Posts in Strategic Planning

Blogging Weekly with National Graduate School

Blogging Business Consulting Change Management Leadership Meandering Genius Organizational Commitment Performance Measurement Process Improvement Strategic Communication Strategic Planning May 5, 2014

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I am now a weekly guest blogger with National Graduate School. Please check out my blog there.

Building a culture of continuous improvement isn’t easy and can take a considerable amount of time. However, it’s very possible and results can be felt within weeks of embarking on the journey. Over John’s 25 plus years of experience, he’s developed a model rooted in strategy and designed to build this culture in any organization. Join John and National Graduate School as we weekly explore this model and ways to drive this type of culture. We look forward to your thoughts and inputs along this journey, so join us and watch for our future blogs about once a week with the tag line “CIC.”

http://ngs.edu/2014/05/01/building-culture-continuous-improvement/

Speaking in May for ASQ

Business Consulting Meandering Genius Speaking Strategic Planning April 27, 2014

I will be speaking at the upcoming May American Society for Quality Section meeting.

The location is the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center Donor Pavilion. The Donor Pavilion is up the road behind the Center itself. The date and time are Tuesday, May 13, 2013, at 6:00 to 8:00.

Stop Jumping To Do!

We are all project managers. When you think about the basics of a project, you can see that every day we manage projects. The question is, how well do you plan them?

John will share his simplified project planning methodology he developed when investigating a way of easily turning strategy into action. Not only will he share with you the simplified approach, but he will take you through an example of the approach and leave you with the basic planning tools you’ll need to apply this technique in every project you manage.

Here are the benefits of the approach:
• It’s easily repeatable.
• It ensures project success.
• It allows for simple timeline planning.
• It takes less than an hour the first time you use it.

Hope to see you there.

Facilitation of an Effective Strategic Plan Offsite

Strategic Planning Think Big April 26, 2014 3 Comments

Strategic planning, as a structured and systematic process, is successful when it is leader-led and overcomes the five reasons 70% of all strategies fail. Learn how to see your plan through to success. The strategic planning process is where leaders of an organization establish the vision of the organization’s future and then develop and implement the actions necessary to achieve that future. This article expands on the strategic planning concepts addressed in Think Big, Take Small Steps and is designed to help you achieve success in your strategic planning process.

Getting the Most Out of Your Company’s Strategic Planning Offsite.

Especially for companies or organizations that have never really dedicated time to strategic planning, the first facilitation can prove to be a make or break experience for executives.

Up to this point, you have focused on developing the Organizational Assessment in my section on How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment. Executive leadership have been involved from an interview perspective, but they haven’t been engaged to the level that we will expect during Leading Your Leaders to Develop an Effective Strategic Framework.

This is when it “gets real.”

As we discuss this part of developing the strategic framework, we will cover these two subjects:

Building a Strategic Plan from the Bottom Up.
Incorporating Scenario Planning into Your Strategic Planning Offsite.

This section is crucial for setting the stage and pre-planning a strategic planning offsite is almost as critical as holding it in the first place. How you organize and what you do at the offsite is as important as the results. This sets the experience that executives should expect from all strategic planning in the future.

If your offsite is boring, produces little results, feels conceived, and appears to be a waste of time, then your resulting strategy will undoubtedly fail to achieve desired results.

The organization of the event is critical. Executives time is always at a premium and pulling them out of the office for even a half day session is met with resistance. Getting buy-in from the senior leader on the importance of the offsite is critical. You need to get their dedicated time and if they aren’t willing to dedicate time to setting strategy, you need to question their understanding of a leader’s purpose in a company.

My approach to an organization’s first strategic planning offsite takes one dedicated day. If the organization has specific issues to deal with, like determining roles and responsibilities, working through a significant cultural issues, etc., then I might add a day or two where they will work specifically on these issues.

Of course, everything is planned in advance and the organizational assessment should already have highlighted additional offsite planning needs and activities.

