Posts tagged strategic planning

Leading Your Leaders to Develop an Effective Strategic Framework

Strategic Planning Think Big April 5, 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.

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/

Leaders Think Strategically All the Time

Start With A Strategic Mindset

Leadership March 16, 2014

Leadership is a dying art in the world today. The great leaders of the past are found few-and-far between these days. There are some that have been fairly successful leaders that have rose to an iconic status, but have they been truly great leaders or just really successful at running something?

Often there is contention between the skills that a leader needs and what a manager needs. I believe, if you’re not a good leader, you won’t be a good manager, and if you’re not a good manager, you won’t be a good leader. It is my contention that those who apply both of these talents expertly demonstrate what I call, “Leaderment^SM.” This is the expert combination of Leadership and Management together.

Leaders Think Strategically All the Time.

Great leaders don’t hold strategic planning sessions once a year; great leaders think strategically all the time. They still hold strategic planning sessions annually and more than not, once a quarter. Because great leaders know that their leadership team doesn’t always think strategically and they have to set aside time for them to think as the leader does. But the leader–a true leader–is always mentally in the strategy realm.

This doesn’t mean that they are out-of-touch with reality. If you understand strategy, then you then know it’s more than just visions and big ideas…it’s tactics and actions that make these things happen.

I don’t care who you talk to, everyone has a different definition of strategy. It becomes even more difficult when you through in terms like strategic plan, strategic planning, strategic mindset, strategic, thinking, etc.

I’m sure I’ll get a lot of comments from “strategy experts” on this, but for this blog, thinking strategically, means you think always about your Mission Vision, Values, Goals, Objectives, and Action Plans–your thinking takes the form of a strategic plan. To Develop the Leader Within, you must learn how to think like a leader–this is a skill all managers and leaders should develop.

“Stuff” happens at the Tactical-level with whatever you do. This is where the day-to-day activities take place. We “live” here mentally all the time. That’s because it’s what’s front of our nose’s day-in and day-out. It is very hard for managers and leaders to step out of this tactical-level because they feel that if they take the time to focus elsewhere, they will lose focus on the operation and things will fail. This is human nature.

Normally, managers and leaders are promoted to the their position because they showed skill at the Tactical-level as an employee. This sent a message to their leadership that they might be good managers and leaders. This doesn’t always prove to be true, but mainly this is because the newly promoted person can’t get their mind out of the tactical-level. Normally, they are too worried that mistakes will happen and the mission will fail, so they stay overly focused on the day-to-day. This often leads to micro-management of the people and frustrates everyone.

Focusing on the Tactical-level is a failure of effective Leaderment^SM.

Above the Tactical-level is the Operational-level. Here, long-range objectives become your daily bread. Almost everything in the Operational-level falls into the form of projects and programs. For definition sake, projects are duration-based activities–in other words they have a beginning and an end. Programs run for a long time–they may end at some point, but they last a long while. Many employees initially have trouble transitioning from the Tactical to Operational levels because they still think day-to-day. Non-exempt employees are used to being hourly and when they move to exempt status and find themselves in the Operational-level, they often have trouble reacting.

Formerly non-exempt employees tend to move in one of two directions, which defines their behaviors for the future.

They treat everything as a day-to-day task. Thus, they can’t think in long-term projects and programs. They feel overwhelmed because they feel that they can never get their work done. This is frustrating to them and their managers because often they are shying away from long-term necessary work and focusing on things they can get done during the day. They look at their day as a eight-hour schedule and see what they can accomplish in that time frame.
They become workaholics that put in excessively long hours to try to get long-term tasks done quickly. Their focus is to get everything on their plate off their plate as quickly as possible. Thus they stay late to work on a project and push things through. They’re often not extremely collaborative on their projects, because others don’t move at their pace. Their management tends to reward these “high performers,” but the employee burns out and eventually gets frustrated because no matter how hard they work, the work never seems to get done.

Neither of these behaviors at the Operational-level are desirable. Focusing on the Operational-level is a failure of effective Leaderment^SM.

Then we have those that literally live in Strategy Land. They’re constantly dreaming up things to do, directions to head, and brand new ideas. They’re the big thinkers and the dreamers and we’ve all worked with and for them. Life is easy for them, because they never get their hands dirty. They’re the ones pushing new projects and programs to the Operational-level that fit the purpose of the day and move with the winds of change. Managers and employees who exist and operate at the Tactical-level never know what direction the organization is heading, so they burrow in and simply focus on the job.

