Strategic planning, as it has been practiced, has really been strategic programming, the articulation and elaboration of strategies, or visions, that already exist. When companies understand the difference between planning and strategic thinking, they can get back to what the strategy-making process should be: capturing what the manager learns from all source (both the soft insights from his or her personal experiences and the experiences of other throughout the organization and the hard data from market research and the like) and the synthesizing that learning into a vision of the direction that the business should pursue.