This is how I normally organize a strategic planning offsite and why:

Set the Stage. Step one at the offsite is to ensure that everyone is present. If the senior leader can’t make it, then don’t have the offsite. This sends a message (regardless of the reason) that the strategy isn’t important. The senior leader kicks off the event and then introduces the facilitators. I like to have at least three people working a strategic planning offsite–two facilitators and a really good note taker. When the facilitator takes the stage, they should take charge. It is a job of the facilitator not only to ensure everything is completed in the allotted time, but to control the group. You will be challenged at some point and probably often by the executives in the room and you must be firm and tactful. Have rules of engagement and stick to an advertised agenda.
Level Set. Before you get into anything about the organization, level set the group on what strategic planning is. Get everyone to agree on terms and definitions that will be used. Everyone in the room has an opinion on what strategy and strategic planning is; what you want is one common definition that the organization will agree on. This eliminates ambiguity as to what the terms you use mean. Some organizations might call it a business plan, others might call it a campaign plan. Some use mission to reflect both the mission and vision, while some might call a mission a purpose. Regardless, get these things on the table and finalized up front to eliminate confusion later.
Organizational Assessment. The second level setting activity is when you explore the results of the organizational assessment with the entire leadership team. Prior to the offsite, I will have reviewed the results with the senior leader to ensure they are comfortable with all the findings being shown. If they are good, then they stand behind the results. Undoubtedly there will be significant discussion on some to several points. They will want to add information to the assessment, which you should capture on white boards or butcher block and keep posted throughout. This makes sure that everyone fully understands, at the same level, the issues that the organization faces and the strengths and opportunity the organization has at its disposal.
Mission Statement. I, using the knowledge from the assessment, lead the leaders through creation of a new or validation of an existing mission statement (or whatever they’re calling it). I will cover this in a few weeks in more detail.
Vision Statement. I, using the knowledge from the assessment, lead the leaders through creation of a new or validation of an existing vision statement (or whatever they’re calling it). I will also cover this in a few weeks in more detail.
Lunch. By this time, the leaders understand the current state and have a mission and vision to move forward. It is time to break for lunch and let them discuss and reflect.
Develop the Plan. Next week I will take you through the approach that I use to build a strategic plan from the bottom up. This activity is simple and ensures the resulting plan has an executable focus on fixing organizational problems and overcoming barriers to the organization’s vision. This series of exercises takes most of the afternoon.
Assignment of Ownership. At the end of the day, I get the leaders to assign ownership to the plan. The plan will have high-level goals (or whatever you decide to call them) and it is important that the leadership of the organization take ownership of these goals. So, before I close out for the day, each goal gets a person that will own it and will drive it toward implementation.
Closeout. At the end, I wrap up by covering what we discussed, our results, and discuss the next steps. Then, I ask the senior leader to close out the planning offsite with their thoughts and direction for the leadership team.

Thoughtful organization of your strategic planning offsite will ensure executive’s time is used appropriately and the result will be an effective strategy for the organization.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Do you have a personal coach?

Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius Strategic Planning April 11, 2014

Have you ever heard of top executives having executive coaches? Heard of people doing life coaching? What were your thoughts around people that have personal coaches…do you wish you had one?

Aren’t you worth it?

Why don’t you have a coach…I’m not talking about a mentor, I’m talking about a full-blown coach that you pay to provide you direction and advice, that helps you build personal and professional plans, and who holds you to standards and tells you like it is?

I can imagine that you think it’s too expensive to have your own coach…well, aren’t you worth it? We pay hundreds of dollars for gym memberships and sometimes personal trainers that a large percentage of people don’t use. We buy business books by the droves that generally sit on shelves and collect dust.

Why not consider hiring someone who is going to develop you so that you can do better at work, which could result in more pay and responsibility?

Are you already so good that you don’t need someone to coach you? Why are very effective executives turning to coaches? Aren’t they already very effective?

Why would you want a personal coach and what would you expect from them?

If you want to be more successful at work and at home…period…then hire a personal coach.

This is a paid consulting position…you are literally paying them to help you get better at everything you do. They aren’t going to do it for you, but they are going to point out your blind spots and guide you in fixing them.

Recently, I was sitting next to a senior executive that I’ve been working with during a meeting. He had a part where he got up and spoke. When he sat back down, he leaned over and asked, ” How did I do?” I looked him dead in the face and said, “We need to work on your ‘ums’.” His response back was, “Did I cover everything?”

The coach in me was screaming that it really didn’t matter…his message was lost because of his delivery approach. I told him, “Yes.”

A coach is not only someone who will tell you what you need to work on, but will show you why you need to work on it, will help you develop a plan to overcome your blind spot, and will hold you to your plan. Just when you think you are there, your coach shows you to the next step.