Leaders that live in the Land of Strategy find themselves very frustrated that all their grand ideas never seem to get accomplished, especially in the time frames they envisioned them occurring. They become more-and-more impatient and they tend to push their employees beyond their limits. They stress the entire organization and frustrate even the hardest and most dedicated workers.

Focusing on the Strategic-level is a failure of effective Leaderment^SM.

So, if thinking strategic, operational, or tactical is a failure of effective Leaderment^SM, how should a Leader think?

Leaders Think Strategically all the time…

This doesn’t mean they live in Strategy Land…this means they think all the time like their strategic plan. Refer to the image below:

All Leaders and Managers, regardless of what level they work at, should apply Strategic Thinking every day. When you think strategically, everything you do starts to change. This means that you are always considering all three levels every day and with every decision.

Strategic Thinkers ground themselves in the values, principles, mission, and vision of the organization–regardless if they came up with them or not. They are constantly evaluating every decision to ensure it fits within the values and principles, is it part of the mission of what they should be doing, and does it move the organization toward the vision.

Strategic Thinkers understand that nothing–I repeat NOTHING–happens at the Strategic-level outside of creating direction. Things do not get done at the Strategic-level and if they think they will, they’re simply fooling themselves. If you are waiting for something “strategic” to happen, then you’re going to wait a long time. Things happen at the Tactical-level.

Strategic Thinkers ensure that their programs are aligned to the strategy of the organization. Programs are long-term and very lasting, thus they should be 100% aligned with the mission. Programs do not support the vision–I know that may surprise you, but they don’t. Strategic Objectives, which are aligned to Strategic Goals, take the form of Projects. Operational Projects, which are temporary in nature, should be primarily designed to evolve Operational Programs to move the organization toward its vision.

Projects are not always 100% aligned to the mission and vision of the organization, but for the most part they should be. Occasionally, you might have to do something that simply doesn’t move the strategic needle.

Strategic Thinkers know that this means that Programs are mission-focused and Projects are vision-focused. Thus, Strategic Thinkers don’t live in Strategy Land pushing down new idea after new idea. They ensure the programs running in the organization support the mission 100%. They also ensure organizational Projects are designed to move the organization’s Programs toward the vision. If something isn’t supporting the strategic plan of the organization, it must be questioned.

At the Tactical-level, Strategic Thinkers know this is where the real work gets done. However, there are two types of tactical work–Program and Project. Understanding this helps those who operate at the Tactical-level connect to the mission. Also, understanding this helps those that operate at the Operational-level better focus on how their day-to-day actions affect the bigger picture and thus relieves a lot of stress and frustration.

Additionally, Strategic Thinkers understand that the act of strategic planning is a tactical activity that should operate within an operational program–in other words, organizational strategic thinking is a strategic program that should always exist. The problem is that it seldom does.

If you work at the day-to-day Tactical-level, your actions exist within a Program and sometimes they support a Project designed to evolve a Program. Just thinking this way fully aligns what you do every day to the strategy. If what you’re doing every day doesn’t support this, ask yourself why.

If your mind exists in one level–strategic, operational, or tactical–then you will fail to achieve effective Leaderment^SM. No matter where you operate, you must always think strategically–think like a leader. Following this guidance will build your competence in the Leaderment^SM Youniversity^SM and prepare you for greater challenges.

When you think of great leaders think about what styles and concepts of Leaderment^SM they employed. What did they do that was so effective…that propelled the masses under them to great things. As we can see, these styles vary in application, but an effective leader and manager should understand and apply all traits in a combined approach as appropriate.

Leaderment^SM and Youniversity^SM are service marks of Crosscutter Enterprises

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.

Related Links:

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.

The Robust SWOT Assessment

Strategic Planning Think Big March 1, 2014 3 Comments

Taking SWOT Assessment to the Next Level in Strategic Planning

It was probably back in the early 90s that I first heard of the term SWOT Analysis / SWOT Assessment. I started to hear about it a lot more when I was in Germany from 1997 to 2002. The acronym was the easy part, but actually building one was, in my mind, difficult.

