Your 2027 Plan Has No Diagnosis

The planning template came over from FP&A in September, and you could recite the slide order before you opened it. A 2026 recap with green and amber arrows. Next year's targets, with pipeline up 30%, sourced revenue up 20% and aided awareness up five points. Four strategic pillars, each one a verb and a noun. Twenty-some initiatives under the pillars. Then the budget by channel, which is where the meeting will actually happen.

Every slide will survive review, because the targets tie to the company plan and the budget foots. The deck will still lack one sentence explaining why pipeline missed in 2026 and what changes in 2027 that makes 30% plausible.

That sentence is the diagnosis. A plan without one is a forecast with a spending schedule.

The kernel test

Richard Rumelt, the UCLA strategy professor, argues that every good strategy shares a core he calls the kernel. A diagnosis explains "the nature of the challenge." A guiding policy is "an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis." Coherent actions are "steps that are coordinated with one another to support the accomplishment of the guiding policy" (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011).

As a ten-minute check on a draft, look for a sentence that names the problem and its cause, then one that rules out a plausible use of money. Then pick any initiative and ask which others would get weaker if it were cut. Most marketing plans I review fail all three checks.

Rumelt lists four hallmarks of bad strategy, which are failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, bad strategic objectives, and fluff (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011). His line on corporate planning is blunter. "Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection," he told McKinsey (McKinsey Quarterly, November 2007).

Two of his examples compress the problem. A CEO's "20/20 plan" called for 20% annual revenue growth and a margin of 20% or better, and when Rumelt asked what had to happen for it to work, the CEO showed him a highlighted Jack Welch quote about reaching for the impossible. A small city's strategic plan held 47 strategies and 178 action items, and action item 122 was "create a strategic plan" (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011).

A teardown of the plan on your desk

What follows is a composite I assembled from B2B marketing plans I have seen in recent planning cycles. It describes no single company, and every number in it is illustrative.

The vision slide. "Become the most trusted brand in our category." In the planning template Rumelt mocks, popular visions are "to be the best or the leading or the best known" (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011). Nobody can disagree with it, so it instructs nobody.

The targets. Pipeline up 30%, sourced revenue up 20%, awareness up five points, an EMEA launch. These are fine as targets. Nothing above them explains why they are reachable this year when the 2026 versions were missed.

The pillars. "Accelerate pipeline through integrated, full-funnel programs." "Elevate the brand." "Scale ABM." "Drive efficiency with AI." Each one is a target with a verb in front of it. The template Rumelt mocks has a line for this, "Fill in some aspirations/goals but call them strategies" (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011). "Integrated, full-funnel" is fluff in his sense, a description every marketing team already claims.

The initiatives. Twenty-four of them, each with an owner and a quarter. They came from asking every director what they wanted next year, which is how Rumelt says a "dog's dinner of goals" forms (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011). Pull any one out and nothing else in the plan notices.

The budget. Last year's channel mix, plus or minus a few points. Nothing in the plan ranks the problems, so the budget falls back on history.

The missing slide. Nowhere does the deck say why 2026 pipeline came in short. That is Rumelt's first hallmark, the failure to face the challenge, and the other three follow from it.

Why marketing plans come out this way

The template asks for targets and a channel budget, so that is what gets written, and Finance needs the budget whether or not a strategy exists. Rumelt's advice was to separate them, calling annual budgets "long-term resource plans" and running strategy as "a separate, nonannual, opportunity-driven process" (McKinsey Quarterly, November 2007).

The second cause is the cost of choosing. A real diagnosis tells at least one of your directors that their program is not the priority this year. At Digital Equipment in 1992, in Rumelt's simplified telling, three executives backed three incompatible strategies, and the consensus statement that came out read, "DEC is committed to providing high-quality products and services and being a leader in data processing" (McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011).

CMOs report the symptom themselves. Gartner's December 2025 release on CMO priorities found that half of CMOs named short-term needs impeding long-term strategic planning as their most pressing challenge. The same release reported that 46% of CMOs wanted to know how to prioritize the marketing initiatives most likely to drive growth (Gartner, December 2025).

The cost shows up in your team. Donald Sull and Rebecca Homkes surveyed 11,000 executives and managers at more than 400 companies and found only a third of senior managers could correctly identify their firm's top three priorities. Among those who helped develop the strategy, the figure was only slightly more than half (London Business School, December 2015).

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The Kernel Page

The Kernel Page is my marketing version of Rumelt's kernel, one page that sits above the budget tab. Rumelt supplies the diagnosis, the policy and the actions. The stop list, the 60% rule and the trigger are my additions and my positions.

Diagnosis. One sentence that names a cause, written so a smart peer could disagree with it. "Pipeline missed by 12%" is a symptom. "Mid-market buyers build shortlists from peers and review sites, and we are absent from both" is a diagnosis. Default to one per year. Write a second page only when you run separate businesses with different buyers.

Guiding policy. One sentence on how you will attack the diagnosis. My test is that it rules out at least one thing a competent CMO in your seat would otherwise fund. If it rules out nothing, rewrite it.

Stop list. At least two programs or channels that end or lose half their funding, named on the page so the budget meeting cannot quietly restore them. Deviate only when the diagnosis is a new market and the current mix already performs at plan.

Coherent actions. Five at most. Each one must pass a removal test, where deleting it makes at least one other action measurably weaker. These actions get at least 60% of non-headcount program dollars. Go below 60% when the diagnosis is a measurement or data problem, because those first actions are cheap and the spend lands the following year.

Targets. Keep them and move them to the bottom, each tied to the action that moves it. A target no action drives goes to the risk section with a note saying so.

Reopen trigger. Rumelt calls the need for strategy work "episodic," because change does not arrive on an annual calendar (McKinsey Quarterly, November 2007). Name the event that reopens the diagnosis, such as two quarters of falling shortlist rate or a competitor price cut, and check it quarterly.

The same plan, rebuilt

Here is the same composite, still illustrative, with a kernel on top.

The diagnosis reads, "We win at our normal rate once we make a mid-market shortlist, and we rarely make one, because those buyers shortlist from peers and review sites where we have little presence." The guiding policy reads, "Earn the mid-market shortlist with customer proof, and stop buying enterprise awareness we already have."

The stop list names two enterprise trade shows and the broad programmatic awareness line. The coherent actions are a reference program that pays customers for their time, a review-site program run off the same reference list, customer-hosted regional user groups funded from the trade-show money, sales content built from what they say, and a shortlist-rate field in the CRM. Four of the five draw on one pool of customers and the fifth measures whether they work, so cutting one weakens the others.

The 30% pipeline target survives, now on the last line with a mechanism under it. Once the kernel exists, every budget line can get a verdict, which is the work in Plan for the Budget You Won't Get.

Before the plan goes to Finance

Write the diagnosis sentence before you open the budget tab. Send it to your CRO and CFO and ask whether they disagree. If neither finds anything to argue with, it is still too safe to be a diagnosis. Keep rewriting until one of them pushes back.

If the diagnosis lands on a revenue line nobody owns, such as expansion revenue or a partner channel, that is also the opening I described in Pick Your P&L. In my experience, the executive who writes the diagnosis is usually the one asked to own the number that follows from it.