Don’t let your strategic plan sit on a shelf
What do you think of when you hear the term ‘strategic planning?’ Does dread fill your mind? It used to conjure up images of middle managers stuck in a windowless room, droning on about SWOT analysis, a dashboard, and ultimately a document that would collect dust for the next three years until it was time to go through strategic planning, again.
This year, the word “planning” took on special meaning. Everyone’s strategic plan was impacted. That word ‘pivot’ felt overused by the end of Spring, but it expressed how quickly things changed for many businesses. Some were able to scale up quickly and take advantage of the changing landscape. Many were forced to deal with immediate crises. Still, others were consigned to sit tight and try and ride it out.
Strategic planning might not ever look the same. What if strategic planning could result in tools that helped you to develop a formula for continual evaluation and course correction if necessary, and, more importantly, develop an organizational capacity to replicate success and address uncertainty?
Future decision-making could truly be informed by your strategy. Your organization could deploy the strategic direction once it was fleshed out – if crafted simply and easy to digest.
How does a team work to overcome the burden of strategic planning?
I reflected on our most recent work with clients, leading planning sessions and designing outcomes from those sessions. Because so many working adults have, at some point in their careers, participated in that arduous “strategic planning” they tend to envision that windowless room. And some may resist being recruited to the activity.
You can get the best work out of the planning committee by setting some ground rules:
Invite a cross-section of your staff to join the planning team, and be specific that each voice will be given equally-weighted value. Those who report to others on the planning team will be expected to contribute ideas and feedback.
Instead of a multiple-page document, with an index, amendments and even backgrounding, explain the goal for the draft plan is a single sheet that will influence how everyone from leadership to frontline staff make tactical decisions.
Encourage them to refrain from taking the easy way out - establishing a series of goals they are pretty sure at which they, or their peers (or even their direct reports) will succeed, along with a tactic-heavy work plan.
Ask them to consider how they would leverage the strategy to create a cultural advantage and replicate success.
Set the expectation of a simple game plan to help all employees commit to what their department/team/branch will or will not focus on in the coming months.
Knowing that a single sheet will be even more challenging for the strategic planning committee to draft, you might assign some relatively light reading as homework in preparation. You might also allow for a single tabloid sheet.
For Blue Grotto clients, we assign an evergreen article we found, and clipped and photo-copied and scribbled notes on in the 2013 Stanford Social Innovation Review: The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy and a Harvard Business Review article by Roger Martin. Also “vintage” – first printed in 2010. Thank goodness for the internet to connect us all.
Dana O’Donovan and Noah Rimland Flower of the Monitor Institute tackled the topic of strategic planning and their research still rings true, almost 20 years later. And, in the middle of a pandemic. In today’s fast-changing world, why freeze your strategic thinking in a five-year plan? They advocated for developing a plan that is adaptive and simple.
For Harvard Business Review’s blog, Roger Martin instructed very simply that there are Five Questions to Build a Strategy, treating strategy-making as developing a set of answers to five interlinked questions.
One simple takeaway: debating tactics that may or may not be relevant in even just a few short weeks feels like a waste of time. Prioritizing what your team wants to focus on as an organization for the next twelve months and identifying the best practices you can rely on to guide the decisions made by everyone from the front-line customer service to the corner offices makes perfect sense.
Links to the articles: http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/the_strategic_plan_is_dead._long_live_strategy
Stanford Social Innovation Review Nonprofit Management The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy. In today’s fast-changing world, why freeze your strategic thinking in a five-year plan?
By Dana O’Donovan & Noah Rimland Flower
http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/05/the-five-questions-of-strategy/
Harvard Business Review Five Questions to Build a Strategy By Roger Martin