Now some of you out there might have never had difficulty with building a really good SWOT, so this blog really isn’t for you. However, if you are currently challenged by this tool and developing what you really think is a good SWOT, then this blog is for you!

I welcome input from those who have other techniques and experiences for getting to a great SWOT.

I call it an Assessment tool, versus an Analysis tool as it’s commonly referred to. It’s part of your Organizational Assessment as I talked about in Understanding the Different Assessment Tools, or at least should be, and can be part of any effort to examine the current state of something. I’ve since used SWOT in communications studies, marketing plans, etc. We will focus on its use in strategic planning.

The first thing that really propelled my thinking is that the SWOT is actually a high-level representation of a much deeper analysis. It’s really more of a way to capture organization’s themes and present them for further discussion during the Strategic Planning Session, which is the next stage of strategic planning as outlined in Think Big, Take Small Steps.

I have seen some very poor examples of a SWOT and even created several in my own time. If you are using brainstorming (personal or as a group) to build your SWOT, you’re going to end up with a poor SWOT Assessment. The key is to align the results of your assessment interviews, like I talk about in Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment, and build the SWOT off a more robust analysis using Affinity Diagramming. I use Affinity and Tree Diagramming a few times as I help organizations build their strategic plan and will discuss it in later blogs as well.

Understanding the design of a SWOT Assessment is the first important part. There are many key aspects of a SWOT that are not as obvious as the words would lead someone to believe. What I want to talk about is not only the four vectors, but how the tool was designed and how to use the tool moving forward. See the image below as we discuss:

As you can see from the image, things are either positive or negative in nature and either internal or external to the organization. Positive aspects are what an organization can leverage to overcome negative aspects. Internal aspects are those they control and external do not currently reside within the organization’s control. Note that something can be more than one thing (i.e., Employee longevity can be a Strength because you have a low turnover and a great deal experience, but also a Weakness because the employees might be resistant to change and you might have a large wave of retirement coming).

Strength. Strengths are internally positive aspects about the organization. These are the things that make the organization strong and are the main things an organization can leverage to overcome internal weaknesses and external threats. Organizations tend to focus only on their weaknesses and take their strengths for granted. A failure to focus on and nurture your organizational strengths can quickly turn them into a negative. When you brainstorm to build a SWOT, you tend to come up with a lot of perceived strengths, some of which might not be true.

Weakness. Weaknesses are also internal to the organization, but these are the challenges that could prevent the organization from achieving its eventual vision. Only the most glaring weaknesses are normally highlighted by an organization when brainstorming and usually this list is short. When done correctly, this tends to be a long and difficult list for leaders to swallow. Although it doesn’t sound like SWOT, I often refer to this box as Challenges (a SCOT). Nothing in an organization will prevent it from achieving its vision, unless they fail to address the challenges in front of them.

Opportunity. Many times Opportunities and Threats can be the same thing, but simply it’s the way you look at them. Basically, these both fall into a risk category. Opportunities are positive and external to the organization. If you have an opportunity that exists within your organization, then it is a Strength that you just aren’t leveraging at the moment. The importance of focusing on the external factor of it is that there is less of a guarantee that you can turn Opportunities into Strengths. Many organizations, especially those that don’t currently have a strategic plan or the one that exists is poor, fail to focus on the external factors. Extremely effective strategies focus more on the external factors then the internal. This is how you develop strategic positioning and become prepared for the what might happen versus dealing with it when it happens.

Threat. Obviously, Threats are the external negative aspects surrounding an organization. These are significant threats that the organization faces or could face in the future that they have no control over. Competitors and government regulations often fall into this category. If your organization is part of a bigger organization, things like down-sizing, reorganizations, and funding, even though they exist in the greater organization, still can be external to your control. The two biggest things about Threats is to determine ways to either turn a Threat into an Opportunity, or to develop a mitigation plan should the Threat materialize.

As you can see, the SWOT in itself isn’t really an analysis tool…it’s a way to display what you have learned in your assessment so that leadership can review it and discuss it. I have put them on separate pages before, but its best that leadership can see them all on one page and thus compare and contrast in discussion. This is why a good SWOT really is only a high-level view of what’s going on in and outside of the organization.

