Strategic planning has changed. The annual planning cycle that served organisations for decades now struggles to keep pace with market shifts, technological disruption, and evolving stakeholder expectations. Yet the need for strategic clarity has never been greater.
This guide presents strategic planning best practices updated for 2025—approaches that blend traditional rigour with the adaptability modern conditions demand. You'll learn how leading strategists are rethinking planning cycles, integrating foresight, and building strategies designed to evolve.
Whether you're a corporate strategist refining your organisation's approach or a consultant guiding clients through planning processes, these practices will help you design strategies that create genuine advantage—not just documents that gather dust.
I've developed these insights through years of strategy work and building Portage, where I've focused on what actually helps teams move from insight to confident decisions.
Strategic planning best practices are the principles, methods, and habits that consistently produce effective strategies—plans that clarify direction, align resources, and adapt as conditions change.
Unlike rigid frameworks or one-size-fits-all templates, best practices represent accumulated wisdom about what works across contexts. They answer questions like: How often should we revisit strategy? Who should participate? How do we balance analysis with action?
The distinction matters because strategic planning isn't just about following steps. Two organisations can use identical frameworks and achieve wildly different results. The difference lies in how they apply those frameworks—the practices that surround the process.
For example, scenario planning is a method. Using scenarios to stress-test every major strategic choice before committing resources is a best practice. SWOT analysis is a tool. Grounding every SWOT in primary research rather than assumptions is a best practice.
Best practices evolve as conditions change. What worked in stable markets may fail in volatile ones. That's why 2025 demands an updated playbook—one that accounts for accelerating change, distributed teams, and the integration of AI into strategic workflows.
The gap between effective and ineffective strategic planning has widened considerably. Organisations that plan well gain compounding advantages; those that don't waste resources, miss opportunities, and struggle to respond when conditions shift.
Three forces have reshaped the strategic landscape:
Uncertainty has intensified. Supply chains, geopolitics, technology adoption curves, and workforce expectations remain in flux. Strategies built on single-point forecasts break when assumptions prove wrong—which happens faster and more frequently than before.
Information abundance creates new challenges. Strategy teams now have access to more data than ever, yet struggle to separate signal from noise. The limiting factor isn't information access but sense-making capacity.
Stakeholder expectations have evolved. Boards want strategies that address sustainability, workforce transformation, and resilience—not just growth targets. Employees expect to understand strategic rationale, not just receive directives.
Poor strategic planning practices lead to predictable failures: strategies disconnected from market reality, plans that never translate to execution, leadership teams misaligned on priorities, and organisations caught off-guard by foreseeable disruptions.
Effective practices produce the opposite: clarity that enables faster decisions, alignment that accelerates execution, and strategies resilient enough to adapt when circumstances change.
Modern strategic planning requires updated approaches across each phase of the process. Here's how to implement best practices throughout your planning cycle.
Effective strategy begins with understanding the landscape—not through gut feel, but structured observation.
What this looks like in practice:
Conduct environmental scans that examine political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors relevant to your organisation. But don't stop at surface-level trends. Look for weak signals—early indicators of change that haven't yet reached mainstream awareness.
Build a habit of continuous scanning rather than point-in-time research. The most strategically aware organisations maintain ongoing intelligence gathering, not annual research sprints.
Practical tip: Create a structured repository for trends and signals. Tag them by domain and relevance. Review monthly with your strategy team. This transforms scattered observations into actionable intelligence.
In Portage, I've built Environmental Scan functionality into Strategy Boards and Trend Reports specifically because this practice is foundational—yet often skipped when teams lack the right tools.
Traditional planning extrapolates from the present. Modern planning explores multiple futures.
What this looks like in practice:
Don't ask "What will happen?" Ask "What could happen, and how would we respond?" Develop 3-4 plausible scenarios that represent genuinely different futures—not optimistic/pessimistic variations of the same assumptions.
Use these scenarios to stress-test strategic options. A strategy that only works if current conditions persist is fragile. A strategy that performs reasonably well across multiple scenarios is resilient.
Practical tip: For each major strategic choice, explicitly identify the assumptions that must hold for success. Then examine how each scenario might invalidate those assumptions.
The traditional model—analyse, then decide, then communicate, then execute—assumes sequential phases. Reality is messier.
What this looks like in practice:
Expect to revisit earlier phases as you learn. Your initial strategic options will evolve as you stress-test them. Your environmental analysis will sharpen as you clarify strategic priorities.
Build in explicit iteration points. Plan to refine your strategy at defined intervals—quarterly reviews, not just annual updates.
Practical tip: Treat strategic documents as living artefacts. Version them, track changes, and preserve the reasoning behind decisions. When conditions change, you'll need to understand why you chose your current path to know whether that logic still holds.
Strategy benefits from diverse perspectives but suffers from decision paralysis.
What this looks like in practice:
Involve stakeholders from across the organisation in sense-making and option generation. Different vantage points reveal blind spots. Then narrow the decision-making group for final choices—clear accountability beats consensus.
Document not just what you decided, but why. This serves two purposes: it creates alignment by making rationale transparent, and it builds institutional memory for future planning cycles.
Practical tip: Use structured formats for capturing strategic rationale. What options did you consider? What criteria guided your choice? What would have to change for you to reconsider?
Strategies fail in execution more often than in design. Best practices bridge the gap.
