Every year, we went thru the motions, knowing from past experience that it would have minimal impact.

A grand plan gets created, a lot of time is invested and money spent, the off-site bar tab is usually large, but little if anything actually happens.

How do you avoid this trap?  What goes wrong and what are the solutions?  Is there a recipe for success when it comes to strategic planning and stimulating innovative thinking?

At Synappsys we have created a comprehensive review of the factors that are commonly at play based on many collective years of hits and misses in the area of setting strategy.  Our full article “Why strategic planning fails and what to do about it” provides a detailed list of common failures, collected into groups, supported by examples and, importantly, it provides recommendations for success.

This BLOG posting presents a high level overview.  Please use the contact us link if you are interested in the full article or wish to discuss this subject as it relates to your experiences and issues.

The Right People

What goes wrong …

• Having the wrong people in leadership positions – wedded to the status quo or the past.
• Use of large strategic planning committees – no clear authority and plenty of places to hide individual accountability.
• Too Much Reliance on Consultants – truly, even consultants understand this. It is your strategy and vision.
• Too Much Bottom Up – don’t deliver tablets of commandments to the masses.
• Too Much Top Down – don’t action your staff without clear guidance and vision.
• Not having the right people involved – they must have bandwidth, drive and incentives.
• Natural Human Biases.  This is so important and complex that we will separately blog about “unenlightened self-interest”

What you can do about it …

You need the right people who will advocate for and champion the strategic plan and keep the company on track. Either prune your management team or focus the “right” people on the core strategic planning process, engaging others to support and learn.

The Executive need to seed the process, while encouraging and soliciting input from the staff.  Go beyond your executive team. Involve and get input from strong performers, high-potentials and leaders elsewhere in the company. Give them a chance not only to react to tentative planning assumptions but also to input fresh planning ideas. It is a balancing act between top down and bottom up planning.

Whatever you do, don’t strike a large strategic planning committee.  If you want innovation and risk taking, you need to form small like-minded groups with expressly given public mandates to reach out, with leadership that encourages a certain approach and mindset.

Consider hiring an external consultant who is qualified to lead and “facilitate” the planning process but who maintains a “neutral” third-party role toward the content, ensuring that you define the substance of your plan and direction of your company. Consultants should bring tools, education and mentoring, and strong planning and facilitation skills.  But remember – It is your strategy.

Look out for common human emotional responses and biases.  Know that these are present.  Understanding that a great deal of strategic planning and change management is about people, not technology or business analyses, have an honest conversation about human behaviour with your team at the outset.  Encourage a non-confrontational environment where your team is free to call out bias when they see it.  Know yourself.

Finally, those charged with executing the plan must be involved from the onset. Those involved in creating the plan will be committed to seeing it through execution.  Consider tying a substantial part of the executive bonus structure to metrics associated with your strategic objectives.

A Tailored Process

What goes wrong …

• Do-It Yourself Strategic Planning – good luck with that.  See our blog article “Knowing”
• The Latest Fashion – some of the old tricks are the best tricks. Don’t be a strategy fashionista.
• Overly Complex Processes – Keep it simple
• Rushing to a Conclusion – the truth is out there – See our blog article “Knowing”

What you can do about it …

Don’t go it alone – you are too close to the action and the process is more complex than you might think.

Don’t fall for the latest fashion.  Build a program around a mix of tools.  Plan to cycle thru the various tools multiple times, iterating towards a solution.  Get help from someone who understands this landscape.  Furthermore, you need a tailored approach.  Resist the temptation to make a meal out of strategic planning.  If you create a culture of continuous planning and self/market assessment, you can vary the methodologies and tools over time, keeping the process fresh.

You certainly need agility, but it must be tempered with careful honest analysis and thoughtful planning.  Make strategic planning, in whatever form is appropriate, an ongoing activity.  Motivate staff to innovate and think.  Make this an executive level priority.  Reward people who push back against corporate “truth”.

An Achievable Concrete Plan

What goes wrong …

• Lack of Concreteness and Actionability – A classic failing that stops execution dead.
• Unachievable or Massive Long Term Actions – you need some short term wins.
• Excessive focus. Don’t get lost in the details and sidetracked by the Vision statement.  Focus on the end goal and cycle thru the process multiple times if necessary.
• Lack of flexibility. While you plan, the World keeps on spinning.  Your plan will likely be partially invalid as soon as you “complete” it – it is never finished nor engraved in stone.

