What Is Strategic Planning? Definition, Process and ClearPoint Data

Strategic planning is the process an organization uses to decide where it needs to be in three to five years, which few priorities will get it there, and how progress will be measured, owned and reviewed. The output is a strategic plan: a short set of objectives, measures, owners and initiatives, tied to a budget and a review calendar.

I have worked in strategy execution for more than 30 years, 15 of them with the Balanced Scorecard, and ClearPoint’s founders worked with Robert Kaplan and David Norton, who created it. Today ClearPoint powers over 20,000 strategic plans for 150+ organizations, including local governments, health systems, universities and businesses. This guide explains what strategic planning is, what goes into a strategic plan, and what our platform data shows about the plans that keep moving after the retreat.

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a leadership process that answers three questions: where are we now, where do we need to be in three to five years, and how will we get there and know we are on track. It ends in decisions about priorities, money and people, written down as a plan that the organization reviews on a fixed calendar.

In practice, the process moves from analysis (performance data, a SWOT or PESTLE scan, stakeholder input) to direction (mission, vision, priorities) to execution design (objectives, measures, owners, initiatives, budget) to a review rhythm. Most planning effort goes into the first two parts. In our data, the plans that keep moving are the ones where the last two are in place: every objective has an owner, and status is reviewed on a fixed calendar.

In 2018, I sat in a quarterly review with a city manager running a metro area of 280,000 residents. She pulled up their strategic plan: 47 goals, 200+ KPIs. Her team had spent six months building it. When I asked how many were being actively updated, the room went quiet. The answer was eleven. The rest of this guide uses data from the plans on ClearPoint to show what keeps a plan moving.

Strategic planning vs. strategic management vs. operational planning

Strategic planning sets the multi-year direction and the few priorities that matter most. Strategic management is the ongoing work of running the organization against that plan: reviewing results, reallocating resources and adjusting. Operational planning translates the strategy into annual department work plans, budgets and schedules. For a side-by-side comparison, see strategic planning vs. operational planning.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is the document, or better the system, that records the decisions strategic planning produces: the direction, the priorities, and who will deliver what by when. A usable plan fits on a few pages and connects every objective to a measure, an owner and a budgeted initiative.

Most effective strategic plans contain the same building blocks:

1. Mission, vision and values. Why the organization exists and what it wants to become. See mission statement examples and vision statement examples.
2. Strategic priorities. Three to seven themes or focus areas, such as “Safe Community” or “Economic Health” (two of Fort Collins’ outcomes).
3. Objectives. What must be true under each priority. A strategy map shows how they connect.
4. Measures and targets. How you will know each objective is moving. Our KPI library has examples by sector.
5. Owners. One named person per objective and per measure, responsible for reporting status each period.
6. Initiatives. The projects that will move the measures, each with a start date, an end date and a budget line (see linking budget to strategy).
7. Review cadence. When status is reported, who reviews it and what decisions the review can make.

How many objectives should a strategic plan have?

Across the plans on ClearPoint that contain objectives, the median plan has 5 objectives and the mean is 7.2. More than a third (37.2%) have one to three, 28.5% have four to six, and about one in nine (11.4%) has 15 or more. Separately, 42% of all scorecards hold no objectives at all, only measures or projects. You will often read that four to six objectives is the ideal. Our data does not show an advantage for that range, and I disagree with the cap: I would rather see twelve objectives with twelve owners than five that nobody reports on. Keep an objective if someone is willing to own it and report on it every period, and cut it if nobody is. For ideas by perspective, see our strategic objective examples.

Why is strategic planning important?

Strategic planning makes an organization choose. Without a plan, every department optimizes its own work, budgets follow last year’s numbers, and leaders learn about problems at year end. A plan with owners and a review calendar gives an organization a shared list of priorities, a reason to fund some work and not other work, and an early warning when something slips.

The benefits show up in five places:

• Alignment. Departments work toward the same few outcomes. “I learned the importance of aligning your processes and system, and being systematic across the board,” says De’Kisha Fondon, Senior Budget & Performance Analyst at the City of Germantown, Tennessee.
• Better use of money. Initiatives compete for budget against stated priorities instead of history.
• Accountability. Each objective has a named owner. On ClearPoint, initiatives with an owner are 2.5× as likely to be completed as initiatives without one (21.5% vs. 8.7%).
• Collaboration. “There’s been more of a collaborative effort. We’ve seen better communication between departments, a stronger partnership with the county, and more opportunities to engage with our residents,” says Jay Reinstein, Strategic Plan Project Manager at the City of Durham, North Carolina.
• Transparency. A plan with measures can be reported to a board, a council or residents. Germantown and Coral Springs, both Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients, publish progress on public dashboards.

