Tips for Strategic Planning: Frameworks and Tactics for 2026 (TPS599)

What It Covers

Tan and Brooks explore strategic planning frameworks for 2025, focusing on how AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT compress multi-day planning sessions into hours. They discuss the four key business decisions from Scaling Up, explain why traditional incremental goal-setting fails, and demonstrate practical prompting techniques for generating KPIs and leading indicators.

Key Questions Answered

• •Strategic Variables Simplification: Effective strategy reduces to three to five core variables maximum. For events, this means venue quality, people curation, and budget allocation. For business, focus on opportunity assessment, market trends, and financial implications. AI can identify these variables in twenty to thirty minutes versus the days required through traditional team brainstorming sessions, providing menu options based on historical strategic planning data.
• •Four Decisions Framework: Scaling Up by Verne Harnish identifies four critical business decisions: people, strategy, execution, and cash flow. Under people, define team characteristics and shared values. For strategy, articulate core competency in one page. Execution requires clear priorities and relevant data. Cash represents business oxygen. Master these four areas to build sustainable business operations regardless of industry or company size.
• •Frontline Data Advantage: Customer-facing employees possess insights AI cannot access from offline interactions at restaurants, meetings, and service touchpoints. Record customer calls, generate transcripts, and use AI to analyze patterns and missed details. This combination of human-gathered intelligence with AI analysis creates competitive advantage. CEOs like Whole Foods' Jason demonstrate this by personally delivering groceries to understand operational inefficiencies firsthand.
• •Leading Indicators with AI: Before AI, determining progress metrics for non-numerical projects like website redesigns required extensive consultation and story point systems using Fibonacci sequences. Now, prompt AI with project details and request leading indicator suggestions. The system generates multiple measurement options immediately, eliminating days of deliberation. This applies to any project lacking obvious numerical tracking methods.
• •Brutal Feedback Prompt: Submit existing plans to ChatGPT or Claude with this specific prompt: be brutally honest and one hundred times more specific than normal when providing feedback. This technique reveals overlooked assumptions, missing variables, and unrealistic timelines. The AI challenges plans with questions and considerations that internal teams miss due to proximity bias. Apply this to current strategies or retrospectively to past plans.