What this looks like in practice:
Translate strategic choices into specific initiatives with clear ownership. Connect long-term direction to shorter-term objectives using frameworks like OKRs—but avoid the trap of measuring activity rather than progress.
Build feedback mechanisms that surface execution challenges quickly. The sooner you learn a strategic assumption was wrong, the sooner you can adapt.
Practical tip: For each strategic priority, identify 2-3 leading indicators that will tell you whether you're on track—before lagging results arrive.
AI tools can accelerate analysis, synthesis, and documentation. They cannot replace strategic judgment.
What this looks like in practice:
Use AI to process large volumes of information—scanning trends, summarising research, identifying patterns in data. Use human judgment to interpret meaning, weigh trade-offs, and make choices.
Be especially cautious about AI-generated forecasts or recommendations. AI excels at pattern-matching on historical data; it struggles with genuine novelty and contextual nuance.
Practical tip: Deploy AI for first-pass synthesis, then apply critical scrutiny. What's missing? What assumptions underlie the analysis? What context does the AI lack?
A strategy that people don't understand can't guide decisions.
What this looks like in practice:
Translate strategic frameworks into clear narratives that answer: Where are we going? Why? What trade-offs have we made? What does this mean for different parts of the organisation?
Create communication assets at multiple levels—executive summary, detailed rationale, team-specific implications. Different audiences need different depths.
Practical tip: Test your strategic communication with people outside the planning process. If they can't articulate your strategy after reading your materials, revise until they can.
A mid-sized consultancy traditionally conducted environmental analysis once per year during their planning cycle. By the time plans were finalised, much of their analysis was already outdated.
They shifted to continuous scanning, designating team members to monitor specific domains and contribute observations to a shared trends database. Quarterly strategy reviews drew directly from this living intelligence base rather than commissioning fresh research each time.
The result: faster identification of emerging client needs, more responsive service development, and planning cycles that took weeks rather than months.
A manufacturer faced uncertainty about energy costs, automation adoption, and trade policy. Rather than betting on a single forecast, they developed four scenarios representing different combinations of these uncertainties.
They evaluated each strategic option against all four scenarios, identifying choices that performed adequately across conditions versus those that required specific futures to succeed.
This approach led them to invest in flexible manufacturing capacity rather than highly optimised single-purpose facilities—a choice that proved valuable when supply chain disruptions hit.
A nonprofit struggled with strategic drift—each new leadership team questioned previous decisions without understanding the original reasoning. They implemented a practice of documenting strategic rationale alongside decisions.
Now, when circumstances change, leaders can review why previous choices were made and assess whether the underlying logic still applies. This reduced repetitive debates and allowed more nuanced adaptation.
Keep time horizons proportionate. Match planning detail to predictability. Detailed plans for next quarter, directional choices for the next year, strategic themes for longer horizons.
Distinguish decisions from options. Not every strategic discussion requires a decision. Sometimes the goal is generating options or building shared understanding. Be explicit about what each session aims to produce.
Avoid planning theatre. If your strategic planning process consumes months and produces documents no one references, you have a ritual, not a practice. Simplify until planning actually informs decisions.
Update strategies, don't just review them. Many organisations review strategic progress without updating the strategy itself. Build explicit mechanisms for strategic revision, not just performance reporting.
Balance inside-out and outside-in perspectives. Strategies based solely on internal capabilities miss market shifts. Strategies based solely on external opportunities ignore execution reality. You need both.
Preserve productive tension. Good strategy involves trade-offs. If your planning process produces comfortable consensus without difficult choices, you're likely avoiding the real strategic work.
This article is part of a comprehensive resource on strategic planning methods and frameworks. Explore related topics to deepen your practice:
The Strategic Planning Process: A Practical Overview — Understand the foundational steps of strategic planning and how they connect. Link
Limitations of Strategic Planning in a Dynamic World — An honest assessment of where traditional planning approaches fall short and how to compensate. Link
Strategic Planning Tools: SWOT, PESTLE, OKRs and More — A guide to common frameworks and when to apply each one. Link
How to Conduct an Environmental Scan — Step-by-step guidance for systematic environmental analysis. Link
Techniques of Environmental Scanning — Methods and approaches for gathering strategic intelligence. Link
Return to pillar: Strategic Planning Frameworks & Methods: The Modern Toolkit — The complete guide to modern strategic planning approaches. Link
Start by auditing your current planning practices against these best practices. Where are the gaps? Which improvements would have the highest impact for your organisation?
If you're looking to operationalise these practices, Portage provides an integrated workspace for modern strategic planning. You can begin with an Environmental Scan to structure your intelligence gathering, generate Trend Reports to synthesise insights, and use Strategy Boards to design, test, and document your strategic choices—all in one environment built for the way strategy work actually happens.
Begin a strategic plan in Portage →
Strategic planning best practices in 2025 prioritise adaptability—continuous scanning, scenario testing, and built-in iteration replace static annual plans.
Environmental scanning should be ongoing, not point-in-time research. Build systems for continuous intelligence gathering.
Foresight integration is essential. Test strategies against multiple scenarios rather than single-point forecasts.
Document strategic rationale, not just decisions. Future planning cycles depend on understanding why previous choices were made.
Connect planning to execution through clear ownership, measurable objectives, and feedback mechanisms that surface challenges quickly.
AI accelerates analysis but doesn't replace judgment. Use it for synthesis and pattern recognition; apply human expertise for interpretation and choice.