finance, academics, operations—people arrive at similar territory using completely different language.
The academic leader frames it around coherence and standards. The CFO frames it around outcomes and accountability. The admissions director frames it around competitive positioning. The development officer frames it around how to explain the school’s value. Different entry points, same underlying need: clarity about institutional identity.
This convergence matters because most planning processes treat alignment as something you build during the process. But in our experience, the alignment is already there—latent, unspoken, waiting for a structure that can surface it. When a leadership team of ten or fifteen people independently identifies the same fundamental tension, you don’t need six months of committee work to discover your strategic question. You need the discipline to name it and the willingness to answer it.
The Most Diagnostic Data Point We Collect
One question consistently produces the most revealing responses in the entire survey: What did the organization explicitly stop (or pause) doing as a result of the last strategic plan?
Across multiple engagements, the pattern is strikingly consistent. Somewhere between two-thirds and nearly all respondents cannot name a single meaningful thing the organization stopped.
When the occasional respondent does name something, it’s modest. A schedule change. A fundraising practice. A professional development format. Nobody points to a program that was deliberately sunset, a role that was eliminated to create capacity, or a strategic initiative that was intentionally wound down.
This finding cuts across every functional group. Academic leaders, advancement staff, operations—everyone struggles equally to name what was subtracted. It tells you more about the organization’s relationship with strategy than any mission statement review or SWOT analysis.
Organizations that treat strategy as additive—layering new priorities on top of existing ones without making trade-offs—end up with stretched systems, initiative fatigue, and a leadership team that quietly knows nothing will actually change. Several leaders in our diagnostics have said as much directly: the previous plan produced a document, not transformation. It felt unfocused. It was forgotten within months.
The strategic plan must include an explicit stop-doing list, or it will repeat the pattern.
They’re Asking for Optimization, Not Innovation
Here’s something that surprises boards and a few heads: when you ask leadership teams what kind of strategy the organization needs, the majority consistently choose optimization over innovation. They’re not asking for new programs, new buildings, or transformational bets. They’re asking for clarity about existing commitments, consistency in execution, and discipline in prioritization.
This matters because boards and heads often enter strategic planning with an appetite for the new. New signature programs. New facilities. New revenue streams. And sometimes that’s exactly right. But when the people closest to execution are telling you they need coherence before they need creativity, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.
The minority who select “innovation-ready” aren’t wrong—they often see capacity that others don’t, particularly in areas like financial stability or infrastructure that have genuinely improved. Their perspective deserves attention because it may reveal that the organization has more runway than the majority perceives.
But when six out of ten or ten out of fifteen leaders say “optimize first,” the plan needs to honor that reality. These are the people responsible for executing whatever the plan produces. If they’re telling you existing systems need coherence before they can absorb something new, designing around innovation reproduces the same initiative fatigue the team is already describing. You can’t build new floors on a foundation the people standing on it say is still settling.
Decision-Rights: The Quiet Structural Question
Across engagements, a pattern emerges around decisions that keep getting reopened. Placement criteria. Curriculum ownership. Student support systems. Hiring authority. The specific decisions vary by institution, but the dynamic is consistent: decisions get revisited because nobody has clearly defined who owns them.
The diagnostic surfaces this without asking about it directly. When you ask leaders what keeps getting reopened and why, they describe ownership that shifts depending on the student, the situation, or who pushes back hardest. They describe informal authority that works until it doesn’t. They describe decisions made at one level and revised at another without transparent criteria for when that’s appropriate.
This isn’t a people issue. It’s a structural one. And it has direct implications for the planning process: any strategic plan that doesn’t address how decisions get made—not just what decisions get made—will stall at implementation. Leaders told us as much, repeatedly. They want clear ownership, fewer goals, and measurable accountability. They’ve lived through plans that produced aspirations without operational follow-through. They’re ready for something different.
Culture and Capacity Come First
When we ask what companion work needs to run alongside strategic planning, two categories dominate every time: culture work (values alignment, trust, shifting norms) and operational capacity building (stabilizing systems, developing people).
This is the leadership team’s self-diagnosis. They’re telling you that a strategic plan alone won’t address what needs addressing. That the organization’s systems need stabilizing before new strategic weight gets added. That trust dynamics and decision-making norms require attention that a planning document can’t provide.
Some teams also surface deeper concerns—about whether dissent is safe, about whether the autonomy they’re told they have is real, about whether the process itself will produce another round of aspirations that gets quietly shelved. One leader in a recent engagement put it plainly: the thing that most needs resolving isn’t a strategic question at all—it’s whether people feel safe enough to disagree openly. These concerns aren’t cynicism. They’re hard-earned pattern recognition from people who’ve watched previous planning efforts layer on new goals without removing old obligations. They deserve a process that takes those concerns seriously from the start.
Why This Changes the Process
The diagnostic does two things that reshape everything that follows.
First, it gives the planning process an honest starting point. Instead of beginning with aspirational questions about the future, we begin with an accurate picture of the present—what’s working, what’s stretched, what keeps getting reopened, and what the team actually believes the organization needs. That picture is worth more than any environmental scan or community survey because it comes from the people who will be responsible for executing whatever the plan produces.
Second, it builds trust. When leaders see their observations reflected in the synthesis—anonymized but unmistakable—they recognize that the process is designed to surface reality, not manufacture consensus. That changes how they show up in every subsequent conversation. They engage more honestly in working groups. They name trade-offs more directly. They hold each other accountable for specificity rather than retreating into comfortable abstractions.
The diagnostic doesn’t produce the strategy. It produces the conditions under which honest strategy becomes possible. And in my experience, those conditions are what most planning processes skip.
The Honest Question
If you’re considering strategic planning, here’s the test before you begin: Can your leadership team—individually, candidly, without coordinating—articulate the same fundamental question about your organization’s future?
If they can, you’re closer to ready than you think. The alignment exists. The question is whether your process is designed to honor it.
If they can’t, that’s the first thing to work on. And no amount of committee work or community forums will substitute for the discipline of asking the right questions of the right people at the right time.
(For board chairs and heads who attended my recent ISCA keynote on strategy and what great boards do differently, resources and frameworks for this diagnostic approach are available at isca.mehtacognition.com.)
Questions for Reflection
If you asked every member of your leadership team to name the one question the strategic plan should answer—independently, no comparing notes—would they converge? What would divergence tell you?
Can you name three meaningful things your organization stopped doing as a result of the last strategic plan? If you can’t, what does that tell you?
Is your leadership team asking for innovation or optimization? And is your planning process designed to deliver what they’re actually asking for, and what your organization needs?