Are strategic plans worthless?

Think about the strategic plan at your organization.

1. Does the organization publish the plan in a document?
2. Do most of the "workers respond to the plan by nodding and smiling in public while sighing and rolling their eyes in private"?
3. Does it begin "with an anodyne statement of principles, lists several general goals, and finally recounts a series of initiatives that the institution will undertake to realize these objectives"?
4. Does it state "that the company 'seeks to be a leader'”?
5. Does it set “stretch” targets?
6. Does it clearly identify where the activities on which the firm will focus and which it will avoid?
7. Does the plan align with the organization's budget?
8. If the plan and the budget diverge, which is a better guide to the firm's priorities?

This opinion in the WSJ (Oct. 2019) criticizes what many organizations call a strategic plan. The critique resonates with me. Many strategic plans are not plans and even fewer are strategies, imo.

One relevant comment to the post follows.

"It is axiomatic: an organization's "strategy" is where it spends its money. The corollary is: since every organization spends money, every organization has a strategy. Not every organization has a PLAN on how to spend money. A company that has no plan for spending invites (and usually gets) chaos, dissension, and sub-optimal returns on spending and investment. Some run out of cash. Others run out of customers.

"I've been involved in strategic planning for 40 years. Like all management pursuits, its been wasteful, enormously helpful and everything in between. It is vastly under-rated, and under-used, as a communication tool in large complex organizations. Good planning works when it helps focus choices and resource use. When you shoot at every leaf that moves, you run out of ammo. Fast.

"That people have been subjected to lousy processes isn't an indictment of planning; it's an indictment of, well, lousy process."