Becoming strategically agile boils down to replacing an organization’s intermittent, formal planning processes—which traditionally require many layers of review and approval—with a more frequent and informal series of meetings among small groups of stakeholders who are empowered to make strategic decisions faster.

A traditional planning process is rigid and usually happens once a year. An agile process is flowing and impactful, and generally gets repeated monthly or quarterly.

Practitioners of agile thinking are seeing traditional planning evolve into a continual, iterative process that generates a flow of potential initiatives. These undergo accelerated review, then prioritization and implementation.

Third, you need to have an agile process to manage, document, and control the flow of information for each initiative. This can follow agile best practices, including breaking the process into smaller tasks with achievable, measurable outcomes, prioritizing what gets done first, enabling rapid review and buy-in from leadership, and fast-tracking implementation. Someone in the C-suite is usually responsible for shepherding the process and removing obstacles, not unlike how a Scrum master would in Agile DevOps.

Companies should also have a governance process in place to monitor the planning progress, modify it based on any unexpected changes, and revalidate the thinking.

I’ve never seen daily standups in a strategic planning process. A strategic sprint tends to be a bit longer than a project development sprint, which could be every week or two weeks. The strategic process would probably be a month on the short end. But at the end, would you do a retrospective? Absolutely. When people come back into a governance meeting, they’re talking about what went right, what went wrong, what needs to be adjusted.

I see it a lot in midsized businesses that are upping their game, and I’m seeing it more frequently in manufacturing. I just worked with one of the oldest manufacturers of industrial equipment, and their C-suite team has adopted an agile mindset.

Agile strategic planning is becoming muscle memory for a lot of organizations because that’s just how we’re doing things now. When you’re trying to transform quickly, you need sprints.