The concept of strategic planning is a strange one.
Most business owners know they should do it. Or they do it and know that it should be doing more for them, or they did it and they wonder what the point of it was. There are very few businesspeople who truly point to their strategic plans as a key to their success.
The truth is that strategic plans don’t work – at least not the way business leaders expect them to work.
The traditional model for strategic planning is to lock the top executives in a boardroom surrounded by bagels, coffee and dry-erase markers with the purpose of laying out clear goals and objectives – or strategies and tactics – that support the business moving forward. When this process is done well, the result is an energized team, a list of powerful ideas and specific action items complete with accountability.
The problem is that the traditional process ends when the bagels are gone. Once the plan is written, everyone returns to day-to-day work. Individuals and teams work on the action items, but as they learn more, they develop more questions. They gain insight, while the plan remains static. At the same time, the business world changes as competition acts, customers come and go, and markets adjust. The static plan gets lost in a dynamic world. Clarity is replaced with cloudiness.
How do businesses react? Some businesses schedule times to renew their plans. Plan renewal comes in several forms, from the basic five-year plan cycle to an annual review combined with quarterly updates. This process can become cumbersome and even creates its own noise and confusion. After a while, more time in the strategic planning sessions is spent discussing where the information came from in past sessions than focusing on the future opportunities for the organization. Many businesses, especially smaller businesses with very limited resources, scrap the process altogether.
Vision vs. missionThe solution to this quandary is a shift in thinking. It’s not about the strategic plan as much as it is about the strategy.
It all starts with a vision and mission. There are so many different definitions of these concepts that it is easy to get lost, so I’ve created a simple definition: A mission is the game you are playing, and the vision is what winning the game looks like.
People often confuse their visions and missions with marketing material. A great vision and mission are internal tools because they yield nothing less than insight into every decision made at all levels of the company.
Once you have these tools as a powerful internal compass, you need to put it in front of everyone inside the company. This gives you a common purpose and helps everyone align their decision making. This means more than just hanging a banner in the conference room or printing T-shirts. It means effectively communicating the vision and mission through training and in open discussions about their implications. I’ve seen successful companies review their visions and missions and discuss them at every department meeting.
Build the houseOnce the organization is focused on a common purpose, it is time to establish goals and objectives. Goals are the next moves you plan to make within the game, or mission. Objectives are the specific outcomes of those moves.
Often, your goals will come together like you are building a house. I recently had the opportunity to hear David O’Reilly speak about the history of O’Reilly Automotive. Many years ago, as the company starting seeing significant growth, the systems it utilized to track various products became impractical, so the company invested a significant amount of time and money in upgrading to a computerized system from its original manual card system. Company leaders realized they needed the goal of improving their inventory system to support their mission, and this investment allowed them to grow to thousands of stores.
It’s time for the punch line. We’ve laid out the framework for creating a strategy, but how does a company effectively maintain this strategy? The answer is a single word: continuously.
Rather than focusing on creating a plan, a company should focus on how its people will constantly evaluate, modify, and act on its vision and mission. Every person, department, division and business unit should be crystal-clear on their roles in the organization’s success and what their next moves will be. This is a strategic system. This requires a way to manage the goals and objectives. It requires a way to coordinate the various ongoing special projects within the company. It requires a lot of meaningful conversations from engaged people all contributing their own unique strengths toward a common purpose.
Good companies know they are successful. Great companies know why they are successful and how they will become more successful. Pitch the plan and embrace the system.
Don Harkey is a professional speaker, consultant, and partner in the People Centric Consulting Group in Springfield, providing consulting, coaching, and leadership development tools to help support business leaders. He may be reached at donharkey@peopleccg.com.[[In-content Ad]]
