Five strategic planning frameworks, tested across real engagements over the last five years. The frameworks all have published advocates. The question is which actually move the needle in real engagements versus which produce beautiful slides and no decisions. Here's the honest report.
1. SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
What it is: The classic. Map your strengths and weaknesses internally; opportunities and threats externally. Use the resulting four-quadrant view to develop strategy.
How it performed in engagements: Mediocre. SWOT generates lots of bullet points but rarely produces strategic decisions. The bullets accumulate without forcing prioritisation. Most SWOT outputs end up as appendix material rather than as strategic guidance.
Where it works: As a starting input for early-stage discussions, particularly for teams new to strategic planning. Useful warm-up; insufficient as a primary tool.
Where it fails: When used as the primary strategic framework in mature engagements. The lack of forced trade-offs is its central limitation.
2. Porter's Five Forces
What it is: Analyse your industry along five competitive dimensions: rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes.
How it performed in engagements: Useful in specific contexts, less so generally. Works well for industries with stable structural dynamics. Works poorly for fast-changing industries where the structural dimensions are themselves shifting (technology platforms, AI-affected sectors, much of media).
Where it works: Mature industries with reasonably stable competitive dynamics. Particularly useful when the firm is overestimating its ability to influence one of the five forces.
Where it fails: When the industry structure itself is changing faster than the framework can keep pace with. Increasingly common.
3. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)
What it is: Reframe what customers are buying as the "job" they're trying to accomplish, rather than as the product itself. The classic example: "people don't buy quarter-inch drills, they buy quarter-inch holes."
How it performed in engagements: Surprisingly powerful when used carefully. The reframing genuinely changes how teams think about competition (you're competing with everything else that does the same job, not just with direct product competitors).
Where it works: Customer-facing strategy, particularly product positioning, marketing, and product roadmapping. The conversational shift it produces is often where the engagement's real value gets created.
Where it fails: When applied too literally or treated as a complete strategic methodology. JTBD is a framing tool; it doesn't replace the analytical work strategy requires.
4. The Three Horizons Framework
What it is: Divide strategic activity into three horizons. Horizon 1: defend and extend the core. Horizon 2: build emerging businesses. Horizon 3: create options for the future. Allocate resources across all three with explicit attention to balance.
How it performed in engagements: One of the most useful frameworks I've used. The structure is right. It forces explicit attention to the question most strategies avoid: what proportion of resources should go to defending today's business vs. building tomorrow's.
Where it works: Almost everywhere. The framework is industry-agnostic and scales from small companies to large ones. Particularly useful for resource-allocation conversations that would otherwise produce lopsided portfolios.
Where it fails: When the team uses it ceremonially without making real allocation decisions. The framework is only as good as the choices it forces; if no choices follow, it's decoration.
5. OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures)
What it is: A structured planning approach. Set the broad Objective, define measurable Goals, identify Strategies for achievement, specify Measures of progress.
How it performed in engagements: Useful as an execution framework once strategic direction is set. Less useful as a strategy-development framework. The structure imposes discipline on the operationalisation of strategy without much help in deciding what the strategy should be.
Where it works: The execution layer. Once you know what you're doing, OGSM helps you operationalise it consistently across the organisation.
Where it fails: When used to develop strategy rather than to execute it. The framework asks you to fill in objectives and goals; it doesn't help you choose the right ones.
The pattern across the five
The frameworks that worked best in actual engagements share a common feature: they force decisions rather than just generate analysis.
SWOT generates bullets; that's why it underperforms. Five Forces generates analysis; that's why it works only when the analysis happens to be the bottleneck. JTBD forces a reframing of the competitive landscape; that's why it produces real shifts. Three Horizons forces explicit resource allocation across time; that's why it produces real allocation conversations. OGSM forces specification of measurable goals; that's why it works in execution.
The frameworks that fail in real engagements are the ones that produce analysis without forcing choices. The frameworks that succeed are the ones that make choices unavoidable.
What I actually use in engagements now
For most engagements, my default toolkit is:
- JTBD in early customer-discovery work
- Three Horizons for portfolio and resource-allocation conversations
- OGSM for translating strategy into operating rhythm
I rarely use SWOT or Five Forces as primary tools. I use them occasionally as warm-ups or as inputs to other conversations.
The harder lesson
The framework matters less than the conversation it forces. A team in disagreement won't reach alignment by adopting a better framework. A team unwilling to make trade-offs won't make them just because a framework asks them to.
The work of strategy is, in this sense, mostly the work of running good conversations. The frameworks are scaffolding for those conversations. They're useful scaffolding, sometimes essential. But they're scaffolding.
The teams that produce good strategy do so because they have good conversations, not because they have good frameworks. The teams that produce bad strategy do so despite excellent frameworks, because they avoid the conversations the frameworks were trying to make them have.
The framework I'd invent if I could
What I want and don't have is a framework that forces explicit acknowledgment of which of the team's shared beliefs are now demonstrably wrong. Most strategic failures, in my experience, aren't about missing analysis. They're about clinging to assumptions that the available evidence has already invalidated.
The framework that's closest to this is "premortem" planning — imagining the strategy has failed and asking why. It works occasionally. It works less often than I'd like. The avoidance of acknowledging wrong beliefs is, perhaps, structurally harder to design a framework around. Working on it.
