Why Strategic Planning Is Producing More Activity, but Less Conviction

In many organisations, strategic planning has become more frequent, more detailed, and more resource-intensive than at any point in recent memory. Planning cycles have shortened, mid-year reviews have multiplied, and portfolios of initiatives are refreshed continuously in response to shifting market, regulatory, and technological conditions. Yet despite this increased activity, there is growing evidence that strategic conviction, the confidence to commit decisively to a small number of choices, is weakening rather than strengthening.

Recent surveys of CEOs and CFOs consistently highlight this tension. Leaders report revisiting plans more often, adjusting priorities mid-cycle, and expanding the number of initiatives under consideration in order to remain flexible in uncertain conditions. At the same time, many express concern about diluted focus, stretched leadership attention, and the difficulty of translating strategy into sustained momentum. Planning, it seems, is doing more work, but delivering less clarity.

This pattern reflects a broader shift in how organisations are responding to uncertainty. Rather than placing a small number of confident bets, many are opting to preserve optionality by keeping more initiatives alive for longer. Capital is staged, commitments are softened, and decisions are framed as reversible wherever possible. In principle, this approach reduces risk. In practice, it often defers it, pushing unresolved trade-offs downstream into execution where they are harder to manage.

The result is what some investors and executives have begun to describe as strategic sprawl. Portfolios expand as new priorities are added, but few are explicitly closed. Initiatives continue at partial intensity, consuming talent and attention without ever reaching scale or delivering clear learning. Planning cycles become mechanisms for accommodation rather than choice, reinforcing the sense that everything remains possible, but little is truly decided.

This dynamic is reinforced by the way performance and accountability are structured. When funding is spread thinly across many initiatives, ownership weakens and success criteria become ambiguous. Teams struggle to distinguish between exploratory efforts and strategic commitments, while leaders find it difficult to signal which priorities genuinely matter. Over time, activity increases while conviction erodes, and the organisation becomes busy without becoming decisive.

What makes this particularly challenging for strategy leaders is that the loss of conviction often appears rational in the moment. In volatile environments, decisiveness can be misinterpreted as rigidity, and focus as inflexibility. Planning processes respond by emphasising adaptability and responsiveness, but without clearly defined points at which options must be narrowed or choices closed. The organisation remains in a permanent state of readiness, but never fully commits.

Research on capital allocation and portfolio management suggests that this approach carries real costs. Organisations that fail to concentrate investment behind their highest-conviction priorities tend to underperform peers in both growth and return on invested capital. The issue is not a lack of insight or intelligence, but an inability to convert analysis into commitment, particularly when the future remains uncertain.

The distinction that matters here is between designed optionality and default optionality. Designed optionality is deliberate, bounded, and time-limited, with clear criteria for when choices will be made and options closed. Default optionality, by contrast, emerges when decisions are repeatedly deferred without an explicit rationale, leaving the organisation with an ever-expanding set of priorities and no clear path to focus.

For strategy executives, this represents a subtle but important shift in the nature of the challenge. The issue is no longer simply about producing robust plans or sophisticated analyses, but about helping leadership teams develop the confidence to commit under uncertainty. That confidence does not come from eliminating risk, but from designing portfolios and governance processes that support learning early and commitment later.

The organisations that appear to navigate this well are those that treat planning not as an exercise in preserving flexibility indefinitely, but as a process for progressively narrowing choice. They allow breadth early, when learning is cheap, but deliberately reduce scope as evidence accumulates. They distinguish clearly between initiatives that are exploratory and those that are meant to scale, and they are explicit about when and why options will be closed.

The signal to watch is not how often strategies are refreshed, but how often meaningful choices are made. Where planning activity continues to rise while conviction remains elusive, the problem is rarely a lack of foresight. More often, it is an unwillingness to accept that strategy, by definition, requires choosing what not to do, even when the environment makes those choices uncomfortable.

In this context, the real test of strategic leadership is not adaptability alone, but the ability to convert uncertainty into commitment at the right moment. Without that, planning risks becoming an ever more elaborate substitute for decision-making, rather than the foundation for it.