As organisations move into their 2026 planning cycles, the familiar rhythm begins: leaders gather their priorities, departments draft ambitious action lists, and HR teams start building out the People Plan. It all looks productive on the surface, but there’s a quiet truth many businesses overlook - most People Plans aren’t really strategic. They are activity lists. Neatly organised, sometimes beautifully designed, but still fundamentally just collections of HR tasks. And while they might demonstrate busyness, they rarely move the organisation forward.
 

A real People Strategy is not created by deciding which initiatives sound impressive. It starts by stepping back, sometimes uncomfortably, and asking what the organisation genuinely needs. That requires patience, insight, and a willingness to acknowledge underlying issues that can’t be solved with another training programme, a new system, or a refreshed onboarding checklist. Before we map out the future, we have to understand the present.
 

This is where many businesses falter. They jump straight into creating solutions without diagnosing the problem. But without a clear sense of “where we are today,” even the most enthusiastic HR interventions risk being misaligned, misprioritised, or simply ineffective. When leaders take the time to properly examine their culture, workforce data, operational frustrations, and talent gaps, patterns begin to appear - and those patterns tell the real story. They highlight the difference between isolated issues and systemic ones. They reveal whether turnover is about salary or something far more complex. They expose capability gaps leadership may have sensed but never defined. In short, they provide the clarity needed to build a strategy that will actually work.
 

A meaningful People Strategy also requires a forward lens. It must be anchored in the commercial direction of the business, not in HR’s independent goals. Too often, organisations ask HR to produce a plan without clearly articulating what the business is trying to achieve. When that happens, the People Plan becomes a set of well-meaning initiatives floating beside, rather than powering, the organisational agenda. To truly plan for 2026, leaders must first articulate the capabilities, behaviours and workforce design needed to get there. Only then can HR design a strategy that enables, rather than guesses.
 

The most valuable part of strategic workforce planning isn’t the plan itself, but the conversations that build it. Honest discussions reveal the gap between perception and reality. They challenge long-held assumptions. They expose the hidden friction points - the things employees whisper about but never say directly. In those moments, real change becomes possible. Without them, organisations risk creating People Plans full of energy but devoid of impact.
When a People Strategy is built on diagnosis instead of assumption, everything becomes clearer. Priorities align naturally with organisational goals. Decisions are anchored in evidence rather than preference. HR is able to focus on strategic actions that genuinely shift performance, culture, and capability - not on activities that simply “feel” strategic. The result is a People Plan that is smaller, sharper, and significantly more powerful.
 

As 2026 approaches, the challenge for leaders is not to produce more action points, more initiatives, or more beautifully designed planning documents. The challenge is to slow down long enough to understand what truly matters, and what has been quietly limiting progress. Planning is important, but diagnosing is transformational. And the organisations that take the time to do it properly will be the ones that enter 2026 not just with a plan, but with purpose.
In a landscape where talent, capability, and culture increasingly determine competitive advantage, surface-level People Planning is no longer enough. The future belongs to the businesses that look beneath the symptoms, confront the root causes, and design strategies that reflect the realities, not the aspirations, of their organisation. So before you build your 2026 People Plan, pause. Ask the hard questions. Have the honest conversations. The strategy you create afterwards will be far stronger for it.
 

This article was prepared by Katie Fox, Assoc. CIPD
MCS Group Intelligent Recruitment Solutions 
https://www.mcsgroup.jobs/t Recruitment Consultancy Belfast | MCS Group