Recently, my boss was promoted in the position he’s been in–an in place promotion. Within a couple of weeks, we sat down over lunch and I asked him, “What’s next?” Clearly they didn’t promote him to continue to do what he’s been doing…now is the time to take things to the next level. The next morning we laid out a plan for the rest of the year and every other week we discuss his progress on that plan.

This is what you should expect from a coach.

In reality, coaches, are not as expensive as you might think. Sure you can hire extremely expensive coaches, but in reality, a personal coach should cost about as much an hour as a really good fitness coach. However, you’ll be paying every few days for that fitness coach because you’re going to need to work out at least three days a week and sometimes even more. A personal coach really only needs to meet with you occasionally, I mean you don’t want this person hanging around you all day…that would get creepy and probably a bit annoying. So, you really only need to meet with this person for a couple hours every other week at most.

What would you–what should you expect from a coach:

If you are paying someone to help you grow, then you should expect them to be honest and forthright. If you cannot accept constructive criticism, don’t bother hiring a coach. If your coach isn’t making you feel a little uncomfortable, then they probably are not helping you.

They should be able to align themselves to your needs…not your wants. If you hired me as a coach, and told me you wanted to become a better public speaker, I’d simply tell you to go to Toastmasters and you don’t need to hire me. What I would tell you, for the cost of nothing, is that you need to stop hiring people and telling them what you want. You need to tell me where you are going and ask how can I help you get there–better yet, you know you want to go somewhere, but you need help figuring out where you need to go. A good coach helps you understand what you really need and then helps you get there. Wants are immaterial.

Your coach should point out the barriers that you need to overcome to get where you need and then help you build you a plan to overcome those barriers. Those barriers might be you, your family, your boss, your coworkers, your job…it doesn’t matter. The coach should help you plan to overcome the barrier. When I say “help you plan,” I mean “help.” If your coach builds you a plan, throw the coach out of your office. If the coach isn’t showing you how to identify your obstacles and showing you how to plan to overcome them, then they just want to be your crutch not your coach.

Once you have a plan, your coach should be holding you to task. If they don’t know how to implement plans…you have the wrong coach. Having a plan is great, but not knowing how to implement the plan is like not having the plan at all. As a matter of fact, you’ll be even more frustrated because you have a plan. This is not to say that because you have a plan, suddenly everything starts falling into place. Plans take hard work to implement and the results of strategy are never really visible.

I have been working with an organization as a strategic business advisor–essentially a business coach to an entire organization–for a little over two years. Soon after I started, I laid out a long-term vision for that organization, which I’ve been slowly revealing to them. A good coach should know where you are going even if you don’t. About six to eight months ago, the person this team reports to, commented that all the things in the organization that were occurring were happenstance. I quickly corrected him…I laid out every strategic action the organization and it’s leadership had done in the last year and a half that led them to being in the right position strategically to seize the opportunity when it appeared.

The best coaches help you strategically position yourself to seize opportunities and then they can rewind the film over the actions that got you there. This is because you seldom see the fruits of strategy…strategy activities are normally too high level. You need someone who can tic and tie the actions to the results, which can almost seem random.

So, do you have a personal coach? If not, aren’t you worth it? Perhaps today you should take your first strategic step for the rest of your life…

Leading Your Leaders to Develop an Effective Strategic Framework

Strategic Planning Think Big April 5, 2014 3 Comments

Developing a Well-informed Strategic Framework is the Second Crucial Step in Strategic Planning.

All successful plans start with an Executable Focus. If a plan lacks focus on fixing organizational problems and overcoming barriers to the organization’s vision it is not built on the realities of the environment impacting the organization. When plans are built in a vacuum with by leaders or a planning team sitting in a conference room one afternoon, they often lack this focus. This was the focus of the last several blog articles designed to guide you through How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment. The last ten weeks were designed to outline the first step in ensuring strategic planning doesn’t fail–building an executable focus.

The second step of Think Big, Take Small Steps, is to develop a well-informed Strategic Framework with a purposeful and everlasting mission statement; an inspiring and far-reaching vision statement; and three to five broad goals that encompass what must change.

The leadership’s primary role is to decide the direction of the organization and when the plan is not developed by the input of organizational leadership, it does not have their buy-in. Just as importantly, a plan built without the input of the organization’s personnel will have an equally difficult time of gaining approval and traction.

