This post is the second in a series about the various schools and models of making organizational strategy. It is excerpted from The Portable Guide to Leading Organizations, available now from LeaderLab Press.

Strategy is a formal process.

The planning school developed parallel to the design school. It rose to awareness in a flurry of publications in the 1960s and was regularly in practice in organizations in the 1970s. The planning school opposed most of the tenets of the design school, with the exception of its formality. The planning school saw strategy as a systematic and detached process, a formal planning process. The planning school relies heavily on data from tools such as SWOT, but takes SWOT and breaks it down into formal, delineated steps. These steps get further broken down into checklists and techniques, each assigned to an individual or department and given a deadline and budget.

In many ways, the strategic planning process is taken away from senior managers, as the real work of this process is done by staff planners. Many organizations even create strategic planning department, in charge of a regular strategic planning process. The result is typically a neatly delineated plan, with little trace of uncertainty, that may or may not be fully implemented once in the hands of those charged with taking action.