Forget Your Business Plan – Create a Strategy Map

Strategic plans become outdated the moment they’re created. Instead, create a one-page strategy map.

Having run the internal strategy consulting group at HP, and then consulting to both startups and big companies like Disney, Visa, Colgate, Medtronic and others, I’ve created hundreds of strategic plans.

Business strategy used to be a clear and methodical process. No more.

Today’s discontinuous technologies and disruptive change have reinvented the rules of strategic planning.  If you’re going after a new market space or creating a new-to-the-world product or service, or reinventing an industry business model, gone are the days of traditional plans and forecasts. There’s just too much uncertainty in the world now to be constrained So what do you do? You create a Strategy Map.

A Strategy Map is a visual representation of your vision and related priority strategic objectives. A good Strategy Map basically communicates what needs to happen to achieve your vision at a high level in the short, mid- and longer-terms – ideally on a single page.

Here’s a template that anyone can download and modify to build out their own strategy map.  The template includes the following categories, organized In full disclosure, this template comes from upBOARD, the company I co-founded that’s creating the world’s largest library of business process apps. Modify the categories in the template to suit your specific organization’s focus. And be sure to update the template regularly as you learn new things and as the world changes around you – that’s what modern-day strategy is all about in today’s disruptive world.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized