This is my season for strategic planning.  Last week I spent a full day with our colleagues at the National Trust Historic Site Filoli for their strategic planning retreat.  As you read this, I’m on a plane for another retreat with 20 team members designed to scale up one of our most important organizational initiatives.  When I return, I have a half-day financial planning retreat set for early August. That’s a lot of planning! There are some who say that strategic plans are useless. They generally throw around the phrase “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” which is a popular adaptation of a phrase uttered by Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, also known as Moltke the Elder. He was a German Field Marshal who lived between 1800 and 1891 and is credited with creating a new approach to directing armies in the field. This entailed developing a series of options rather than simply a single plan.  Note that he didn’t stop planning.  He simply recognized that in changing environments, you need options and …