Five Signs Your Strategy Is Actually more of a Wish List

September 11, 2026

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Five Signs Your Strategy Is Actually more of a Wish List

Friday, 11 September 2026

Key takeaways

A strategy that doesn’t name the obstacle it is designed to overcome is not a strategy. It is a statement of aspiration, or a wish list.
Richard Rumelt’s distinction between good and bad strategy provides the diagnostic framework: good strategy has a diagnosis, a guiding policy and coherent actions
The five signs apply equally to corporate strategic plans, government reform agendas, departmental business plans and team level planning documents
In Australian public sector settings, strategic plans that avoid naming the hard trade offs tend to produce activity without progress
Strategic thinking is a learnable discipline. Recognising a wish list is the first step toward replacing it with something that works

A strategy is a plan for overcoming an obstacle. A wish list is a collection of things you hope will happen. The difference matters because organisations allocate resources, assign accountability and measure performance against their strategy. If the strategy is actually a wish list, those resources are scattered, that accountability is diffuse and those performance measures track activity rather than progress. Richard Rumelt, professor emeritus at UCLA Anderson School of Management, built an entire body of work on this distinction. His 2011 book Good Strategy Bad Strategy argues that most of what organisations call strategy is not strategy at all. It is ambition dressed in strategic language. Here are five signs that your strategy has crossed that line.

Sign one: it doesn’t name the obstacle

The most reliable test of a strategy is whether it identifies the challenge it exists to address. As Rumelt’s diagnostic framework makes clear, if you fail to identify and analyse the obstacles, you do not have a strategy. You have a stretch goal, a budget or a list of things you wish would happen. A strategy that says “become the employer of choice in our sector” without naming why the organisation is currently not the employer of choice has no diagnostic foundation. It has not identified what is in the way, so it cannot propose how to get past it.

In the Australian government, this manifests as strategic plans that list desirable outcomes without diagnosing the systemic barriers. “Improve citizen satisfaction with service delivery” is a goal. The strategy is the answer to why satisfaction is currently low and what specific changes to service design, staffing, technology or policy will address those causes. Without the diagnosis, the goal sits in the plan untouched from one planning cycle to the next.

Sign two: it contains too many priorities

A strategy with twenty priorities has no priorities. Rumelt describes this as the inability or unwillingness to choose, which he identifies as one of the root causes of bad strategy. Strategy requires concentration of resources on the actions that will have the greatest impact. When a strategic plan tries to accommodate every stakeholder’s preferred initiative, it produces a comprehensive list rather than a focused plan. The result is that resources are spread thinly across too many fronts. None of them receives enough investment to produce a breakthrough.

Rumelt recounts the example of a city mayor whose strategic plan contained 47 strategies and 178 action items. Action item number 122 was “create a strategic plan.” The planning process had recommended itself as one of its own deliverables. This is not a parody. It is the natural outcome of a process that defines strategy as listing everything the organisation wants rather than choosing what it will actually do.

Sign three: it confuses goals with strategy

Grow revenue 20 per cent. Achieve market leadership. Transform the culture. Each of these is a goal, not a strategy. The Perdoo analysis of Rumelt’s framework highlights this as the most common and most destructive confusion in strategic planning. A goal states what you want. A strategy explains how you will get there, given the specific obstacles in your way and the specific advantages you can exploit. Without that explanation, the goal is a wish with a deadline.

This confusion is especially prevalent in environments where strategic planning follows a template. When the planning process asks for a vision, a mission, values, goals and KPIs but does not require a diagnosis of the central challenge, it produces documents that look strategic but contain no strategy. The form is complete. The substance is absent. In Australian public sector planning, the template based approach is widespread. It reliably produces plans that satisfy the governance requirement without providing the strategic direction that the organisation actually needs.

Sign four: it is written in language that sounds impressive but says nothing

Rumelt calls this “fluff”: the use of abstract, inflated language that sounds like expertise but communicates nothing specific. “Leveraging our core competencies to drive synergistic outcomes across the value chain” is fluff. It could describe any organisation doing anything. It is unfalsifiable, which means it cannot be wrong, but it also cannot guide a decision. The Scalabl summary of Rumelt’s framework identifies fluff as one of Rumelt’s four hallmarks of bad strategy, alongside failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy and setting bad strategic objectives.

The practical test is substitution. If you can replace the strategy statement with any other strategy statement and the sentence still makes sense, the original statement says nothing. “We will deliver excellence through innovation and collaboration” could be stated by a hospital, a mining company, a university or a procurement team. It tells you nothing about what this particular organisation will do differently from what it is doing now.

Sign five: nothing changes after the strategy is approved

The final and most telling sign is operational. If the strategy is approved by the board or the executive team and nothing measurably changes in how resources are allocated, how people spend their time or how decisions are made, the document was never a strategy. It was a planning exercise that satisfied a governance requirement without altering the organisation’s course.

Rumelt’s concept of the strategy kernel explains why this happens. A good strategy consists of three elements: a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for addressing it and a set of coherent actions that carry the guiding policy forward. Most wish list strategies have the first element (if vaguely stated) but lack the third. They describe what the organisation wants to achieve but do not specify the coordinated set of actions that will get it there. The APSC’s APS Reform agenda provides a counterexample: it defines four priority pillars with eight measurable outcomes and reports annually on progress. Whether or not one agrees with the specific priorities, the structure has the three elements of Rumelt’s kernel: a diagnosis (the Thodey Review), a guiding policy (the four pillars) and coherent actions (the specific reform initiatives tracked in the annual report).

How can professionals develop strategic thinking capability?

Recognising a wish list is the diagnostic step. Replacing it with a genuine strategy requires the ability to diagnose a complex situation, identify the leverage points, make hard choices about where to concentrate resources and communicate the resulting plan in terms that people can act on. AcademyGlobal (AG), the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) Centre of Excellence for Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, delivers programs that develop these capabilities.

AG’s Strategic Thinking program is designed for professionals who need to move beyond operational planning to genuine strategic analysis. It builds the skills to diagnose organisational challenges, evaluate strategic options and construct plans that are focused, realistic and actionable. For professionals in leadership roles where strategic capability is essential to performance, AG’s Leadership & Management Skills programs develop the broader leadership disciplines that strategic thinking depends on: judgement under uncertainty, stakeholder alignment and the capacity to make and communicate difficult choices.

A strategy that names the obstacle, chooses where to focus and specifies what will actually change is worth more than a hundred pages of aspirational language. The five signs in this article are the quickest way to tell which one you are holding.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a strategy and a wish list?

A strategy identifies a specific obstacle, chooses an approach for overcoming it and specifies coordinated actions to carry that approach forward. A wish list describes desired outcomes without naming the challenge, making trade offs or specifying what will change.

What is Rumelt’s strategy kernel?

The strategy kernel is Richard Rumelt’s term for the three essential elements of a good strategy: a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for addressing it and a set of coherent actions that implement the guiding policy. If any of the three is missing, the strategy is incomplete.

Why do organisations produce wish lists instead of strategies?

Rumelt identifies three root causes: the inability or unwillingness to choose between competing priorities, the use of template based planning processes that produce form without substance and positive thinking that substitutes aspiration for the hard analytical work that strategy requires.

How can I tell if my strategic plan is actually a wish list?

Five signs: it does not name the obstacle it is designed to overcome. It contains too many priorities to be actionable. It confuses goals with strategy. It uses abstract language that could describe any organisation. Nothing measurably changes after it is approved.

Where can I develop strategic thinking capability?

AcademyGlobal’s Strategic Thinking program builds the skills to diagnose organisational challenges, evaluate strategic options and construct plans that are focused, realistic and actionable.