Yes, strategic planning is a best practice, and it can completely transform organizations.

But it’s also universally challenging. Everyone has a day job to make the business run, and thoughtful planning takes time, and forces teams to make often-difficult choices.

The good news is: the payoff is worthwhile. In collaborating with our businesses over many years to help plan their futures, we’ve learned some solid lessons about strategic planning.

Here are five keys to getting it right:

1. Plan for the next three years. And do it on a rolling basis, so each year, you’re refining the three-year plan. We guide each of our companies through strategic planning every year—always with a three-year outlook—and we’ve found it to be a successful way to advance companies across multiple industries. We then use our annual strategic planning work to drive budgeting and operational planning for the year.

2. Acknowledge uncertainty and make plans anyway. A common refrain from teams tasked with planning: “We just don’t have enough information yet.” Not having enough information is an enduring truth of life. Acknowledge that you’re not sitting there with perfect—or even decent—information. Then make plans anyway, understanding that plans can and will adjust as you learn more. You can wait, but conditions will keep changing around you, and that vision of perfect information on the horizon will remain just out of reach. The best time to plan the future is always now.

3. Engage employees throughout the organization. Sure, a couple top executives can craft a strategic plan alone in a boardroom in a single day. It’s undoubtedly speedy. But it also bypasses critical knowledge held by others, and it can hamstring execution. Engaging team members throughout the organization is a worthy endeavor. It might not feel like the most efficient way to do it, but we’ve found that when teams develop a vision together, the execution is much more powerful.

4. If everybody owns it, nobody owns it. Hands down, the most important part of strategic planning is assigning solo accountability for each initiative in the plan. Yes, the best teams collaborate and work together. But to really get the most out of an initiative the team has chosen to drive the business forward, one person needs to own it. Who should you tap? That depends on the initiative and the organization. Just make it a singular assignment.

5. Create systems for follow through. Without follow-through, a strategic plan is no more than a thought exercise. Who is getting up each day and doing what to carry out those plans? And how will you know if an idea is working? For example, if you want to increase revenue by increasing the average customer check by 10%, ask how that plays out: Who can influence that? What tactics are you asking them to employ? How are you training them? How are you incentivizing them? And then how are you measuring success? Do the rigorous thinking up front, and then follow through.

A final thought: Be realistic about the team in place and the bandwidth they have. Set your team up for success. If you craft a plan that has many initiatives, prioritize three to five items that will have the biggest impact on performance, and sacrifice everything else in service of giving those key goals the resources they deserve.

Strategic planning is hard—but well worth the success it can unlock.

Good luck!