Strategic planning is dead. So claims economist Bill Conerly in a series of articles for Forbes. That may come as welcome news to many executives and managers who have long questioned the value of developing strategic plans.

Still, it begs the question: Did strategic planning die of natural causes or was it the victim of abuse? Have organizations finally rid themselves of an outmoded ritual, or have they lost a valuable tool due to neglect?

For some time now, strategic planning has been dying a slow death. Rapid acceleration in the rate of change and innovation along with instability in the global economy have made long-range forecasting obsolete.

Companies can no longer lock themselves into a set of multiyear objectives based on certain assumptions about the future while markets and technologies are morphing and mutating in unpredictable ways. Execution and flexibility are the keys to managing today's organizations, says Conerly, whose conclusion is based on interviews with a number of top executives.

Strategic planning has outlived its usefulness — of that there is no question. Yet, even before the economic bubble burst, strategic planning had fallen into disrepute as a result of misuse.

The real value in strategic planning is devoting time for the organization's leadership to come together to do strategic thinking. Too often, however, strategic planning sessions devolved into formulaic exercises for writing mission statements and developing work plans.

The process overshadowed the purpose; the outputs became more important than the outcome. Not planning but developing the plan became the focus of the work.

In addition, as Conerly notes, the resulting plan usually reflected the current thinking — and biases — of the leadership, with perhaps a few "stretch" goals tossed in for good measure to demonstrate forward thinking.

Rather than articulate strategy, plans turned into to-do lists of new initiatives and pet projects, as each participant was eager to contribute his or her "out-of-the-box" thinking. As a result, plans became too cumbersome, unmanageable, unactionable and quickly outdated.

Examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that strategic planning did not merely expire at a ripe old age. It was, in fact, slowly strangled and crippled and then tossed aside, having failed to keep up with the times.

In that is a lesson for organizations. Whatever the process — strategic thinking, visioning, problem-solving or decision-making — it needs to be allowed to perform its function and runs its course. Subverting it for other ends only wastes effort and creates distrust.

It's time to move past strategic planning, but let it not have died in vain.