February has a certain rhythm in corporate India. Calendars fill up with “strategy discussions”. Offsites are booked well in advance. Decks are refreshed. Markets, competition, customers and cost curves are analysed with renewed seriousness. Leaders speak of the year ahead with intent, optimism and resolve.
It is planning season again.
Every February, I find myself in boardrooms, offsites and long conversations with leaders, observing organisations sift through noise, distraction, commotion and clutter. The intent is always genuine. The questions are real. The effort is undeniable. And yet, year after year, I am struck by a familiar discomfort. For something so important, business planning often becomes an annual ritual rather than a continuous discipline.
There is an irony here that is easy to miss. We live in a time when data flows faster than ever. Sales numbers arrive realtime. Customer sentiment is tracked in real time. Competitive moves are visible almost instantly. Digital dashboards tell us what is working, what is not, and where the pressure points are. In theory, this should make strategy a living, breathing activity, revisited often and adjusted thoughtfully. In practice, many organisations still compress their deepest thinking into a few intense days, hoping that clarity achieved in February will somehow carry through till March of the following year.
Over time, strategy has quietly turned into an event. A moment of collective seriousness, followed by months of execution that slowly drifts away from the original intent. Assumptions made in a planning room harden into targets. Spreadsheets freeze reality at a point in time. By April, the world has already changed. By July, everyone knows it has changed. By December, we quietly admit that many of the original assumptions no longer hold. And then February arrives again.
When Strategy Becomes Theatre
In the meantime, organisations stay busy. Very busy. There is motion everywhere. Reviews, dashboards, meetings, follow-ups. Activity becomes the proxy for progress. Tactics multiply. Execution accelerates. But strategy, the quiet discipline of choice and trade-off, often recedes into the background.
The real tension here is not between planning and execution. It is between strategy and tactics.
Strategy is about intent. It is about deciding what matters, what does not, and what must be resisted. Tactics are about action. They translate intent into movement. When the two are in balance, organisations move with purpose. When they drift apart, something subtle breaks. Strategy becomes abstraction. Tactics become exhaustion.
I see this most clearly when leaders ask why their plans “did not land”. The answer is rarely that the strategy was flawed. More often, it is because the strategy remained trapped in presentation decks while tactics took on a life of their own. Teams executed energetically, but not necessarily strategically. People worked hard, but not always in the same direction.
The danger of turning planning into a corporate spectacle is not frivolity. It is false confidence. Song and dance can energise. They can create momentum. But without disciplined follow-through and ongoing sense-making, they also create disappointment. By the time the next February arrives, people carry quiet scepticism into the room. We have been here before.
Why Trust Is the Missing Ingredient
Many planning exercises are designed to control outcomes rather than enable judgment. Assumptions are centralised. Targets are tightly specified. Variance is treated as deviation rather than information. The implicit message is clear: think deeply in the planning room, execute faithfully outside it.
Yet organisations today are far too complex for this model. Markets shift mid-year. Customers behave unpredictably. Competitors surprise. Frontline managers see changes long before dashboards reflect them. When planning becomes rigid, it unintentionally signals a lack of trust in local judgment. People are asked to deliver outcomes, but not to adapt intent.
Serious strategy today requires the opposite. It requires leaders to trust people closer to reality, not just closer to the spreadsheet. It requires clarity of direction combined with flexibility of action. It requires the humility to accept that no annual plan survives first contact with the market unchanged.
This does not mean planning less. It means planning differently.
The most effective organisations I work with do not treat February as the peak of strategic thinking. They treat it as a moment of alignment. A pause to restate intent, revisit assumptions and sharpen priorities. But the real work happens in the months that follow, through regular strategic conversations rather than annual theatrics. Leaders check in on what has shifted, not just what has been achieved.
In these organisations, tactics are not micromanaged from the top. They are guided by a clear strategic compass. Managers are trusted to adjust course within agreed boundaries. Deviations are discussed, not punished. Learning flows upward as much as direction flows downward.
I often tell leaders that the most important outcome of a planning exercise is not the plan itself, but the shared understanding it creates. When people understand why certain choices were made, they are far more capable of making good decisions when circumstances change. When they do not, they simply execute instructions until reality forces improvisation.
Planning, at its best, is an act of collective thinking. It is a leadership responsibility that does not end when the offsite does. In a world saturated with data and distraction, the real leadership skill is not producing more information, but filtering it. Not reacting faster, but interpreting better. Not tightening control, but deepening trust.
If we can shift our mindset even slightly, from treating planning as an event to treating it as a habit, February will no longer carry the burden of the entire year. And strategy will finally begin to live where it belongs — in everyday decisions, thoughtful conversations and trusted execution.
That, in the end, is what serious planning was always meant to do.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of NDTV Profit or its affiliates. Readers are advised to conduct their own research or consult a qualified professional before making any investment or business decisions. NDTV Profit does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the information presented in this article.
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