Here’s a set of some general ‘must-do’s I have developed from my several years’ experience of running and participating in strategy workshops – as a facilitator and Board director:
1. Don’t do a strategic plan if your organisation is in a state of flux: If you’re waiting for a new CEO to start or facing a cashflow crisis, or similar, wait until things are more settled. Then people will be more at ease and can focus their minds more constructively.
2. Use a planning steering group, a project plan, and don’t take too long! Strategy work needs input from a wide range of people inside and outside your organisation, but use a ‘core’ team of 8-10 individuals to champion and drive the task. Use a ‘balanced’ mix of Board members, senior managers, and a few other well-regarded and enthusiastic staff members from different functions. Appoint a senior member to be overall leader (doesn’t have to be the CEO) and a talented senior or middle manager to be project manager. Be sure to prepare a project plan and ideally don’t take longer than 4-5 months, or else the world will have moved on too much since the time you began the process!
3. Strategy begins with insight, analysis and consultation: Start by ensuring you know as much as you can about your customers/beneficiaries/service users, what they think of you, and what they’re wanting for the future. This needs to be closely followed by a wider internal review/analysis of your organisation’s performance, strengths and weaknesses, together with an external review of major trends, opportunities and threats. Complement desk analysis with some deeper consultation amongst your wider stakeholders. Crucially, do an overall analysis of all findings to identify a set of 12-15 major, overall issues and opportunities. At the end of this step, prepare a written file documenting your findings and analysis and circulate to all your steering group members and Board members.
4. Use a few, well-facilitated strategy sessions away from your office: Strategy development requires a lot of thoughtful discussion and reflective thinking, so it’s wise to avoid the distractions which can occur by staying in the office! It’s best to hold 3-4 separate sessions with some weeks apart – rather than try and do all in one go – so people have time to reflect and prepare. Use a good, external facilitator to help structure each session and stimulate the right atmosphere, questioning and achieve open but purposeful debate. Be sure to equip participants with information and issues to think about ahead of each session: ‘pre-work’ is as important as the group sessions themselves.
5. Use specialists and dedicated task groups (with wider membership) to look into or progress work on specific issues or opportunities between group sessions: Examples could range from collecting more information about an emerging competitor to working up a business appraisal for a potential new market. The project manager needs to brief and co-ordinate these wider contributors, picking up issues or questions or gaps in people’s thinking or information, and (with the project leader) ensuring the project advances forward effectively, building on all contributions.
6. Stretch and spark people’s thinking by developing combinations of strategic options: The second group session is typically a good place for team members to start to think about and identify broad lines of potential action for responding to key issues and opportunities. It’s a good idea to develop a number of creative combinations of these lines of action as (alternative) broad-choice ‘pathways‘ and then to assess each using a range of suitable criteria (e.g. use of organisational strengths, degree of risk).
7. Treat strategy as defining a broad ‘directional framework’ for the next few years (which you can review/refine each year): Include: your driving Purpose (mission); your Vision and top-line goals for what you would like to see achieved by a few years’ ahead – both external-facing and internal-facing (e.g. financial); definition of who you will serving (markets, customer types, geography, channels); your product/service/idea offering (make as distinctive as possible); what sort of operating model you will use (e.g. use of partners, online, franchise-based); what sort of organisation and key capabilities you will need; what are to be the key contributions / developments in each part of your organisation over the next few years; and listing of all major projects/ventures.
8. Focus with some flexibility: To have a winning strategy, you can’t be all things to all people. You need to focus and be prepared to make some clear and proactive trade-offs – especially in terms of where and how you compete. At the same time, though, don’t seek to define a focus and direction in too much precise detail: allow for some flexible timings for certain actions and include some testing or experimentation in some areas of action. Additionally, wherever possible, use resources or processes which have some potential flexibility, so you can adapt or refine what you do, as you learn.
9. Don’t start your thinking with financials or targets: Good strategy should be much more about applying creativity, experience and ideas than just numbers. Taking last year’s budget and simply adding 5% is not strategy! Also, don’t rush to define precise objectives early in the strategic thinking process: develop first the agenda of ideas and initiatives and then afterwards go back through these and try and define some targets for delivery/progress across the planning period.
