Business strategy and planning

Strategy is a set of choices about where an organisation will compete and how it expects to win there, made with limited money and attention. Planning translates those choices into objectives, resources and a sequence of work. SFIA 9 treats strategic planning as organisation-wide work, defined only from the fourth of its seven levels upward, and describes it as tying resources and daily action to the organisation's top objectives, scanning the environment first and revisiting the plan whenever conditions shift.

The toolbox, and what each tool is for

• Business model canvas. Nine boxes that make a team state customers, value, channels, revenue and costs on a single page. Its strength is exposing the box nobody can fill in.
• Environmental scans. PESTLE for forces outside the industry, five forces for the pressure within it. They generate inputs and decide nothing.
• SWOT. Handy as a summary of the scans, weak as a method, because lists of strengths and weaknesses rarely lead to a choice.
• Scenarios. Two or three plausible futures, and the question of which choices hold up in all of them.
• Objectives and measures. OKRs or a balanced scorecard, turning the chosen direction into targets whose progress people can see.

Each tool is a way of asking sharper questions. A strategy that survives them still has to name what the organisation will stop doing, and it has to pass a risk assessment: what would make the bet fail, and how early would anyone notice? A useful check on any strategic statement is whether a sensible competitor could choose the opposite. If nobody would, the statement is a platitude.

The numbers behind a choice

A strategy is tested in money: the size of the market, margins, the cost of winning and keeping a customer, the investment needed and when it pays back. Those calculations belong to finance, and this site treats them there. Budgets, forecasts and unit economics sit under management accounting and FP&A, valuation and investment cases across the finance silo, and building the model itself is covered under spreadsheets. The strategist's job is to know which figures would change the decision and to insist they are checked.

The beginner's mistake is confusing a strategy with a goal. Becoming the market leader is an ambition; a strategy says which customers, with which offer, against which rivals, and what the company will give up to get there. Plans written from ambitions produce long lists of initiatives, every one of them urgent, and no basis for refusing any.