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Oh No! It's Strategic Planning Time!

For many organizations it's that time of year again. Time to take last year's Strategic Plan from the shelf, dust it off, determine how much progress was made, and update the strategies or make a new one. Now is the reckoning, the time when we realize just how little of last year's plan we actually accomplished. We wonder one more time how it is that we could invest such energy in making plans that never materialize.

We were careful to involve all the "right" people, set aside several days, rent an off-site facility, and even bring in an external consultant to facilitate. What more could we do?

Strategic Planning is perhaps the most disliked activity in the organizational world - at least in those organizations that do it. What we have found in our work with organizations is that Strategic Planning is often regarded as a once-a-year activity resulting in a document that is mostly numbers. When we ask about Strategic Planning, we are usually handed a substantial, nicely bound volume in mint condition. When we thumb through the document, we find lots of numbers and few actual plans. When we ask about ongoing monitoring and adapting and integrated business plans, we get confused looks or blank stares.

We are convinced that most organizations dislike formulating plans because most have no real understanding of what Strategic Planning really is or how to do it. Most organizations do budget planning rather than Strategic Planning because they understand that having a budget is mandatory for success. Formulating a budget is important. However, budgets should not be formulated from thin air or from last year's numbers. Budgets are formulated based on plans. There are many facilitating factors required to make a plan a reality -- financial resources is only one of those. It is true that plans or time lines for plans must sometimes be adjusted based on the availability of these facilitating factors.

Adjustments notwithstanding, our experience indicates that organizations that formulate a budget and then make plans around the finances often suffer from lack of clear vision and mission. They are also given to stagnation and lower overall performance. Yes, Strategic Planning takes a little time. Yes, the environment is changing so rapidly that Strategic Plans must be made for shorter periods of time and must be adjusted regularly. Nonetheless, human beings still want and need plans. We put confidence in and are motivated by them. And since organizations are people focussed on a common vision, mission, or work, planning of all kinds becomes pretty important.

If you or your organization have had problems with Strategic Planning, we'd like to introduce you to a new way of thinking about it. We would also like to give you some tips about how to make the planning process more effective and results oriented for your organization.

Strategic Planning is:

• an assessment-based look at where you are & where you want / need to be

• the "big picture" plan for closing the gap

• the foundation on which integrated, organization wide plans are built

• a dynamic, monitored organizational process

Strategic Planning is basically looking at where we are as an organization and determining where we want to or need to be after a certain period of time. Closing the gap between these two points is the heart of Strategic Planning - what strategies we will use to get from point A to point B in general and in each of the organization's critical business areas. (For more info on the 7 Critical Business Needs, click here.) Though planning to close the gap is the heart of Strategic planning, it is not the most difficult or the most time consuming part.

TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR PLANNING

DO YOUR HOMEWORK: ASSESS

Assessment-based means that thorough assessments of the organization and its external environment have been conducted prior to or concurrent with beginning the Strategic Planning process. The data from these two assessments will provide a more realistic understanding of the current conditions of organization and its environment.

These understandings will enable the planners to establish a more realistic and achievable future state and to devise much more realistic and implementable strategies to close the gap between the present and the future.

THINK "BIG PICTURE" & BE CREATIVE & INNOVATIVE

Strategic Planning is about big pieces, global strategies, not operational or even business planning. Good Strategic Planning requires big picture thinking, moving away from the operational realities that make up our work days and looking with a fresh eye at the organization as a whole. This moving away to a more objective perspective enables us to be more creative and innovative and less tied to "the way things have always been."

We must carefully consider what global strategies will best help us to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be, given the understandings we have gained from our assessment.

Most Strategic Planning goes awry or gets bogged down because the planners move into implementation and other details that should command the attention of
others in the organization.

BUILD THE FOUNDATION FOR INTEGRATED PLANNING

Once it is completed, the Strategic Plan and the strategies it outlines for each Critical Business Need become the basis for Global Business and Operational Plans. The global or macro business plan is developed first to put timelines and business details, including budgets, around the broad strategies outlined in the Strategic Plan. From this plan come the operational or implementation plans needed to actually put feet on the Strategic and Business Plans.

However, integrated planning doesn't stop here. Each division, department, area, and team must also formulate business and operational plans that will enable them to implement the global Strategic, Business, and Operational Plans. Integrated planning insures that the Strategic Plan is not just a document on a shelf, and it insures that every member of the organization is involved in planning to reach the vision.

If good Strategic Planning does not happen then all subsequent plans will be built on a poorly constructed foundation, given to shifts and cave ins.

TREAT THE STRATEGIC PLAN (& ALL OTHER PLANS!) LIKE ANY DYNAMIC PROCESS: MONITOR & ADAPT IT AS NEEDED

By dynamic we mean that the plan is growing and changing as the problems and opportunities inherent in the ecology of any organization present themselves. This means that the "grand plan" and all subsequent plans are being monitored and changed as the internal and external demands on the organization change. The flow of information used to make these changes comes from all directions. Demands in one area of the organization or in the market may impact the Strategic Plan just as changes in the Strategic Plan will impact all business and operational plans.

When Strategic Planning and all other planning becomes a dynamic - living and ever changing - process, the members of the organization have entered into what we call Continuous, Collaborative Assessment.

This on-going assessment means that Strategic Planning becomes much less time and energy intensive. It also means that the plan is adapted as needed rather than adapted several months later when the problems will certainly be more difficult to solve and the opportunities long missed, the gap between where the organization is and where it wants to be is growing smaller, and the vision is becoming more and more tangible every day.

Up Next: "Integrated Business Planning"

Strategic Planning is only the beginning. The next step is to link your Strategic Plan to daily operations through Integrated Business Planning. That will be the focus of our next "Hot Topic" essay. Stay tuned ...

Questions? Comments? We would love to hear from you.
Drop us a line at info@lazarusconsulting.com .