Over the next six weeks we will focus on conducting an effective strategic planning offsite and ensuring we develop a strong mission and vision statement and effective goals. We will also discuss establishing core values and principles that don’t exist and how to adjust those that exist, but are not the ones the company desires to drive the right behavior.

The focus of these articles, like the ones before, are really for someone to facilitate the strategic planning activity, but any organization could pick these steps up and complete them end to end.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Putting Your Key Audience First

Strategic Planning Think Big March 29, 2014

Aligning Your Strategic Plan to Your Key Stakeholders, Customers, and Partners.

This blog will round out our discussion around How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment. A good strategic plan should lay out a systematic plan to close the “gap” between where you are now and where you are going. This “gap” is identified by an organizational assessment’s results. A good and throughout assessment will help you define a very strong strategic plan. Last, but not least, you need to ensure your plan is firmly aligned to you audience.

Five years ago, I was brought in, at the last minute, to help a government organization develop a strategic plan. They had already created a strategic plan the year before. They spent several sessions in a conference room wordsmithing a mission and vision statement and they created goals for each of the division chiefs in the organization–they wanted to make sure each chief was doing something strategic. They put this plan into a beautiful and colorful glossy book and then presented it to their senior service commander.

He took one look at it and simply said, “Here’s some money, go get ‘these people’ to help you out.” ‘These people’ ended up being me. When they sat down with us, at first they said, “All we need to do is to get to some key process indicators and we’ll be fine.” Luckily, we were able to convince them that they needed to start over.

Their glossy strategic plan was 30 pages long. It was well written and said all the right things (on the surface). However, one thing really stood out to me to this day. In those 30 pages, they mentioned the word “customer” 5 times. Nowhere in the entire plan did they say who those customers were. The customer was important–at least five times important–but they had no idea who that customer really was.

The problem is that I see this everywhere. Organizations, because of business and management education, most leaders know that the customer is very important, but very few have ever sat down and identified who these customers are.

What’s worse is that they really don’t know their entire audience–their stakeholders, customers, and partners.

This is one of the first things I show to the leadership in the strategic planning session. Throughout the organizational assessment effort you need to be keen to discover who these audience members are and which ones are the most important. Then they need to be presented to the leadership at the start of the planning session because this is who–especially customers–you are really building a strategy for.

Stakeholders, Customers, and Partners.

The first thing I do for the leadership is define what I think a strategic planning audience is. I define what stakeholders, customers, and partners are and how they inter-relate. You might feel differently about this or have different names and that’s fine–just make sure everyone knows your definitions up front. Once defined, very little can be done to argue the point. If you don’t define them, no one will agree.

Stakeholders are people and groups that have an interested in what your organization does.

Customers are people and groups that drive the work of the organization. All customers are stakeholders, but clearly all stakeholders are not customers.

Partners are people and groups that you work with to deliver the work. Some partners might be stakeholders and customers of your organization and some might not.

These definitions are pretty simple for people to understand and a venn diagram really helps paint the picture.

For presentation I make a list of all the stakeholders, customers, and partners on a slide and I rank order them based on what I’ve learned in the assessment. The leaders, in turn, review, adjust, and re-rank them as required.

This all seems like a simple concept, but its immensely important to the true success of any strategic plan. If you have not built your plan in full alignment of your key audience, you’re probably going to have significant trouble implementing it and being successful. What’s worse, if you don’t build your strategy with your customer in mind, then I’m going to question why do you even have a strategy–it’s nothing but a self-licking ice cream cone.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Incorporating Recurring Measures in Your Assessments

Strategic Planning Think Big March 22, 2014

What Gets Measured, Gets Done — Over and Over Again.

Several weeks ago, I shared with you a tool that I use for organizational assessments in my Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment blog. In that blog, I told you that I ask, through interviews, for interviewees to rate particular items from 1 to 5.

The reason I structure and write out these interview templates is so that, in a year, myself, or the company, can go back and ask the same questions, or at least a subset of those questions, the same way year-after-year. Specifically, I want them to ask these 1 to 5 questions again if nothing else. This is a way to compare the organization’s strategic progress over the years. This utilizes your DOTMLPF-FREE Assessment as your guiding light over the strategic journey of the organization.

