Put the Planning Back Into Strategic Planning

Great! We have a strategy, now what? Have you ever come back from a strategic meeting or planning off-site very excited about the possibilities of your new strategic direction, but seriously concerned about the lack of specifics on how this would be achieved? You may be experiencing a case of too much strategic, and not enough planning.

The problem may lie in the fact that too much time was spent discussing the strategic issues and not enough time being allocated for the leadership team to do the focused planning required to outline how this strategy will be executed. Strategic success is achieved by design and it is only by reaching a common understanding on how the strategy will be executed that real leadership buy-in is achieved - it is as much about the “how” than it is about the “what.”

When a leadership team converges on a strategy, the members do so by making key assumptions on how this strategy will be achieved. In other words, each member of the team makes several fundamental assumptions on how their own organization’s efforts will be realigned to meet the overarching strategic goal. They also make critical inferences on what they expect their colleagues to do to achieve that same goal. If these key assumptions and inferences are not discussed immediately following the definition of the strategy, the team members will leave with a major disconnect on how they will have to pull together to make the strategy a reality.

I have used a model I call Achieving Business Success (ABS) very successfully to define very comprehensive strategic plans. The ABS strategic model can be used to ensure your impactful strategic planning session includes five main activities: (1) defining the strategic direction, (2) establishing the strategic business objectives (SBOs) necessary to deliver the strategy, (3) planning the key activities that must be completed to achieve the SBOs, (4) establishing the governance to ensure the timely completion of key activities, and (5) agreeing to the key measures of success that will be used to gauge progress. Steps (2), (3), (4), and (5) put the planning back in strategic planning. This information will ensure your strategic planning process is comprehensive enough for all participants to reach the same level of understanding on how they will succeed as a team.

Leadership teams cannot leave these key steps to be defined later in an ad-hoc manner or on an as required basis. By not including all the steps of the ABS strategic model in the strategic planning session, the team will lack a clear and common definition of the road to success, risks not being in agreement with the priorities, and will be misaligned from day one; all of which will result in much confusion with their subordinates who will be charged with executing the activities required to achieve the SBOs.

Find the ABS strategic model at http://www.g3point0consulting.com/#!strategic-success-by-design/c1vw1

Focused planning can typically be accomplished by adding one full day to the planning sessions. The first third of the day is structured for each major function or line organization to discuss the major assumptions behind the strategy and identifying the strategic business objectives (SBOs) that will have to be achieved in order for the team to deliver on the strategic promise. The healthy debating associated with selecting the half-dozen SBOs and the discussions required to arrive at a consensus will make the strategy more tangible and, in most cases, be of great value to further refining it. Stopping at SBOs is not enough. The second third of the day is dedicated to providing a first draft of the key activities that they will focus on to ensure the SBOs are achieved. This will provide a forum for leaders to be specific on the needs of their organization and their expectations of other groups for the SBOs and, consequently, the strategy to be successful. Finally, the last third of the day is focused on agreeing to the measure of success and follow up activities that will be necessary to guarantee everyone follows through. Add a follow up, one-day meeting, a week to ten days following the conclusion of the focused planning session, to give time to each participant to review the SBOs and validate certain assumptions with their own organization’s leaders and report back to the team to confirm them or suggest minor modifications.