Your Comp Plan Is Not Your Strategic Plan: Here's Why That Matters

When I ask local government leaders whether their organization has a strategic plan, I hear the same answer more often than you would think: "We have our comp plan."

I get it. Comprehensive plans are substantial documents. They take years to develop, involve extensive community engagement, and carry real legal weight. If your agency has invested that kind of effort, it feels like the planning box is checked.

But a comp plan and a strategic plan are doing entirely different jobs—and confusing the two leaves public agencies without something they need, right now more than ever.

Two Plans, Two Purposes

A comprehensive (comp) plan is a land use document. For most Washington cities (and some counties) it is required under the Growth Management Act. A comp plan covers a 20-year planning horizon, gets updated every 10 years, and it answers the question: How do we manage our growth and development over the next 20 years?

Scan its mandatory elements and you will find land use, housing, capital facilities, transportation, and climate resiliency, to name a few. All of the elements are externally focused and about your community's physical future. Questions about how your agency makes decisions, focuses its energy, or aligns its team around shared priorities? That is not what a comp plan addresses.

A strategic plan operates on a completely different timeline and answers a completely different question: Given everything our agency is facing right now, where do we focus our energy and resources over the next three to five years?

This question matters most when something is shifting, whether it be a change in leadership, a budget under pressure, or a community whose needs are evolving faster than current priorities reflect.

The word "strategic" implies a moment of change, a juncture that calls for pausing, looking clearly at where the agency is, and making deliberate choices about where it should be headed. It gives your agency a North Star: Everyone knows where they are going and how they are going to get there.

Both plans matter, and neither is a substitute for the other.

The Cost of the Gap

In my work with local government entities across Washington State, I see the same pattern: talented, committed staff already stretched thin. When organizational priorities do not have a stable foundation—when they shift with elections, new council or board interests, or projects that arrive with urgency and no clear criteria for evaluation, the cost lands on the people doing the work.

Without a shared framework, every decision gets made against an unlimited field of competing priorities. The aspirations of policymakers are boundless, and constituent expectations are unrelenting. When resources are tight (which they always are in local government), trying to do it all becomes costly, in more ways than one.

Your agency needs criteria—something everyone can hold up and say: Here is why we are choosing this and not that.

What an Effective Strategic Plan Actually Does

Too many strategic plans end up as what I call a bag of tactics: A sprawling list of goals and projects, loosely organized, that could justify almost any decision (or none at all). These plans sit on a shelf because they do not help when it comes to making choices. This is where strategic planning gets a bad reputation, and, frankly, deserves it.

An effective strategic plan is different. It is honest about what is getting in the way—the real barriers, not the symptoms—and it surfaces those blocks clearly so the organization can address them directly rather than work around them indefinitely.

An effective strategic plan culminates in something specific: strategic, focused organizational commitments that give the entire team something to aim for together. That clarity is what makes implementation possible. Staff know what to prioritize and leadership has the guidance they need to drive the work forward. And when hard decisions come, as they always do, everyone is steered by the same compass.

The Goldilocks of Planning

A word about the timeline. Three to five years is the sweet spot for strategic planning. It is long enough to move the needle on things that uniquely matter to a community and short enough to stay responsive to changing realities.

A strategic plan gives the whole agency a trajectory that is stable enough to build on, yet flexible enough to absorb what changes along the way. The governing body still sets annual priorities, responding to what is emerging in the community. Those priorities now sit within a framework that holds a steady direction across elections, leadership transitions, and the inevitable surprises a local government absorbs every year.

When it works, the effects ripple through the organization. Teams, departments, and leadership are pulling together. Budget conversations get easier, and the community can see that their local government is moving somewhere with intention and focus, and with everyone steering by the same North Star.

Why This Matters Right Now

The agencies that get the most from strategic planning view it as a chance to get honest about where they are right now, where they want their community to be headed, and, critically, what is preventing them from making progress.

One Washington State city manager put it plainly to me when reaching out to begin this work, stating "We can't keep moving in seven different directions. We need a trajectory our whole organization can follow."

That is not an unusual situation, just an unusually honest description of one.

Trying to respond to everything equally is not a strategy, but it is an unsustainable path to exhaustion.

Ask the leadership team—and the governing body—to complete this sentence: Over the next few years, we will focus our attention on...

If they all can give more or less the same answer, that is something powerful—a shared focus that helps the whole organization work toward what matters most, together.

If there is not broad alignment across the responses, what difference would it make if there was, and how could that benefit local communities?

Conclusion

While both are critical to the functioning of local governments, a strategic plan and a comp plan answer fundamentally different questions and neither should be used as a substitute for the other.

In my next blog, I will be exploring three things to help you prepare for strategic planning: articulating what is driving the need to plan right now, identifying who needs to be involved, and compiling the information that sheds light on your current situation.