By Kayla Monroe

If you’re in the middle of planning for 2027, you’ve probably spent a lot of time talking about what you want the business to accomplish next year.

Where you want to grow. What needs to improve. Where you’re investing. What you’re going to stop doing. What the numbers need to look like.

But there’s a part of the planning process I’ve come to believe deserves just as much attention:

What does the organization need to be able to do for this plan to work?

I’ve spent a lot of my career working in and around significant business change. Growth. Transformation. Restructuring. New strategies that required people across the organization to work differently.

And one thing I’ve seen repeatedly is that a business decision can create organizational requirements that aren’t obvious when the decision is made.

Deciding you want to grow into a new market is one decision. Making sure you have the leadership, capabilities, capacity, structure and ways of working to do it is another.

The same is true if your plan includes an acquisition. A significant technology investment. Margin improvement. A new product. A different customer strategy.

Each of those choices changes something about what the organization needs to be able to do.

Deloitte’s latest survey of strategy leaders found that more than half are managing too many priorities with too little time, while nearly two-thirds are leading cross-functional transformation efforts. Their challenge isn’t simply setting direction. It’s translating those decisions into coordinated action across the business.

That tracks with what I’ve seen.

Some of the execution problems organizations run into later can be traced back to questions that weren’t asked while the plan was being built.

What this looks like in practice

Say you’re a manufacturer with two big priorities for 2027: grow revenue and improve margin.

Pretty normal goals.

But start looking at what it will actually take to get there.

Growth depends on moving into a different customer segment. That changes what Sales needs to be able to do. It changes what Operations needs to produce. Operations is already implementing a new system. The commercial team doesn’t have much experience in the new segment. And several of the decisions that will need to happen quickly still tend to make their way back to the president.

None of that means the strategy is wrong.

It means there’s more to plan for than the revenue target and the initiatives underneath it.

• Maybe the commercial team needs a capability it doesn’t have today.
• Maybe Sales and Operations need much tighter coordination than they’ve needed in the past.
• Maybe some decisions need to move away from the president if the business is going to move fast enough.
• Maybe the system implementation and the growth plan are competing for more of the same capacity than anyone realized.

I’ve seen what happens when those things aren’t recognized early.

A few months into execution, leaders are spending more time intervening than they expected. Teams are working around unclear ownership or competing priorities. Decisions take longer than they should. People add meetings, processes or headcount trying to get things moving.

Eventually, the conversation becomes, “Why aren’t we making more progress?”

By the time the business is three or six months into the year, it has already spent months of leadership attention, time, energy and money working through friction that could have been identified much earlier.

One question to add to your planning process

You don’t need to turn your annual planning process into a comprehensive organizational assessment.

And you don’t need to solve every issue before January 1.

But before you finalize the plan, take each of your biggest 2027 priorities and ask:

What does our organization need in order to deliver this?

• Does it require a capability you don’t have today?
• Will leaders need to make different decisions or have different authority?
• Does the work itself need to change?
• Will functions need to work together differently?
• Do you actually have the capacity for it alongside everything else already underway?

From experience, I’d want to know the answers to those questions before everyone leaves the planning process and starts executing against it.

Because sometimes what you uncover changes what you do next.

A capability needs to be built earlier. Two initiatives need to be sequenced differently. A leadership issue needs to be addressed before another priority can move. A decision needs to be made about where accountability sits. Or something that looked like a Q1 priority needs to wait.

That’s not separate from strategic planning.

It’s part of making sure the business can actually do what the plan says it’s going to do.

So before you finalize the 2027 plan, take your biggest priorities one at a time and ask:

What does our organization need in order to deliver this?

You don't need to solve every organizational implication during strategic planning.

But you do want to see them.

Because seeing them early gives you options.

You can build capability before you need it. Prepare leaders for greater ownership. Make deliberate choices about where capacity goes. And shape how the organization works before growth forces those decisions for you.

That's the advantage of looking beyond the plan itself.

You enter the year with more than a set of priorities. You have a clearer view of what it will take to deliver them, where your organization needs to evolve, and what deserves your attention now.

And you can lead the business forward knowing you're not just planning for where you want to go. You're intentionally building the organization capable of getting you there.

Until next time,

Kayla

P.S. Planning for 2027?

If your 2027 strategy will require meaningful changes in how your organization leads, operates, builds capability or executes, I’m opening a small number of Organizational Diagnostic engagements.

I work with the CEO and key stakeholders to identify the organizational factors most likely to affect execution and determine what deserves attention before they become barriers to the plan.

If that would be useful as you finalize your 2027 priorities, reach out and we can talk.