From Annual Plans to Living Strategy: The StratTech Revolution

Why fragmented, static strategy costs you

When your strategy lives across Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks and whiteboards, decisions slow down. Evidence becomes disconnected from the choices it should inform, plans become out of date, and follow-through is difficult to see and manage.

The result is often a strategy process that consumes significant time without giving leaders a clear, current view of what matters, what has changed or what needs to happen next. A competitor move, regulatory development or shift in customer needs can make a carefully prepared annual plan obsolete before it has been properly implemented.

Business strategy development and execution is still a long way behind other business disciplines in its use of technology.

Using general-purpose office software for strategy

Most businesses I know still use products like Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint for their strategy processes (or the equivalents from other vendors). The more progressive might use collaborative whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural.

That is a step up from doing it using pen and paper, but only a very small one. We have essentially traded pre-printed paper templates for on-screen templates.

Those templates do not do any work for you. They will never get cleverer or better at it.

They can make a strategy document easier to produce and share, but they do not connect evidence, decisions, actions and outcomes into a coherent, living system. They do little to relieve the administrative drudgery involved in keeping plans aligned, current and actionable.

Most technology just makes strategy 'prettier'

Many organisations I know use PowerPoint for their strategy documents simply because it makes it easier to produce documents which look 'pretty'.

But if our main criterion for selecting software for strategy development and execution is its ability to produce 'pretty' output, then we are missing the point.

What we need software to do in strategy

What we need is software that will

• help us to develop and execute better business strategies more quickly and consistently, using capabilities like analytics, machine learning and Generative AI.
• connect the evidence behind strategic choices with priorities, actions, measures and progress, so that teams can make better-informed decisions and follow through more effectively.
• elevate strategists and enable them to focus on higher-order, more value-adding activities in the same way that accounting software did for accountants.

AI has an important supporting role here. It can help gather information from connected sources, structure it around a consistent strategy model, summarise large volumes of material and challenge assumptions by surfacing gaps, contradictions, patterns and questions that people may otherwise miss.

But AI does not own the strategy. Leaders remain accountable for judgement, choices and trade-offs: deciding which evidence matters, what risks are acceptable, whose needs should take priority and what the organisation will deliberately not do. These are human responsibilities, informed by evidence and supported by AI, not delegated to it.

The statistics about how many strategies are ever successfully executed are sobering. Studies suggest that as many as 90-98% of strategies are never implemented. That is a terrible indictment.

We need technology that will enable us to do better, not just software that helps us to make our strategies look pretty.

Technology is not, of course, the whole solution. But it must be a part of it.

What bookkeeping can teach us

To see where strategy could go, it helps to consider bookkeeping.

I am old enough that I learned old-fashioned double-entry bookkeeping at school. Transactions were recorded by hand in journals and ledgers, totals were carried from one page to the next, and the results were eventually transferred into an income statement and balance sheet.

It was a structured but labour-intensive process. In larger organisations, teams split the work and consolidated it later, making the process increasingly difficult to manage.

How technology changed bookkeeping

By the time I reached the workforce, this process had been taken over by computer systems. I do not think I have ever seen someone do manual bookkeeping in real life.

At first, these systems were fairly simple.

• Bookkeepers typed the transactions into computers instead of writing them onto pre-printed pages.
• But the computer could add the numbers, consolidate the accounts and transfer the balances to the income statement and balance sheet far more quickly and accurately than any human bookkeeper could.

Then, as other parts of the business also became computerised, it became easier to have those other systems create financial transactions directly in the accounting software. You no longer needed bookkeepers to do it manually.

• You could connect your electronic cash register, point-of-sale system or ERP software directly to your accounting system.
• You could also connect your HR and payroll systems to your accounting software.

What happened to the bookkeepers?

Before long, there was much less need for bookkeepers to enter transactions manually.

Of course, that did not mean we needed fewer accountants.

Instead, freed from the tedious task of recording transactions, they could focus on more value-adding activities, such as financial analysis and planning.

Automation elevated accounting to new heights. And artificial intelligence (AI) took it even further.

That is what technology often does. It starts by replicating existing manual processes. Sometimes, in those early stages, it can seem more trouble than it is worth. But it gradually becomes more capable until you cannot imagine how you ever worked without it.

Strategy needs a similar shift: away from fragmented documents and static planning artefacts, and towards connected systems that help people think, decide, act and adapt.