What you can do about it …

Make sure that your plan contains concrete, specific, measurable initiatives or projects.  Assign these to specific individuals with specific completion dates. Then, manage to these dates and hold people accountable for “delivering.”

Actions must be achievable, clear and measurable.  Some actions must be short term.  These will create early wins and will serve to support the overall process or may provide an early warning that some aspects of the plan are not workable. Early wins keep people engaged.  Measurable actions give the plan currency and allow you to objectively assess progress and provide timely course corrections.

Don’t allow your team to get lost in the details.  The plan should be developed in an iterative process – this is not a one shot deal.  It is fine to force closure on some aspect of the plan, with the commitment to revisit incomplete item(s) later.  The fact that you cannot get closure on an item suggests a need to gather more data or take time to reflect.

You must cultivate an ongoing commitment to strategy, to testing results, to market assessments and to fine tuning.  The World is not static, so your plan must be flexible.  That said, you need the perseverance to follow thru, so long as your near term action results confirm the viability of your overall vision.

A Bias for Data

What goes wrong …

• Blurring fact and opinion.  Use fact-based versus opinion-based analysis as much as possible. Always ask the question, what is the evidence supporting this?
• Ignoring marketplace reality, facts, and assumptions. Jump on this behaviour.  Demand data and facts.  Dig for objective information.

What you can do about it …

Have a look at our blog post “Known and Unknown”.

Use fact-based versus opinion-based analysis as much as possible. Beware of self-serving regurgitations of your value propositions or self-perceptions of your place in a market.  Buy data if necessary and use trusted independent third parties with deep industry knowledge to participate in key planning sessions.  Look to your suppliers, industry associations, perception audits, and web searches for data.  Assign some team members the specific task of data mining.

Don’t bury your head in the sand when it comes to marketplace realities, and don’t discount potential problems because they have not had an immediate impact on your business yet.

Dig for objective information.  Engage in Black Hat sessions using trusted informed outsiders to provide a balanced perspective.  Use robust employee and third party perception audits to get the true goods on how you are viewed.  Reject platitudes and unsubstantiated “marketing speak” when doing environmental assessments.

Enough Resources

What goes wrong …

• Partial commitment. If you are not committed, the team with fail and your next attempt at strategic planning will be met with scepticism.
• Lack of energy/resources. Set a budget (time and money) and double it.  Keep the second half in reserve, but know that you are almost certainly going to have to use it.
• Writing the plan and putting it on the shelf. The cardinal sin of strategic planning.
• No accountability or follow through. Make it count and make passive and active resistance painful.

What you can do about it …

Spend some time planning your strategic process and selecting methodologies. Use a consultant and knowledgeable third parties to test your overall sense of your place on the market and your underlying vision.  Is the time right?  Do you have the fire in the belly?  Can you follow thru?  If you are not committed, the team with fail and your next attempt at strategic planning will be met with scepticism.

Set a budget and double it.  Keep the second half in reserve, but know that you are almost certainly going to have to use it.  Find the right people and make certain that they have the time and resources necessary to succeed.  If your core team is “double hatted”, make sure that it is clear what their priorities really are and make this public knowledge.

Whatever you do, don’t go thru this process simply to shelve a plan.  Your staff will resent the lost effort and your next attempt will be that much more difficult.

Be tough once the plan is developed and resources are committed and ensure there are consequences for not delivering on the strategy. Make execution of the plan a key element of bonus calculations.  Take as hard a line on late results in the area of corporate strategy and change as you would take for poor financial results in the current quarter.

A Passion for Change

What goes wrong …

• Unwillingness or inability to change. Change management and planning are critical. Many great plans are broken on the rocks of active and passive resistance to change.

What you can do about it …

Communicate the strategic plan to all employees. This communication should vary depending on the personnel that you are dealing with. A summary of the overall strategic vision for the company should be communicated to all employees. This must be more than a new vision statement and mission statement pinned to a wall.

In addition, the implications of the strategic plan for each group should be discussed in some detail. The specific objectives that have come out of the planning process should be conveyed to the employees, with particular emphasis on the objectives that are most relevant to their work.  The overriding need for change must be communicated.  Your staff at all levels must embrace the need to evolve.

 

For More Detail and Insights …

Contact us for the complete and comprehensive article “Why Strategic Planning Fails, And What to Do About It” and watch this blog for additional postings – we plan to produce one that is focused on human biases and what we call “unenlightened self interest”.