Additionally, when developing the organizational assessment, look for key things that the company measures today and bring that into the assessment. Do they have a balanced scorecard that they use? What type of human resource measures do they have, like employee engagement (I recommend Gallup), retirement eligibility and employee tenure, and attrition rates? Operational volume of services and sales and overall expense, when combined, provide a simple view of average cost per piece for an organization. Look for the big things you can measure every year or that they already measure.

Tying a company’s strategy to what they measure, or things they should be measuring, helps ensure the success for the strategic plan in the future. All too often, strategies are created by a single executive or small group of executives who come up with a mission, vision, and goals, in a conference room. The reality of these are as good as the wordsmithing that occurs to create them. The purpose of Think Big, Take Small Steps and specifically this whole section on How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment, is to provide the Executable Focus that helps strategies succeed.

Incorporating recurring measures in the organizational assessment at the start provides the organization with a repetitive tool for addressing and measuring strategic progress. The tendency will be to measure everything and that simply isn’t required. The company will have lots of measurements that could absorb your time and attention. Focus only on the few that are important.

For instance, I worked with the Air Force Sergeants Association over the years as a consultant and volunteer. As a membership organization, their primary focus is providing an Air Force Enlisted Voice on Capitol Hill. Their mission is only effective if they have a strong membership base. As a general rule, lobbying associations with less than 100K members tend to be discounted. Thus, Membership Strength was the most important strategic metric for the association, especially when they hover around 120K. However, for a long time, they only focused on Membership Recruiting and didn’t really look at the bottom line. They would be recruiting people by the droves, but on the back end they were pouring out the door faster as their membership expired. Taking account of Membership Strength, along with Membership Recruiting, Membership Retention, and Membership Loss provides the full strategic picture on the most important factor that the association cares about–Legislative Strength. Now you they strategically examine what drives recruiting and retention and causes loss for the organization and focus on these activities. A DOTMLPF-FREE assessment further highlights gaps that might be affecting or preventing the association from being successful.

Part of assessing an organization is to develop recurring measures that give the organization a repetitive tool for addressing and measuring strategic progress. If you follow my suggested approach with DOTMLPF-FREE, you will automatically create a starting strategic performance measure. Then focusing on those important few metrics that tell you everything about the organization and are fairly easy to obtain round out the assessment. Remember, this is strategic…not operational or tactical planning…and you want to focus on strategic measures that lead you to operational and tactical actions. This provides an executable focus to your plan.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Links:

Air Force Sergeants Association: http://afsahq.org/
http://balancedscorecard.org/
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-measure-your-strategic-plans-success.html
http://www.gallup.com/

Applying Innovative Thinking in Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning Think Big March 15, 2014 2 Comments

“There is No Box” When it Comes to Strategic Planning.

Have you ever read the book, “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There?” Basically, the premise of that book is that your current actions and thinking that have moved you to where you are today, will not be the same actions and thoughts you will need to get you to where you want to go in the future. Thus, in strategic planning, doing things and thinking the same way won’t help you achieve your vision.

Everything up to this point in the How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment section of my Think Big, Take Small Steps blog has been designed to feed new thoughts for leaders to consider when designing a new strategy. Let’s review the topics over the last several weeks and see how they are feeding new and innovative thought processes when it comes to strategic planning:

Understanding the Different Assessment Tools. The concept of this blog was to open your thought-aperture to new tool ideas to assess your organization prior to actually sitting down and conducting any strategic planning.
Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment. This blog was dedicated to examining a whole new way of conducting a full-blown organizational assessment that would be extremely complete.
The Importance of a Stakeholder Assessment. This assessment approach, helps you understand who your crucial stakeholders are that are affected by your organization and will be affected by your strategic plan.
Are You Ready for Change? Understanding the change readiness of your stakeholders helps prepare yourself for a successful strategic plan implementation and informs the strategic plan development.
The Robust SWOT Assessment. I provided a much deeper understanding of this relatively confusing tool and explained how it’s more an assessment than a analysis as its commonly called.
Application of Scenario Planning in Strategic Planning. Last week, I rounded out the tools with a deeper look at scenario planning and how it can be used to provide a new way to look at your organization and how to get leaders to examine some of the warts that they normally overlook.

All of these different blogs were designed to spur innovative thought around the strategic planning process–specifically when assessing an organization. In my first blog, I said, “If a plan lacks focus on fixing organizational problems and overcoming barriers to the organization’s vision it is not built on the realities of the environment impacting the organization.” A complete and proper organizational assessment is the first of five ways to ensure your strategic plan will be successful.

