Agrifood strategic planning in Canada — from vision to execution

This is true of private food businesses and it's especially true of non-profits and government-adjacent organisations mandated to develop the Canadian food and agriculture sector. The ambition is genuine. The stakeholder engagement is thorough. The final document is often excellent. And then the organisation returns to doing what it was already doing, with a new document to reference when asked about strategy.

Why plans don't get executed

The plan wasn't built around the people who have to carry it

Strategy that doesn't account for team capacity, organisational culture, and the real constraints on how decisions get made will always struggle at implementation. A plan built with the team is exponentially more likely to be executed by the team. The process of building it together is also part of building the shared understanding of why it matters — which is what sustains execution when things get hard.

There are no OKRs

Objectives and Key Results — the framework used by Google, many high-performing non-profits, and an increasing number of Canadian agricultural organisations — are the translation layer between a strategic direction and daily action. Without them, a strategic plan is a list of aspirations.

With OKRs, every person in the organisation understands what they're doing and why it connects to the larger goal. For agrifood organisations, OKRs should be set quarterly, reviewed monthly, and tied explicitly to the strategic priorities in the plan. The quarterly cadence creates enough urgency to maintain momentum without the brittleness of annual targets.

The plan doesn't have a decision framework

Strategy is as much about what you won't do as what you will. Organisations that execute well have an explicit filter: when a new opportunity, request, or initiative arrives, they can evaluate it against the strategy and make a fast, principled decision about whether to pursue it.

Without that filter, every interesting thing becomes a potential priority and the plan fragments into a hundred small commitments that collectively prevent any of the strategic priorities from getting done.

What a plan that gets executed looks like

It's shorter than you think it needs to be. The most effective strategic plans for agrifood organisations have three to five priorities, not twelve. Each priority has a named accountable person, clear success metrics, and quarterly milestones that can be evaluated objectively.

It was built with the people who will implement it — which means they understood it before it was finished, and they own it rather than receive it. The difference between those two things is the difference between a plan that gets executed and one that sits on a shelf.

The role of external advisory

One of the structural advantages of working with an external advisor during the planning process is that they can hold the thread across the organisation in a way that internal staff often can't — because the internal team is simultaneously trying to run the organisation and build the strategy. An advisor who understands both the Canadian food sector and the mechanics of organisational change can help translate ambition into plans that the team can actually carry.

The best strategic planning processes produce not just a document but a leadership team that understands the strategy deeply enough to make good decisions in its absence.