An archer who cannot name the target will never hit it. It sounds obvious when you say it plainly, yet I have watched capable leaders draw back the bow again and again without ever answering the one question that matters most: what, exactly, are you aiming at?
I developed the framework I am about to share with you years ago out of necessity, not theory. I was working with organizations that treated strategic planning as an annual ordeal: a two-day retreat, a thick binder, a document that everyone applauded and no one opened again until the following year. I later brought the same framework into the classroom, teaching strategic planning and management on the Executive MBA programme at the Cave Hill School of Business, University of the West Indies. Across both settings, the pattern held. Strategy does not falter because leaders lack intelligence or effort. It hits bumps in the road because the planning process can feel so unwieldy that people either skip key steps or get so overwhelmed they feel like they are drowning in it.
So I simplified it. That was not meant to cut corners. Instead, I wanted to distil strategic planning down to three questions that, answered honestly and in sequence, do the work of a much heavier process.
Where are we now? Where are we going? How will we get there?
That's the whole architecture. Everything else is detail.
Why Most Planning Breaks Down Before It Begins
Here is one of the patterns I have seen most often: a leadership team realizes they have a problem and they immediately start thinking about what they can do the fix it without investigation or analysis. Sometimes they tell themselves that the situation is urgent and they do not have time for that backgound work. They know they want growth, or efficiency, or a new market, so they start assigning tasks and setting deadlines. The energy in the room is genuine. The plan looks thorough.
Then, a few months in, the plan starts to wobble. Priorities compete. Frustration starts to leak out in meetings. Resources go to initiatives that do not seem connected to anything larger. People work hard in directions that are not aligned.
The plan was never the problem. The absence of a shared starting point was.
An archer who hasn't located their own position on the field, relative to the target, cannot calculate the angle of the shot. Precision requires two fixed points: where you are, and where you are aiming. Organizations that jump straight into "how will we get there" are trying to calculate that angle with only one coordinate. The misalignment that follows isn't a failure of effort. It's a failure of sequence.
Question One: Where Are We Now?
This is the question leaders are most tempted to rush. It feels like throat-clearing before the real work starts. In practice, it is the real work.
Answering it honestly means taking stock of your internal strengths and weaknesses, and the external opportunities and threats bearing down on you. Not the version of your organization you present in the annual report. The actual version, including the parts that are harder to say out loud. The things you have been turning a blind eye to or glossing over because these required too much effort to change.
This is also where what I call the conversation before strategy. Before a team can move forward together, they need a shared understanding of where they are starting from. Leaders who skip this conversation often mistake agreement for alignment. Everyone nodded in the meeting, so everyone must be on the same page. But nodding isn't the same as a shared, examined view of current reality. Teams that take the time to build that shared view consistently show stronger alignment and more resilience when conditions shift later.
In practice, this often looks like structured honesty: an internal audit, candid interviews, a genuine look at what is working and what isn't, done before anyone starts talking about solutions.
Question Two: Where Are We Going?
Once you know your starting position, you can set the target. This is the vision and objectives stage, and it asks something more specific than "what do we want." It asks what future state would actually represent success, and why that future matters enough to organize people and resources around it.
A vague aspiration is not a target. "We want to grow" gives the archer nothing to aim at. A clear target names what growth means, by when, and for whom. The clearer the target, the more precise every later decision becomes, because you can hold each choice up against it and ask a simple question: does this move us closer, or does it not?
This is also the stage where a leader's ability to communicate starts to matter as much as their ability to think. A target that lives only in the leader's head is not a target the organization can aim at together. Naming it clearly, and repeating it often, is a vital part of the work.
Question Three: How Will We Get There?
This is where most of the traditional planning language lives: strategies, action plans, a monitoring and evaluation framework to track whether you are actually moving. But before any of that gets built, two things need to happen, and leaders frequently skip both.
First, responsibilities need to be assigned early, not discovered along the way. Second, implementation needs real planning, not just good intentions and a launch date. I have watched well-intentioned strategies stall for months, not because the thinking was wrong, but because no one had decided, in writing, who owned what.
Here's where it gets practical. A strong "how" includes:
Strategies that connect directly back to the target named in question two, not a scattered list of good ideas
Action plans with named owners and real deadlines, not "the team" as a catch-all
A monitoring and evaluation framework simple enough that someone actually uses it, checking progress on a set rhythm rather than discovering the gap a year later
High performance comes from integration, not intensity. The organizations that execute well aren't working harder than everyone else. They have simply sequenced the work so each stage sets up the next, instead of skipping ahead and hoping it holds.
Keeping It Simple on Purpose
I built this framework to be simple because people abandon tedious processes, and abandoned processes help no one. A simplified three-question approach keeps strategic planning from becoming the kind of exercise people endure once in a while and then quietly ignore. It also keeps it rigorous, because each question still demands an honest, specific answer.
Organizations that return to these three questions regularly, not just at the annual retreat, show something worth naming: superior adaptability. Markets shift. Assumptions age. A team that knows how to re-ask "where are we now" without starting from scratch handles turbulence very differently from one that only visits its plan once every three years.
Where are you right now? Where are you actually trying to go? And does your current path connect the two, or does it just keep you busy?
If you would like more thinking along these lines, I invite you to join our mailing list and explore our other posts. If you are working through a strategic planning challenge right now, reach out. I would be glad to talk through what support might look like for you.