However, the last seven blogs have really been focused on the as-is organization–what’s currently going on. Aside from the Opportunities and Threats parts of the SWOT, we’ve done little to think about the future environment. Now is the time, before you bring leaders into a room to facilitate strategic discussion, you need to think outside the box about what the future could look like.

In this case, I’m recommending you throw away the box!

In the next phase of strategic planning, you’re going to bring leaders into an offsite (or onsite if that works for you) and you want to be as prepared as possible for that event. Thus, you want to do some future vision thinking of your own prior to that event. Leaders have limited time and many of them don’t designate a lot of their time to strategic thought anyway (it’s a fact of life). So, make sure you are fully armed when they walk into that room.

This is how you provide some innovative thought to the organizational assessment.

Sit down with your newly created SWOT Assessment–specifically the TIPSs that I explained in my previous blog. If you have a small team helping you, then you can do this as a brainstorming session. Write one of the TIPS on the top of a piece of paper–butcher block if you are brainstorming as a group.
Spend 30 minutes simply writing down any ideas that come to mind around how you would leverage and/or solve to that TIPS.
After 30 minutes, reread the ideas and look for a possible thread of reasoning that could be formulated into an objective for an organization. Write that down at the bottom of the page.
Move onto the next TIPS and continue until you have gone through every TIPS in a similar manner.
Then transcribe the single threads down on a separate sheet and look for ways these support each other or can be combined. Write down your final thoughts.

This idea generation is very helpful for you to plan out your strategic planning session. If you find some big problem or challenge that the organization needs to come to grips with that comes out of this exercise, then you can appropriately plan your offsite to address it.

For example, I have worked with a few organizations that have issues with properly defined roles and responsibilities. In order to better understand the issue the organization was faced with, I planned, in a specific session, the listing out of roles and responsibilities, doing a RACI diagram, or other similar type sessions.

You might also discover through your envisioning that the leadership, or the organization as a whole, needs more education on something critical to the success of your strategic plan. This could lead you to hold some type of just-in-time training event or exercise or to bring in a specific guest speaker to enlighten the leadership.

What if you discovered that the leadership team itself is dysfunctional? This would feed the need to hold some type of team building event in correlation with the strategic planning session. This could even drive the location of the offsite. You might use some type of personality assessment tool (e.g., Meyers Briggs) with the leadership team to get them to think better about how to work together.

Perhaps you have stumbled across a whole new opportunity for the organization that the leadership hasn’t even realized. You might want to plan a tour prior to the strategic planning offsite to expose the leaders to this opportunity to get them thinking about it.

The purpose of providing this line of innovative thought prior to the strategic planning event is to ensure you get the most value out of the event itself. I’ve worked with a leadership team that didn’t even understand what strategic planning was. The first thing we did was an awareness session on strategic planning. I’ve also worked with an organization whose key leader really liked the book, “Good to Great.” So, we had all the leaders on the team read the book and we held sessions where different leaders facilitated discussion sessions around concepts from the book.

Don’t think about strategic planning as simply bringing leaders into a conference room and coming up with a mission and vision statement. Strategic Planning is a thoughtful activity that leaders embark on to understand their as-is, envision the to-be, and develop new ideas to get there. Doing the same thing that they’re doing today won’t get them there. Your job in the organizational assessment phase is to ensure the right thoughts are occurring during the time you have all the leaders gathered together to think and act strategically.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Links:

Application of Scenario Planning in Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning Think Big March 8, 2014 3 Comments

How Using Various Scenarios in Building Your Strategic Plan Helps.

“What-ifing” your current strategy or your strategic thoughts are a great ways to look for holes in your current strategy or the strategy you’re building–or both. I often use scenario planning–also referred to as “war gaming”–to get leaders to examine before they decide. It’s kind of like taking the strategy out for a test drive without putting a lot of miles on it before you buy it.

Why…

Strategic planning, more than anything else, is positioning yourself strategically to take advantage of a predicted or possible turn of events. It’s more about preparing a company for the future versus putting something in place. Today, your organization has constraints that prevent it from achieving its vision and these need to be overcome, but many of these constraints might not exist today. Scenario planning allows you to recognize threats (even the invisible ones) as opportunities and be strategically prepared to adapt to them if they occur, while still moving steadily toward your vision.

