Roger Martin, one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy, asserts that developing strategy involves escaping the common traps of strategic planning.

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So what's a strategy? A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win. So there's a theory. Strategy has a theory. Here's why we should be on this playing field, not this other one. And here's how, on that playing field, we're going to be better than anybody else at serving the customers on that playing field. That theory has to be coherent. It has to be doable. You have to be able to translate that into actions for it to be a great strategy. Planning does not have to have any such coherence. And it typically is what people in manufacturing want, the few things they want to build a new plant, and the marketing people want to launch a new brand, and the talent people want to hire more people. There tends to be a list that has no internal coherence to it, and no specification of a way that that is going to accomplish collectively some goal for the company. See, planning is quite comforting. Plans typically have to do with the resources you're going to spend. So we're going to build a plant, we're going to hire some people, we're going to launch a new product. Those are all things that are on the cost side of businesses. Who controls your costs? Who's the customer of your costs? The answer is you are. You decide how many square feet to lease, how many raw materials to buy, how many people to hire. Those are more comfortable because you control them. A strategy, on the other hand, specifies an outcome, a competitive outcome that you wish to achieve, which involves customers wanting your product or service enough that they will buy enough of it to make the profitability that you'd like to make. The tricky thing about that is that you don't control them. You might wish you could, but you can't. They decide, not you. That's a harder trick. So that means putting yourself out and saying, here's what we believe will happen. We can't prove it in advance, we can't guarantee it, but this is what we want to have happen and that we believe will happen. It's much easier to say, I'll build a factory, I will hire more people, then I will have customers end up liking our offering more than those of competitors. The tricky thing about planning is that while you're planning, chances are at least one competitor is figuring out how to win.