In the same way that accounting software did not remove the need for accountable financial judgement, AI-supported strategy does not remove the need for accountable leadership. The technology can reduce manual effort and improve the quality, availability and structure of information. People must still interpret it in context, test its implications and make the decisions.

The importance of standardisation

One advantage that bookkeeping has had is that it is much more standardised.

The Italian Mathematician Luca Pacioli defined the rules of double-entry bookkeeping in 1494. He didn’t invent them - they probably existed for several hundred years before. But he did write them down and codify them. And people have stuck to them by and large, ever since. Not only stuck to them- but used them as a foundation to develop a substantial body of accounting standards.

In contrast, business strategy only really emerged as a discipline in the mid to late 1900s. It has developed through a rich range of theories, models and professional approaches, each offering useful perspectives for different contexts.

Consultants and strategists add value by bringing expert judgement: selecting the right questions, interpreting evidence, challenging assumptions and helping leaders navigate difficult trade-offs. The opportunity is not to replace that expertise with a single rigid method. It is to establish clearer common building blocks and language, so expert judgement can be applied more consistently, transparently and at greater scale.

Today, no two strategies often look the same. They may be structured differently, use different terminology and be presented in different ways. This can make it harder for leaders and teams to compare issues, understand the reasoning behind choices, carry learning from one strategy process to another, or connect strategic intent with delivery. A shared structure can make a strategy clearer and more useful without making it generic.

So the first problem we need to solve is to identify the fundamental building blocks of strategy and express them clearly, simply and consistently. This does not constrain professional expertise; it gives consultants and strategists a stronger platform for applying it, showing how recommendations have been developed and focusing their time on the issues where judgement matters most.

This is what will enable us to build software which enables and elevates business strategy in the way it has done for financial management.

This is what will enable us to build strategy software which can be integrated with other systems in our business ecosystem to allow the more fluid exchange and processing of information.

And this is what will enable us to overcome the restrictions imposed by our antiquated ways of working.

Overcoming the planning cycle

The origins of the planning cycle

One of these restrictions is the planning cycle. For most organisations, strategic planning was so onerous that it was originally done in 5-year cycles. Through herculean effort, most have since reduced that to one-year planning cycles, sadly too often linked to the annual budget process.

We see a similar process in accounting, with firms producing the 'annual accounts'. But behind the scenes, most organisations now have near-real-time access to accounting information. This is enabled by accounting software.

The need for real-time strategy development and execution

We need strategy systems to allow us to strive towards the same: real-time, adaptive strategy development and execution.

Changes in the environment, from competitors and regulators, do not conform to planning cycles. If your competitor makes a big strategic move the day after you have put the finishing touches to this year’s business strategy, it may be out of date before you have even started.

So we need software that can enable us to sense and process such changes more quickly, so that our strategies become living, dynamic processes rather than static, out-of-date documents collecting dust in the boardroom filing cabinet.

To do this, we need to be able to integrate systems for collecting and disseminating information. And we need to be able to add artificial intelligence for assessing and processing it.

AI can help teams monitor, gather and summarise relevant information at a scale that would otherwise be difficult to manage. It can help organise evidence, identify emerging issues and challenge the coherence of a proposed strategy. Yet it cannot determine your organisation's purpose, take responsibility for the consequences of a decision or resolve the real trade-offs between growth, resilience, investment, risk and stakeholder expectations.

The most effective approach is therefore human-in-the-loop: use AI to strengthen the evidence and thinking process, while ensuring leaders and strategists review the outputs, apply context and remain responsible for every strategic choice.

Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint are inadequate platforms for building such systems.

The StratTech Revolution

StratTech is the use of connected data, structured strategy models, collaboration and AI to make strategy faster to develop, easier to adapt and more disciplined to execute.

It is not about asking AI to produce a strategy and accepting the answer. It is about giving leaders and teams better support to gather, structure, summarise and challenge the information that underpins strategy, so they can exercise better judgement and make clearer, more accountable choices.

We are not there yet. It is a journey. As the accountants did, we need to start adopting and improving technology in service of our business strategy development and execution processes. We need to start with small steps and progress steadily.

Start with one live strategic issue: use StratNav to turn the evidence around it into a clear strategic insight, then link that insight to the scenarios, goals or initiatives it should inform. Track progress through KPIs and use reporting to keep decisions, actions and results visible. Schedule a StratNav demo to see how you can make that first connection.