When an organization has a solid strategic direction and is moving in that manner, things may appear to occur happenstance. However, in reality, the organization is preparing for opportunity to knock and they’re opening the door quickly to it. Without an effective strategy, the door will open and you’ll be unprepared. The door will open one way or another.

Some organizations, especially extremely large ones might have elaborate war games designed that really help executives envision the future. I recommend these being designed by firms that specialize in this type of activity. For smaller organizations, or ones that are really new to strategic planning, this blog can really help design effective scenarios that help build solid strategic plans.

Scenario Planning–the “planning part”–is done at the tail end of the Organizational Assessment. The application of this tool is actually in the strategic planning session that I will talk about in the coming weeks. There are two ways that I apply scenario planning and it’s based on the organization (note: I don’t always use scenario planning). The two situations are as follows:

The organization doesn’t have a true strategic plan at this point.
The organization you’re working with is pretty new to the concept of planning. They might have a mission and vision that they’ve come up with, but there really was little thought behind it and that’s about as far as they’ve come. In this case, I normally use scenario planning to help them think strategically about the opportunities and threats they face as an organization. Obviously I pull this information from their Robust SWOT Assessment that I talked about last week. This is more along the lines of a “what if” analysis (i.e., If this were to happen, what would you have to do about it). This tests their current environment and helps them think through organizational gaps and what would need to be done about them.

The organization already has a defined strategic plan.
You may be working with an organization that has taken some time, or a lot of time, to examine and develop their strategy. If I’m coming back a year or so later to help examine the organization’s strategic plan that I helped build and then update it, I use scenario planning to validate their current mission, vision, and goals, based on the Robust SWOT Assessment. In this realm, it’s focused on answering, “Does what we have today hold true in these possible future states,” versus, “What do we do about it?” The goal is to ensure that the key aspects of mission, vision, and goals for the organization are still valid and lasting, even if something strange, yet possible happens.

So, let’s talk about what scenarios look like and what they don’t look like. First and foremost, we’re not talking about some fantastic and non-plausible what-if scenario like extraterrestrials beaming into the lobby to say hello. Scenarios have to based in a possible and plausible reality, but isn’t happening today. They can be both positive or negative and in many ways, even positive scenarios can be a risk to a company that isn’t strategically prepared.

When doing scenario planning, try to come up with five ideas and then get the leader of the organization to whittle them down to three. Three fit nicely on one PowerPoint slide and three can effectively cover what you need leaders to think about. The purpose of the scenario planning activity is to drive discussion around whether the organization is prepared and/or if the current strategy needs to evolve. The actual scenarios should come from the organizational assessment and specifically the SWOT. Following are some ideas and examples of potential scenarios:

Natural Disaster. I worked with a housing privatization program that was providing long-term leases to developers to build and provide back housing to military. Part of their program involved a “lock box” that set aside monies for upgrades and improvements. Several of these privatized communities existed along coastal areas that could be susceptible to a natural disasters, like a hurricane. The threat of this occurrence had been mentioned more than once in interviews, so I had the leadership discuss how truly prepared they were for another Katrina-like hurricane, which significantly damaged several communities at once. It allowed them to examine their risk mitigation structure, their lock box strategy, and evolve their approach as a result of their strategic plan.
Government Interaction. Most (if not all) organizations are impacted by government regulations and more and more these cause challenges for companies. Specifically, financial and environmental regulations can challenge the status quo of any company. Those that are normally impacted, are adequately dealing with the “now.” In scenario planning, you could consider throwing in a government regulation curve ball that really changes the operational landscape and see if they are prepared for these types of changes.
Growth or Decline. Often we think commiserate over the potential quick loss of customers and market share, but quick growth can be just as difficult for an unprepared organization, even though it might seem like a good thing. Unpredicted growth and decline scenarios make the leadership think about how they will deal with this possibility and if they have the right strategies in place. Of course, I make these scenarios as realistic as possible, based on what I have learned in the assessment.
Budgetary Constraints. Every organization deals with budget issues, especially if you’re working as a subset of a bigger organization. A perfect storm example would be the result of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on government budgets. Organizations that didn’t strategically plan for this, say four years ago, now are being caught unprepared as things like sequestration and government shut downs occur. Those that looked at their crystal balls four years ago could have been planning to absorb the potential funding impacts through strategic positioning and planning.
Mergers and Acquisitions. I don’t care how good or bad your company is doing, this can almost always be a threat. If you’re part of a bigger organization and there is redundancy, then the threat can be very real. In today’s world, if I were working with say a governmental support service organization, I would definitely be examining the possibility of all military and government support services merging into one organization. This happened with the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) back in 1991. With today’s push to downsize and cut, these types of mergers are very likely. Basically, if your operations has any redundancy or is aligned with another part of an organizational process, consider yourself at risk and scenarios can really help leadership think through the threat and possibly turn it into an opportunity.
Employee Turnover. An increase in employee turnover because of a lack of engagement or due to a highly tenured staff, will always impact an organization. If you are at threat because of these factors, things like single points of failure become a significant threat. If you have poorly documented knowledge, then training will be an issue. Aggressive hiring with a quick turn over can be costly and really slow operations. Obversely, an organization that experiences high turnover and suddenly sees a drop, can experience different issues.
Sourcing Decisions. What you do today might be ripe for outsourcing, or you may have all your outsourcing eggs in one basket. These types of threats are much more prevalent today than ever. Also, you may have outsourced too much and your culture and focus on the customer is starting to slip. All of these things can lead to some pretty interesting leadership discussions.

