The Tell-Tale Signs Your Strategic Plan Lacks a Backbone: ClearPoint Strategy Founders Series

I remember working with a regional utility company in Texas that seemed to have everything in place for a successful strategic plan. They had a lengthy document outlining their strategic priorities, complete with bullet points, color-coded sections, and a long list of what they believed were clear directives.

But...

Once we started peeling back the layers, it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t a strategic plan—it was a collection of good intentions without a structure to support them.

Some of their priorities were actually KPIs. Others were projects. A few were vague goals. None of it was connected. Employees didn’t understand the context behind the metrics they were tracking, and they didn’t know why they were executing certain projects. When I asked one executive how a specific initiative supported their strategy, he paused, looked at the list, and said, “Honestly, I’m not sure anymore.”

That kind of confusion is more common than you might think. We started by helping them clearly identify what each element of their plan actually was.  

• What’s a Key Performance Indicator?
• What’s a Project?
• What’s a Strategic Objective?

Once we made those distinctions and connected everything to specific goals, their strategy started to take shape, and their team could finally see how their day-to-day work tied back to the bigger picture. Within a few months, they were not only more aligned, but more motivated. Teams felt ownership, and their performance reviews started including discussions about strategic contribution—not just task completion.

When Strategy Lacks Structure

A strategy without a framework is like a house without a foundation. It might look fine from the outside, but it won’t hold up when pressure hits.

One of the biggest issues we see is that, without structure, it’s incredibly hard to know what to do to improve performance. There are usually a dozen different directions you could take, and without context, choosing one feels like a shot in the dark. Projects, too, start to feel arbitrary. Teams execute initiatives without knowing if they’re truly moving the needle.

This lack of clarity makes it nearly impossible to respond to challenges or make informed decisions. And when goals aren’t linked together into a single, coherent plan, everything starts to feel like a random assortment of tasks rather than a unified strategy.

Even worse, it can cause trust to erode across teams. If marketing believes they’re executing the company’s top priorities while IT is chasing something completely different, friction builds. Leaders spend more time reconciling roadmaps than actually advancing the mission.

Five Signs Your Strategic Plan Is Just Fluff

Over the years, I’ve learned to spot the red flags. Here are five signs that your plan might be more fluff than function:

1. Your Goals Don’t Lead Anywhere

It’s not enough to have ambitious goals—they need to align. When goals are disconnected or contradict one another, the strategy begins to feel chaotic. For example, if one department is aiming to increase efficiency while another is focused on high-touch customer service, the two might pull in different directions. This lack of cohesion can undermine progress across the board.

What Not to Do: Don’t let departments craft goals in silos. Avoid letting legacy goals stick around just because they’ve always been there. Every goal should answer the question: “How does this move us toward our mission?” If it can’t, it doesn’t belong in your strategic plan.

We often help organizations map their goals on a strategy tree or strategy map. This visual representation makes gaps and contradictions easy to spot. If goals don’t ladder up to your mission, you’ve got some trimming to do. Without this alignment, departments can end up competing for resources or prioritizing conflicting initiatives. This is particularly dangerous during budget season, when everyone's trying to justify their spend.

Reddit AMA: How to Solve the Most Common “Budget Season” Challenges

2. You Can’t Tell What’s What

If everything’s jumbled together in one list, you’ve got a categorization problem—and it’s a sign your team doesn’t fully understand the role each piece plays. A KPI is a performance metric, while a project is an initiative designed to drive performance. They serve different functions. Without clarity here, execution suffers.

What Not to Do: Don’t let your strategy document turn into a dumping ground for every idea. Avoid listing KPIs, goals, and action steps in one giant spreadsheet or slide. That lack of structure creates confusion. Instead, use a framework or system that distinguishes and defines each element of the plan.