10. Be ambitious and bold, not incremental, and don’t confuse planning for strategy! ‘Strategic planning’ is actually an oxymoron! Planning follows and is separate from strategy. Planning is more of a budget and organisational exercise and involves incremental rather than radical thinking. Strategy, in contrast, starts with a fresh or updated aspirational view of where you want to be in a few years’ time (a vision) and thinking back from there. Don’t make your vision too woolly, though, or your managers will also come up with woolly and weak ideas and programs for achieving that vision!
11. Try to avoid biased thinking: Be aware of and do your best to limit the influence of a range of potential human ‘cognitive biases’ that can naturally skew and distort people’s thinking in any strategy process (this is a key role for the project leader and facilitator). Examples of some major biases: a) confirmation bias: the tendency to interpret new information in a way that does not upset or contradict existing beliefs; b) framing bias: assembling a number of unconnected elements falsely together in order to try and achieve a clearer or appealing narrative; c) authority bias: the tendency for people to let their views be swayed by the boss or senior colleagues; d) information bias: the delusion that more information always guarantees better decisions; and e) groupthink bias: where everyone in a group aligns their opinions with the perceived majority view.
12. Factor in for future uncertainty: Without getting too complicated, be sure to step back once you have developed your strategic framework and try to identify explicitly what major assumptions you have made and what major risks apply – firstly concerning your strategy overall and secondly for each of your biggest new initiatives/projects. Think more about those assumptions and risks which would have a significant adverse effect on your organisation and try and build in some flexibility or contingency actions to cope.
13. Follow-up your strategy with a strategic implementation plan & link to annual planning and budgeting: After you have defined your strategic framework, plan how you are going to resource, organise and manage its implementation across the future period ahead. This is ‘strategic planning’. Crucial factors to consider include: more detail to flesh out key strategic ideas or initiatives; what resources will be needed where across the organisation; who will be responsible for which parts of the strategy; what key targets and measures are to be used to drive implementation; what incentives and rewards will be used to motivate people; how the strategy is to be communicated across the organisation; and how implementation will be monitored. Relevant functional managers should be involved in drawing up more detail needed for particular ideas or programmes, thus helping their ‘buy-in’ to the strategy. You should review/update all this planning framework each year and, at the same time, use it as a crucial frame for your organisation’s annual operating plan and budget (this includes ensuring that each department’s operational activities will be ‘in sync’ with the wider strategy and allocating specific managers to progress specific strategy-related projects alongside their day-to-day duties.
14. Ensure staff commitment and energy: Strategy implementation usually needs a big dose of ‘change management’ techniques, especially if there is radical change. This calls for winning people’s hearts, not just minds, and supporting people at an individual level to deal with their ‘cycle’ of emotions (ranging from denial and worry and possible obstruction though to acceptance and support). Strong leadership needs to work with supportive HR and effective communication – not only to establish change but to stabilise it.
15. Monitor, learn and refine as you go: Your Board/senior management need to keep tabs on the ongoing implementation of your organisation’s strategy. A good way of doing this is to use a quarterly ‘scorecard‘ of performance measures selected to track both results in key result/development areas (e.g. reduction in costs, revenue growth, penetration into a new market) and progress of individual major strategic projects (e.g. milestones achieved, money spent). This type of scorecard differs from operationally-focused scorecards often used by managers to track their business week to week, which deal with more narrowly-defined and shorter period measures.
I hope the above set of pointers are helpful for strategic planning in your organisation.
If I can be of any assistance – with your strategy process, strategy design or as a facilitator – do get in touch. Likewise if you’d just like to have a general, first chat or discussion about any aspect of strategic planning. My contact details are as below:
Tel: 01886 881092 OR Email Mike at: mpo@owenmorrispartnership.com
Copyright of Owen Morris Partnership
Owen Morris 'Stratminder' - strategic blog by strategic consultant / facilitator Mike Owen 