As you can see, there are many things that you could discuss as long as you have done your organizational assessment homework. Just coming up with fantastic scenarios without understanding the current situation won’t really be helpful to leaders. These were simply examples of ones that I’ve used before–there are many other possibilities.

One of the important and difficult things about scenario planning is that it will probably make leadership uncomfortable. You’re probably highlighting a risk that they would rather ignore. Good strategic plans put all the issues on the table and require intestinal fortitude of leaders to openly examine and prepare. This tool helps them make the harder decisions.

The bottom line to scenario planning is that it is a tool for the organization to prove or disprove their current state and then decide what to do about it. I present it for discussion near the front part of the strategic planning session, but I build it here in the organizational assessment phase.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

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Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience (WAVE) concept truck

There is no “box” at Walmart

Meandering Genius Strategic Planning March 5, 2014

Have you seen the new Walmart Advanced Vehicle Experience (WAVE) concept truck that is powered by a prototype turbine-powered hybrid engine with a trailer made almost exclusively with carbon fiber, which saves 4,000 pounds?

This is Strategy at its finest and has the world’s number one retailer leveraging their strength–their logistics network–and turning it up a notch.

Clearly Walmart was thinking way out of the box in designing this new semi truck–in fact it appears that they threw the box out in the trash. Walmart isn’t in the truck building business?

True strategists look outside their realm and outside of what they do today as well as looking at what they are good at. Recently I talked about the SWOT Assessment and had a lot of “know it all” input from fellow strategists saying that a SWOT is this and a SWOT is that. Ladies and gentlemen, see the result of a great application of strategy based on a SWOT. This is why I highlighted some simple tips for you to start using a SWOT effectively.

Heavy-duty trucks spend more time on the road than passenger vehicles, so improving their efficiency can have a major effect on emissions–and their owners’ bottom lines. That’s why Walmart is getting into the truck-design business with the WAVE. With its aerodynamic cab, the WAVE certainly doesn’t look like any other large truck currently on U.S. roads and doesn’t operate like one either.

Walmart’s design was achieved in part by placing the driver in the center of the cab. The steering wheel is flanked by LCD screens–in place of conventional gauges–and there is a sleeping compartment directly behind the driver’s pod. The WAVE features a range-extended electric powertrain, consisting of a Capstone micro-turbine and an electric motor. To reduce weight, the entire truck is made of carbon fiber–including the trailer. Walmart says this is the first example of a carbon-fiber trailer ever produced, and that its 53-foot side panels are the first single pieces of carbon fiber that large that have ever manufactured. Like the tractor, the trailer was also designed for optimum aerodynamic efficiency. It features a convex nose, which not only reduces aerodynamic drag but has the added of benefit of increasing cargo space in the trailer.

Take that Peterbuilt and Freightliner! Ha! And I thought the MAN Super Streamlined Semi-Truck was cool. The MAN was designed by truck manufactures, not a super store retailer!

I’ll say it again; use your strengths to overcome your weaknesses. Then turn threats into opportunities. Walmart is known for their distribution system–it is what makes them Walmart and it is their biggest strength. They focused on the threats to that strength and turned it into opportunity. This is a perfect demonstration of a SWOT in action.