What are the steps of the strategic planning process?

The strategic planning process has seven steps: assess where you are, set direction, choose strategic objectives, define measures and owners, plan initiatives and budget, communicate and roll out the plan, then review and adapt. Each step produces a concrete output that the next step uses. Our guide to the strategic planning process covers every step in detail, with data.

What does ClearPoint data show about strategic planning?

Our platform data shows what keeps strategic plans moving once they are written. Across the plans on ClearPoint, the same three checks matter: whether objectives have owners, whether they get a status, and whether measures receive a value. The findings below use anonymized, aggregated data; we never see the content of customers’ plans.

Finding 1: ClearPoint shows which objectives still need a status

A status (on track, at risk, off track, not started) is how a leadership team knows whether an objective is moving.

Objectives, the top level of the plan, are the items a board or council asks about, and ClearPoint shows which still need a status.

Want the full dataset? The 2026 Strategic Planning Report breaks down how organizations build and report on their plans. If you are building a plan now, start with our 8 free strategic planning templates.

Finding 2: a named owner decides whether work gets reported and finished

ClearPoint shows which objectives still need a named owner. Ownership changes behavior in measurable ways: objectives with an owner were 2.4× as likely to receive a status in 2025 (15.9% vs. 6.6%), measures 2.8× (36.4% vs. 13.0%), and initiatives with an owner were 2.5× as likely to be completed (21.5% vs. 8.7%).

One nuance matters for how you use this. Among items that do get rated, having an owner does not change much whether the status is green. Owners make work visible and push it to completion. That is why the first step in reviewing a stalled plan is to assign a named owner to each objective, before any debate about targets.

Assigning owners in a spreadsheet takes minutes; collecting a monthly update from each of them is ongoing work, and it is the job a strategy execution platform is built for: owners on every objective, updates without logins, and review-ready reports.

Finding 3: ClearPoint shows which measures have never received a value

Many measures are defined during planning and never receive data. ClearPoint shows which measures have no actual value on record yet, so teams can fill or cut them before the next review. ClearPoint also shows which owners haven't updated recently, so teams can follow up before the review.

Before adding a measure, name three things: where the data comes from, who enters or approves it, and how often. If you cannot name all three, keep the measure in a backlog until you can.

Finding 4: the bigger the plan, the smaller the share that gets evaluated

Organizations that track more measures evaluate a smaller share of them. Organizations with 51–200 measures have a current status on 45.3% of them on average; organizations with more than 1,000 measures, on 29.1%.

Each measure you add needs a person or a data feed to rate it every period, so the reporting workload grows with every addition.

Finding 5: plans outgrow spreadsheets quickly

Plan size climbs steeply with the number of scorecards (plan units such as departments or programs). Organizations with 100+ scorecards track 4,134 measures on average, 17 times as many as organizations with one to five scorecards.

At this size, spreadsheets become hard to keep consistent. The City of Durham, North Carolina, selected ClearPoint in 2011 to track over 500 performance measures across departments. When departments drifted back to Excel, the city reset its performance program in 2014-2015; its case study credits the move from 22 Excel files with over 100 tabs to a single system with eliminating confusion and improving data quality. Use of the system grew from two initial users to over 100 trained employees. “We wanted to make sure that data was not just being collected but being used to make decisions,” says Shari Metcalfe, Performance Manager. Read the Durham case study.

What makes strategic planning effective?

Effective strategic planning produces a plan that people keep reporting against. The practices below come from ClearPoint platform data and from customers whose plans have lasted: they limit measures to what can be fed, give every objective one owner, review on a fixed calendar, tie initiatives to money, and size timelines on real durations.

• Start from a performance baseline. Before the SWOT, list what you measure today, who owns each measure and when it was last updated. The gaps in that list are your first priorities.
• Narrow the measures. Fort Collins, Colorado, found that its budget metrics pushed the total to more than 400; it narrowed its review meetings to less than 200 “primary” metrics, with 38 metrics at the top of the plan tracking progress toward its 7 strategic outcomes. See the Fort Collins case study.
• Give every objective one owner. Name a person rather than a department. Owned objectives were 2.4× as likely to be rated in 2025.
• Review on a fixed calendar. Fort Collins reviews different outcomes each month in 40 to 50-minute meetings, so every outcome is covered each quarter. “Standardization of the material is key, as far as having people be able to read and review all the content in these reports,” says Budget Director Lawrence Pollack.
• Tie initiatives to the budget. Carilion Clinic ties 20% of provider compensation to performance management through a “tier payment” system, and cities such as Fort Collins link their plan to the budget process. Our guide to linking budget to strategy walks through three city examples.
• Plan on real durations. Completed initiatives on ClearPoint take a median of 10.0 months (mean 13.3), and 43.5% of initiatives are planned at six months or less. July and October, the two most common fiscal-year starts, are also the two most common start months for initiatives (22.2% and 12.9%, excluding initiatives dated January 1 by default), so align launch dates with the budget year.
• Publish progress. Germantown and Coral Springs report progress publicly; public dashboards let residents see progress against each priority.