Take, for example, a sales goal. If you treat “Increase Customer Retention” as both a KPI and a project, you’ll end up confusing your team. Is the goal to measure it, or to execute something to improve it? The distinction matters. I once worked with a manufacturing company where a project titled “Improve On-Time Delivery” was listed alongside metrics like “Percent of Orders Delivered on Time” and “Average Fulfillment Time.” It took multiple workshops to unpack which was which. Once we clarified roles, their performance discussions became much more productive.

3. You Don’t Have Targets

Tracking a KPI without a target is like driving without a destination. Targets provide direction and help you determine whether your performance is acceptable, exceptional, or falling short. Without them, it’s difficult to interpret data or make meaningful decisions. Your team might be reporting numbers without knowing whether to celebrate or take corrective action.

What Not to Do: Don’t delay setting targets because you think you need perfect historical data first. And don’t settle for vague placeholders like “Increase” or “Decrease.” Ambiguity breeds inaction. Even a rough target is better than none—it gives teams a benchmark and a sense of urgency.

Take a nonprofit tracking donor engagement with no benchmarks for what success looked like, for example. The board asks, “Is that good?” during every review. I’ve worked with this hypothetical nonprofit, and once we set clear, realistic targets, conversations shift from confusion to accountability. It also helps the fundraising team feel recognized when they hit their numbers, creating a positive feedback loop that further fuels performance.

Free eBook: 5 Nonprofit Strategy Maps for Success

4. No One Owns Anything

Accountability is the engine of execution.

If your plan doesn’t clearly assign ownership to objectives, KPIs, and projects, then no one is responsible for moving them forward. That creates confusion and inaction. Ownership should be explicit, visible, and consistent. When people know they’re responsible, they’re more likely to engage and deliver.

What Not to Do: Don’t assume that shared goals mean shared responsibility. If everyone owns it, no one does. Avoid assigning “The Team” or “Leadership” as the owner. Put a name to every line item and make that ownership visible across the organization.

Ownership also enables better conversations. A project owner can speak to progress, roadblocks, and needs. Without that, strategy reviews turn into finger-pointing sessions or, worse, silence! In my experience, implementing a simple owner field on every dashboard element can lead to a significant improvement in meeting quality. Instead of vague updates, you get clear answers: “here’s what we’ve done, here’s what we need, and here’s what’s next.”

Video: How to Lead an Effective Strategy Review Meeting

5. There’s No Timeline

A strategy without a timeline is just a wish list. If you don’t set timeframes for initiatives or checkpoints for reviewing KPIs, there’s no urgency to act. Strategy becomes something that’s always on the horizon, never in the moment. Deadlines, milestones, and regular review cycles help keep things moving and ensure your team is making continuous progress.

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What Not to Do: Don’t leave timelines open-ended. “Sometime This Year” isn’t a strategy. Avoid planning without committing to review cycles. Make sure initiatives have start and end dates and that reviews are scheduled at regular intervals.

In one government agency we worked with, simply introducing quarterly checkpoints and assigning timelines to initiatives improved reporting consistency and helped projects stay on-track. Progress became measurable. It also enabled the team to reallocate resources mid-year instead of waiting until the next planning cycle—a change that made a noticeable difference in outcomes.

Why a Framework Changes Everything

That’s where a strategic framework comes in. Whether it’s the Balanced Scorecard, OKRs, or another model, a framework gives your plan structure. It helps you define the relationships between objectives, projects, and measures. It forces alignment. Perhaps most importantly, it makes your strategy understandable—not just for executives, but for teams across the organization.

Let’s look at a few popular frameworks and when to use them:

• ‍Balanced Scorecard: Ideal for organizations that want a holistic view of strategy. It segments performance into four perspectives—Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning & Growth. This helps ensure you’re not overemphasizing financials while neglecting customer satisfaction or operational efficiency. It’s particularly effective in regulated industries, public sector environments, and large, complex enterprises.
• ‍OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): Excellent for companies that thrive on agility and short-term iteration. (O)bjectives and (K)ey (R)esults are typically set quarterly, which allows organizations to adjust quickly. Tech companies, startups, and innovation-driven organizations often gravitate toward OKRs because they encourage ambition and quick feedback loops. However, it requires strong internal discipline to avoid losing focus.
• ‍SWOT Analysis: A foundational tool for situational analysis, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s best used during the early stages of strategic planning to gain clarity on internal capabilities and external conditions. While not a full strategic framework on its own, SWOT Analyses help teams align around what’s working, what’s not, and where the risks and possibilities lie. The key is not to stop at the analysis—use it as a springboard for prioritizing actions.
• ‍PEST/PESTEL: Standing for Political, Economic, Social, and Technological factors, PEST is a macro-environmental analysis tool. It helps organizations identify external forces that could impact strategy. Some organizations extend the analysis to include Environmental and Legal factors, calling it PESTEL. This framework is especially useful during strategy development or when entering new markets, as it ensures the organization is accounting for broader trends and forces that could affect success.
• ‍Porter’s Five Forces: This framework is designed to assess the competitive dynamics of an industry. It examines five key forces: competitive rivalry, the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, and the threat of substitute products or services. Porter's 5 Forces are best used for industry analysis and market entry strategy, helping organizations understand where their industry is headed and what levers they can pull to improve their strategic position.
• ‍VRIO Framework: Focused on competitive advantage, VRIO stands for Value, Rarity, Imitability, and Organization. It’s used to evaluate resources and capabilities to determine which ones can provide sustainable competitive advantage. This framework is especially valuable for strategic positioning and portfolio planning. By assessing your strengths through this lens, you can make more informed decisions about where to invest, what to protect, and how to scale.
• ‍ClearPoint Strategy software adapts to your chosen framework. Explore your options, and how our platform Organizes Strategy.

Each framework has its strengths and limitations. The key is to choose one that matches your organization’s culture, pace, and complexity. And remember, hybrid approaches can also work well—you might use the Balanced Scorecard for enterprise-level alignment and OKRs at the departmental level to maintain agility.

I’ve used these frameworks for years, both in consulting and in building ClearPoint Strategy. They help create a shared language, which makes communication clearer and execution smoother. When a department head and a leader are both working from the same strategy map, the conversation becomes more productive. They can see how decisions in one area affect performance in another.

And contrary to what some people fear, frameworks don’t constrain creativity—they unlock it. When everyone knows the structure and purpose of the plan, they can contribute ideas and make decisions that actually move the strategy forward.

One of our partners, a Native American tribal government managing multiple sectors (from healthcare, to gaming, to utilities), used ClearPoint to bring clarity and alignment to their diverse operations. With strategy and performance data in one place, they identified conflicting initiatives and redundant spending. Within the first year, they reallocated millions in resources and significantly improved interdepartmental coordination.

Read in full: The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

Innovation thrives within clarity!

Getting Started (Without Starting From Scratch)

If your plan feels disjointed, don’t worry—you don’t have to rebuild from the ground up. You just need to give your strategy a backbone.

At ClearPoint, we’ve developed AI Assistants designed around strategic frameworks. You can feed in your key focus areas, and the assistant will help organize them into a structured, actionable plan based on the framework you choose. It can make suggestions, surface potential misalignments, and even help identify missing elements that are essential for execution.

More importantly, ClearPoint gives your team a head start. Instead of spending months debating the format of your strategy, you can start talking about what matters: the work that will drive impact.

We’ve seen organizations use ClearPoint to transform vague, bloated plans into focused, executable strategies. It’s not magic—it’s just clarity, delivered with the right tools.

From Fluff to Focus

Your strategy doesn’t need more buzzwords. It needs a backbone.

If your plan feels like a loosely connected list of ideas, it’s time to put a framework in place. The right structure will help you make better decisions, align your team, and actually achieve the goals you’ve set. Once your plan has that structure, you’ll see how quickly the confusion turns into confidence.

Structure isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the scaffolding that supports your vision. And when that scaffolding is in place, your strategy can finally stand on its own.

Ready to build a strategy backbone? Let’s get to work.