3 Questions to Answer to Build Your 2025 Strategy

2025 is no longer a year in the future but right around the corner. 

Whether you make New Year’s resolutions or not, Dan Pink’s book, When shares that beginnings, like a new year, are a great time to attempt something new – whether that’s starting a new habit, committing to a new goal, or in the case of many companies, determining your department’s new strategic pillars for the coming year. Every year during this time, my coaching clients turn the conversation to next year’s planning and how they can turn to a clean page to recommit to what’s most important at work.

For many of you, the past handful of years have been an exercise in increasing “productivity.” That might mean more emails responded to, more items checked off your to-do list, more projects completed, or even getting more efficient to have more hours to spend with your family. In a recent blog on his website, Cal Newport, author of the new book, Slow Productivity, clarified that the definition of productivity should be about “enforcing some organizing structure on the inputs and obligations pulling at your attention, so you can sort through what matters and what doesn’t.” 

Perhaps you agree with his definition, perhaps you don’t. Either way, I know for many of my clients, productivity at work includes focusing more on tasks that move the needle for their company. For many of you—and for myself—climbing the ladder is valuable only if the ladder is up against the “right tree.” In other words, it’s easy to plan the tactics to execute the strategy but far trickier to question the strategy in the first place and make sure you’re focused on the right levers to begin with.

So here are three key questions and a downloadable diagram for you to use to help you think through next year’s strategy. I like to use the analogy of a mountain to get my clients to think more holistically about their key strategic moves.

Dr. Jo’s 3 Key Questions To Answer Before You Build Your Company’s 2025 Strategy:

1. What am I noticing on the ground? This question is first because, before assessing any new strategies, you want to be very clear about the impact of your company’s current strategies. This question can be partially answered with current KPIs, but that’s not enough. Key performance indicators can tell you a lot, and most businesses also have leading indicators, the metrics that you observe before you observe a jump or a fall in sales or performance.  In addition to KPIs and leading indicators, this “on the ground” analysis should include what you’re noticing when you pick up your head and look around. Are your people smiling or scowling? Do people multi-task during meetings? How many fire drills have you been pulled into recently? Take the time to record ALL the things you’re noticing right now at work. They won’t all be meaningful in the long run, but you want your 2025 strategy to be based on data, not hopes and fears.

At the ground level, spend some time with these questions:

• What’s happened just as you expected? What has been completely unexpected?
• What is the mood on your team? (Optimistic? Stressed-out? Discouraged? Apathetic?)
• Who are your main stakeholders? How often are you communicating with them? What are you hearing from them?
• How much time do you have to think and plan in your days? How often are you caught off-guard?
• How aligned do you feel with the rest of your team? Why?
• What’s the most important thing that needs to work better for your group?

2. What do I notice if I climb above the tree line? For many leaders, taking care of everything under your purview is tiring enough, that there’s rarely little time or energy to remove yourself from the fray and look at the broader vision. However, when we climb above our day-to-day concerns, we can often see things more clearly that are headed our way. This is the place we come to gain more perspective and stretch out of our comfort zone.
At the 2,000 ft level, spend some time with these questions:

• If next year ended as a failure, what probably went wrong?
• Who on your team would be a disaster to lose?
• Who, if they gave notice, would make your life much easier?
• What changes do you see coming to the departments that you work closely with?
• What is the mood of the teams around you? Of the company as a whole?
• What’s on your “important but not urgent” that you never get to? Is it still relevant? What’s even more relevant now?
• What strategies has your company tried and failed at this past year? What were the barriers?
• What strategies have your company successfully executed? What made them successful?
• What one skill, if you developed it, would make you a much more impactful leader?

3. What do the birds see that I might be missing? On a clear day, the top of most mountains can give you a vantage point that you never get otherwise. The end-of-the-year planning is a great time to make sure you’re trying to get a high-level 360 view of everything that is happening around your team, around your company, and around the industry. It’s from this vista that you can see beyond what usually grabs your attention and your focus. I often recommend that clients engage in these 10,000 ft questions by finding their own larger vista. I love to go to the ocean where you can see for miles, but a great hike or a calming place can work just as well. It’s most important to disrupt your usual view and look somewhere new as you answer these final set of questions.

At the 10,000 ft birds-eye level, spend some time with these questions:

• What shift is no one talking about in your industry that you’re worried about?
• What did you recently learn about your industry that you were surprised you didn’t know?
• What skills in your group are missing that you didn’t need two years ago?
• What new companies have entered your industry? What niche are they competing for?
• What political headwinds and tailwinds are you contemplating?
• How much time and energy does your team devote to looking at things with this larger perspective? How would you want to change that?
• What one skill, if you developed it, would make you more future-ready in your company? In your industry?

What my clients discover is that they’re often spending too much time with on-the-ground planning and not taking enough wisdom from perspectives above the tree line or at the top of the mountain. From this higher vantage point, they often notice that they’re spending too much time worrying about the small things, forcing them to miss the bigger picture. To be sure, we all need a plan that is realistic at the tactical level, but first, we need to zoom out enough to ensure we’re not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but instead building more lifeboats, iceberg detectors, and even iceberg-free means of travel.