Which strategic planning framework should you use?

Use the framework your leadership team will actually review every month. The Balanced Scorecard suits government, healthcare and large organizations that need financial and non-financial measures in one view; OKRs suit fast-moving teams with quarterly goals; Hoshin Kanri suits operations-heavy organizations; OGSM suits teams that want a one-page plan. The table below summarizes where each one fits. For more options, see our overview of strategic planning models and this Balanced Scorecard example.

Whichever framework you choose, you still need owners and a review calendar around it. Carilion Clinic built its system on Balanced Scorecard principles and now manages approximately 300 scorecards across clinic, department, section and provider levels. Its program began in 2007 with a single leadership scorecard of 70 measures; by the time of the case study, the clinic scorecard tracked just 7 measures, each aligned with its Carilion Vision 2025 strategic plan.

How does strategic planning differ by sector?

The steps are the same in every sector, with different constraints. Governments plan around budget cycles, elections and public reporting. Health systems plan around quality mandates and provider accountability. Universities plan around accreditation cycles. Plan size also differs: the median government organization on ClearPoint tracks 67 objectives, 376 measures and 139 initiatives across all its plans, vs. 54.5 objectives, 153.5 measures and 47 initiatives for private and other organizations.

Local government

Cities and counties run the largest plans on the platform. Across 118 local governments, the median organization tracks 80 objectives, about 460 measures and 177 initiatives. Germantown, Tennessee, built Germantown Forward 2030, a 15-year strategic plan, through a 30-member steering committee and a town hall discussion with over 200 citizens, and received the 2019 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. See real strategic plan examples from Germantown, Fort Collins, Fort Lauderdale and Durham, or learn more about strategic planning for local governments.

To report on that plan, Germantown used ClearPoint to centralize its data, automate KPI tracking and publish a public-facing dashboard. The city improved the efficiency and accuracy of its reporting and built a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. Read the Germantown case study.

Local plans also depend on public input. When Fort Lauderdale, Florida, built “Fast Forward Fort Lauderdale,” its community vision for 2035, it collected 1,562 ideas from residents, then built its first five-year strategic plan on that vision. “Aligning a preliminary strategic plan with developing the vision plan has to be iterative. We update as we go, but we’re also being very systematic about it, making sure that community priorities are reflected,” says Amy Knowles, Assistant to the City Manager for Structural Innovation.

Healthcare

Health systems often cascade plans down to the provider level. Carilion Clinic, with approximately 13,000 employees and around 1,000 providers, manages approximately 300 scorecards and ties 20% of provider compensation to performance management. Read the Carilion Clinic case study.

Higher education

Universities and colleges usually plan on the same cycle as accreditation reviews, so the plan also has to produce evidence for reviewers. The same rule applies: every objective needs an owner and a measure that someone updates.

How healthy is your strategic plan?

Answer six questions to score your plan on six execution factors: ownership, review cadence, data freshness, update method, budget link and timelines. Ownership, status coverage and data freshness are measured in ClearPoint data; the other three reflect our implementation experience. It takes about a minute.

What tools and software support strategic planning?

Templates are enough to write a first plan. Software becomes necessary when you need owners to report every month and leaders to see status across departments. ClearPoint’s strategic planning software helps you build your plan, give every objective an owner, track measures and report to your board or council in one click; the strategy execution platform shows who owns what, what is slipping and why.

• 8 free strategic planning templates to structure your first draft
• Strategic plan template guide with examples
• Strategy execution toolkit (41 pages)
• 2026 Strategic Planning Report
• Strategic planning statistics from third-party research

Next step

If you are writing or refreshing a plan, start with the 8 free strategic planning templates. If your plan exists but nobody can tell you what is on track, look at ClearPoint’s strategic planning software and strategy execution platform. To see it working on your own plan, request a demo: after the form, a strategic plan expert reaches out to scope what to show, then runs the demo with your own data. Implementation takes about three weeks.

See how ClearPoint would run your plan — book a demo