Strategic Planning Was Never Strategic Thinking

Nearly three decades in banking and financial services had exposed me to strategic planning, business growth, market expansion, profitability, transformation, and execution. Strategy was familiar territory, or so I believed, walking into the first module of the Senior Management Programme at ISB. One month later, I realised what I understood was strategic planning. What I had not fully understood was strategic thinking. The distinction is subtle, yet profound.

What Choices Create Enduring Advantage?

For years, I associated strategy with ambitious goals, annual plans, competitive positioning, and execution. Yet the faculty consistently brought us back to a far simpler and far more demanding question: what choices create enduring advantage? That single shift changed everything. Strategy, I began to understand, is not a document prepared once a year; it is an integrated set of choices that determines where an organisation will play, how it will win, what capabilities it must build, and which management systems must reinforce those capabilities. Those choices must be coherent. A brilliant choice, disconnected from the organisation's capabilities or culture, is merely an aspiration.

Strategy as an Endless Loop of Learning

Another assumption quietly disappeared as the module progressed. I had always believed that execution followed strategy. Donald Sull's teaching challenged that belief: strategy and execution are not sequential activities but part of a continuous conversation. Every decision generates new information; every action reveals hidden assumptions; every market response demands reinterpretation. The strategist doesn't formulate a perfect plan and then execute it, the strategist makes sense of reality, makes choices, acts, learns, revises, and begins again. Strategy is less a straight line than an endless loop of learning. That idea resonated because it mirrors life itself — the most valuable decisions I've made in my career rarely came from perfect information. They emerged through observation, reflection, experimentation, and adjustment. Certainty is overrated; learning is not.

Asking Different Questions

Increasingly, I found myself asking different questions. Not “what should we do?” but “what business are we really in?” Not “how do we outperform competitors?” but “what unique value can only we create?” Not “how do we grow faster?” but “what capabilities must we build today to remain relevant tomorrow?” Perhaps the most significant insight from this module was recognising that strategy is inseparable from judgment. In a volatile and uncertain world, leaders constantly make decisions under incomplete information, human judgment is shaped by bias, intuition, experience, and emotion. A leader's role isn't to eliminate uncertainty, but to improve the quality of thinking within it.

The Value Was in the Conversation

The greatest value of ISB, so far, has not been in the theories themselves, but in the conversations they provoke. The diversity of perspectives within the cohort, the intellectual rigour of the faculty, and the willingness to challenge long-held assumptions have made learning an exercise in reflection rather than memorisation. As one of our peer learning themes put it: leadership is about connecting dots across disciplines, experiences, and perspectives, not merely accumulating knowledge.

Fewer Answers, Better Questions

If there's one thought I'll carry from this first module, it's this: strategy is not the pursuit of certainty. It is the disciplined pursuit of better judgment. The future can't be predicted with precision; markets will evolve, technologies will disrupt, and entire industries will be reimagined. In such a world, competitive advantage will belong not to those with the best forecasts, but to those who learn faster, adapt earlier, and remain intellectually curious. As I conclude the first module, I leave with far fewer answers than I expected but far better questions. And perhaps that is the true beginning of strategic leadership.

Synopsis

Aniel Srivastav is Business Head at Muthoot Homefin (India) Limited and a participant in ISB Executive Education's Senior Management Programme, currently underway. He is an enterprise financial-services leader with nearly three decades of experience building, transforming and scaling businesses across public-sector banking, private banking, housing finance, NBFC, insurance and real estate. He leads strategy, P&L, business growth, distribution, product, sales, credit, operations, collections, customer experience and digital acquisition.