Category Archives: strategy

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In preparing for your annual strategic planning session your role as CEO is to take some time to contemplate where your organization is today, what challenges and opportunities it is facing, where you see the future of the organization, and roughly what the path forward looks like. A key portion of your time should be spent in what can best be described as day dreaming: scheming and dreaming about the near-term and long term future of your business.

 Now that you have your thoughts in order, let’s think about your team. A great deal of time is usually wasted in strategic planning experiences in drawn-out group discussions simply due to inadequate preparation. By spending time preparing in advance of the session there is considerably more time available for clarification, discussion and active debate in the actual planning.

 Mindstorm. The key to leveraging the collective brainpower of your senior team during the planning experience is to have them mindstorm in advance. Mindstorming is similar to brainstorming except that it’s done on your own. Mindstorming helps reduce the effects of groupthink and allow the participants to truly clarify their own thoughts prior to the experience.

 Gain insight. Here is a list of insightful questions for you and each member of your team to consider before stepping into a strategic planning experience: What changes in competition, the industry, key customers, the market, or the economy have the biggest potential for harm to our organization? What is the likelihood that each will occur?  Considering this past year in general and our last strategic plan: What worked well? What needs improvement? What’s missing? What resources or situations are holding me back from being most effective in my role? What are the critical issues that we’re ignoring that are getting in the way of our success? What issues do we complain the most about in our organization that never seem to get fixed? What am I hoping to accomplish in the strategic planning that no one knows about? What does success look like for me in this business or organization this year? What are our organization’s biggest strengths, weaknesses opportunities, and threats (SWOT)? What will our business or organization will look like in 5-10 years?

 Engage your direct reports. In order to get an even wider and more robust view of the current situation have your team poll their direct reports for their answers to the questions above. This not only prepares your executive team for strategic planning, it also engages their teams in providing critical raw data to the experience, helps illuminate potential blind spots and missed opportunities, and reduces the “black box” effect that teams sometimes feel when their leaders return from strategic sessions.

 Choose one big question. After contemplating these questions, ask your team to help identify the right question overall: the strategic question your organization most needs to be asking at this time. One of the key success factors for strategic planning is identifying the right questions to ask so that strategic planning can be focused and relevant.

 Leverage collective brainpower. You may have noticed that as part of the prep work we have not yet requested people to come forward with solutions to the challenges they see the organization facing today. When executives leap directly to solutions instead of bringing a blend of meaningful raw data and questions, the result can be a discussion focused on comparing myopic solutions, skewed by each executive’s perspective within the organization. The value of bringing together the team in a strategic session is to leverage the collective brainpower in the room on a common set of agreed upon inputs, towards creative well thought out solutions and strategies.

 A thoughtful, consistent approach to your team preparing for a strategic planning experience, combined with quarterly reviews of the plan throughout the year, helps raise the level of accountability, connection to reality, and engagement in the overall strategic direction that you choose to take.

PDF of original column in BIV Nov 2010 

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If the last time you thought about your strategic plan you couldn’t immediately recall what was in it, couldn’t remember where the binder was, and then needed to dust the binder off once you found it…my guess is your strategic plan was stale.

 One of the core challenges to effective strategic planning is building in a frequent review process to ensure that your plan stays relevant, you are tracking progress and accountabilities, and there is a clear line of sight between the ongoing operations of the business and your long-term destination as an organization.

 Now the word frequent means different things at different stages of your business growth. In start-up mode the shear number of shiny objects you have to choose from means a monthly review of the plan is appropriate. In our discussion we’re going to focus on established companies and organizations that are well past the start-up phase, and as a result, quarterly follow-ups to the strategic plan are appropriate. 

About every three to four months changes in people, the economy, competitors, your market, the industry, customers, or technology will put pressure against your strategy to the point that your strategic plan no longer feels relevant and timely. At this point, most organizations will shelve the plan due to lack of relevance to the current situation and, inevitably, all of the hard work, energy, and enthusiasm that went into creating the annual plan falls short with 75% of the year still left to unfold.

 Bringing your team together to go through your strategic plan for a few hours on a quarterly basis is the surest way I know to revitalize your plan and maintain its relevance all year. Here is a four-step process to facilitating your own quarterly strategic planning follow-up session:

 Step 1 – Evaluation. Start your session by evaluating your plan using the following questions: What’s working well? What needs improvement? What’s missing from the plan? How have we been celebrating our success along the way? The answers to these four questions will provide an overarching view of the validity of your plan, where it needs to be changed, and what things need to be added that you didn’t know about when you first built the plan.

Step 2 – Review. For each of the three to seven core objectives you are focused on this year, ask the person responsible to walk the group through their action steps and to update the team on progress, delays, missed targets, unrealistic timelines, and finally, new actions. The rest of the team will provide insight, support, and feedback to help ensure that everyone understands the current status and how they can support their peer moving forward.

 Step 3 – Revise. If an objective needs to be removed or reprioritized or a new objective needs to be formed based on new data, this is the time to engage the team in discussion, frame the objective, choose an owner, and build an action plan with accountabilities and timelines. If you’re not sure whether or not your objectives are properly framed, here’s a quick test: if there’s no way to measure your objective so we can throw a party to celebrate completing it, it’s not an objective. The most common framework used to test an objective is SMART: is the objective Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely?

 Step 4 – Next Review. With the team together, now is the best time to select a date for the next quarterly review. It might seem strange to make this a step, yet in my experience without getting a date in the calendar now, the quarterly sessions can end up being semi-annual instead.

 Whenever I’m asked what the number one thing a CEO can do with their team to improve the quality of their annual strategic planning process my answer is always the same: review it more frequently and at a mininum, once a quarter.

PDF of original column in BIV Oct 2010