Is Strategic Planning a Vanity Exercise or a Business Necessity?

This week, Jonathan and I are stepping away from Sententia.

Not for a vacation, although there will undoubtedly be good food involved. We are physically leaving home, changing our surroundings, and setting aside the week to talk seriously about where Sententia is going next.

And I have wondered whether doing something like this is really necessary for a small business.

After all, there is plenty of actual work waiting for us. Courses to prepare. Clients to follow up with. Marketing to write. Websites to update. Programs to build. GamiCon48V to plan. Emails that apparently reproduce overnight when no one is looking. When you run a small business, taking time away from all of that to talk about the business can feel suspiciously like a luxury.

Or perhaps even a vanity exercise.

Big companies have strategic planning retreats. There are conference rooms, PowerPoints, SWOT analyses, mission statements, goals, pillars, priorities, and eventually a beautiful document that may or may not ever be opened again.

That is exactly what I do not want to do this week.

The Problem With Staying Busy

One of the dangers of running a small business is that there is always something productive you can do. I can write another newsletter, follow up with a potential client, create another offer, update another webpage, or work on another course. Jonathan has his own equally long list. We could stay extremely busy every day from now until Christmas and probably never run out of things that legitimately need our attention.

But useful isn't necessarily strategic.

At some point, you have to stop asking, “What needs to get done?” and start asking, “What are we actually trying to build?” Those are very different questions.

And I think the distinction becomes even more important when business is challenging. The natural reaction is to do more. Create more offers. Send more emails. Try more things. Chase more possibilities. Unfortunately, more activity can create the comforting feeling that something is happening without actually changing the trajectory of the business.

Sometimes you need enough distance from the daily work to see the business itself.

That is why we're leaving.

Why a Week?

We could probably block a day at the office and call it strategic planning. I also know exactly what would happen. An email would come in that needed an answer. Someone would need something. I'd remember something that needed to be added to the website. Jonathan would have something he needed to finish. By the end of the day, we would have had a couple of good conversations squeezed between everything else.

I don't want strategic planning squeezed between everything else.

Taking a week doesn't mean we will sit across from each other at a table for eight hours a day discussing revenue projections and strategic priorities. I hope we don't. Some of our best conversations happen when we're doing something else.

The point of leaving is to create room for the conversation to continue.

There will be focused work with paper, numbers, notes, and probably more than a few disagreements. But the thinking doesn't stop when we put the papers away. A question that comes up in the morning may get answered over dinner. Something Jonathan says in passing may cause me to rethink an assumption I've been carrying around for years. We may decide something, sleep on it, and realize the next morning that we were completely wrong.

That is part of the work, too.

So What Are We Actually Trying to Figure Out?

We're not starting with a blank sheet of paper. We already know that Sententia is changing. The learning and development market is changing. AI is changing how people work and learn. The language around gamification, game-based learning, learning experience design, and gameful design is evolving. The things clients need from us today aren't necessarily the same things they needed from us five or ten years ago.

We're changing, too.

So this week isn't about dreaming up everything Sententia could do. Believe me, generating ideas has never been our problem. The harder work is deciding which ideas deserve our limited time, money, and attention.

We need to get clearer about where our revenue will come from. Which parts of the business have real growth potential? Where does training fit? What happens with our certifications? What role should consulting, licensing, memberships, events, partnerships, and AI-related programs play? Which things support each other, and which are simply competing for the same hours in our week?

We also need to talk seriously about what Sententia is becoming. We are moving toward Sententia LXD and a broader focus on gameful learning design. That can't simply be a new name, logo, or URL. If we're serious about the change, it needs to affect what we teach, what we sell, how we talk about our work, and why someone would hire us.

And perhaps the most difficult question of all: What do we stop doing?

Small businesses accumulate things. Programs. Products. Events. Traditions. Subscriptions. Marketing activities. Ideas we loved three years ago. Things we continue doing largely because we've always done them.

A strategic plan shouldn't simply tell us what to add. It should also give us permission to stop.

How Much Strategic Planning Is Enough?

I'm not convinced that the measure should be hours. You need enough time to get past the obvious answers.

If we sat down for two hours and asked, “What should we focus on next year?” we could easily produce a respectable list. We already know the obvious answers. The more valuable questions come after that list.

Why this? Why now? Who will pay for it? How will they find us? What will we have to stop doing to make room for it? What evidence do we have that this is a real opportunity rather than something we happen to be excited about?

Those questions take longer. Sometimes they also require silence. Or another cup of coffee. Or admitting that something you really love may not belong in the next version of the business.

That's why, for us, this needed to be more than a meeting.

Strategic Planning May Really Be Strategic Choosing

I'm beginning to think the value of strategic planning isn't the plan itself. It's the choosing.

Choosing one opportunity means deciding not to pursue another. Choosing a customer means accepting that everyone isn't your customer. Choosing where revenue will come from means being willing to question activities that consume time but don't contribute to that goal. Choosing what the company is becoming may mean letting go of some pieces of what it has been.

That is difficult work to do while simultaneously answering email, preparing the next workshop, checking registrations, updating the website, and wondering what needs to go in Friday's newsletter.

So this week, we're stepping away from the normal rhythm of the business long enough to look at the business from the outside.

I don't expect to come home with a beautiful strategic planning binder. In fact, if that's our biggest accomplishment, I'll consider the week a failure.

I want to come home knowing what deserves our time next, what doesn't, where we're going, and what we're willing to do differently to get there.

That feels less like a vanity exercise and a lot more like a business necessity.

I'll let you know what we figure out.