So, this is how I build a robust SWOT Assessment:

1. I gather all the findings that I collected in my assessment interviews and research. Refer to my earlier blog, Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment, for my techniques in interviewing. At this point you simply have a lot of detail–detail that you (and your team if you have one) need to completely read through and understand.

2. What I do is look for themes that form out of the comments and responses from the interviews and from that were gathered from my research. I use Affinity Diagramming to group these items–I will discuss this more in the next phase of my blog under Leading Your Leaders to Develop an Effective Strategic Framework, but for now, let me highlight how I do this. Normally I start with pen and paper and list out high-level groups of the information I have. Then, I transfer this to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, putting the grouping titles at the top of each column. Then, I copy the information I’ve collected in rows below the appropriate column headers and I allow for information to end up in more than one column. This is an individual (not group) method of doing Affinity Diagramming.

3. These column headers and all the information listed in the rows below the columns are what I call Trends, Issues, and Problem Statements (TIPS). When working with the Army, I referred to them as Emerging Insights. You could also call them Strategic Focus Areas–it really doesn’t matter. The importance of this is that you have a great deal of detail under each major heading to really explain what is going on both positively and negatively in the organization. The TIPS heading and major themes within the TIPS are what form the words on the SWOT Assessment chart. Now you can see why a SWOT is a high-level tool.

The purpose of building the SWOT Assessment is not to analyze the organization–this is why I don’t call it a SWOT Analysis. This is a high-level assessment of the deeper analysis done in the TIPS. The SWOT is a primary tool used to facilitate discussion during the Strategic Planning Session, which we will discuss in five weeks. There are still four more important topics that I want to expand upon during the Organizational Assessment. They are Scenario Planning, Innovative Thinking, Measures, and Audience-Focus. The reason I focus so much on developing the Organizational Assessment, is because if done correctly, you will really make your Strategic Planning Session go smoothly.

A SWOT in itself is not a really great tool. If you understand it and develop it correctly, it can be extremely effective in leading discussion during the Strategic Planning Session. Simply sitting in a room and brainstorming to build a SWOT will lead to a useless document. You will end up with very limited information that is heavily weighted on internal and positive aspects. A true SWOT must come from a detailed analysis of the interviews and research done in 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.

Related Links:

1. I love Dr. McDonald’s “SWAG” http://youtu.be/V6NhsoVSD88 – MUST WATCH

2. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_05.htm

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_diagram

Are You Ready for Change?

Change Management Strategic Planning Think Big February 22, 2014 19 Comments

Understanding Your Company’s Readiness for Change Prepares for Strategic Planning Success.

It always amazes me that people don’t inherently understand that strategic planning equals strategic change.

If you have a “vision” then that means you are looking to go somewhere in the future that you aren’t at today. If you live in Kansas and have a vision of moving to California, do you think anything is going to change as a result of that move? Unfortunately, many executives fail to understand the magnitude of change that they are embarking on when getting into serious strategic planning–I say serious because many are not and this is the primary reason plans fail as I pointed out in The Importance of Strategic Planning.

Like many companies, we foray into changes without even considering the readiness of our organization for that change. Some of these changes are small, like moving a few executives around, creating a new product, or improving a process. Some are rather large, like mergers, organizational changes, and layoffs. However, nothing is quite like strategic change. A strategic plan is a long-term project–what I like to think of as the “forever project.” Your organization, when embarking on a serious strategic planning effort, needs to be ready for constant change forever.

Managing the change after you’ve started implementing a strategy will probably fail. At the onset of your assessment you need to assess the readiness of the organization to make the changes that will ultimately be required.

There are many Change Readiness Assessments available for free on the internet. I encourage you to look for one and apply what you think is best, but I’m going to share with you some basic questions that might help you assess without using someone’s tool (free or not).

First, do the senior executives in the organization understand and agree on the need for change? Are they happy with the status quo or do they feel that something big needs to change? Are they engaged in the direction (vision) that the organization needs to go and do they agree with it? If the leadership don’t feel that there is a need for huge change in the organization, they won’t support it. The shadow they will cast on their people will ensure heels dig in and strategic change, if possible, will take much longer than necessary. More than likely, the strategy will be abandoned the first year because you can’t get leadership traction.

Once you’ve defined the direction the organization needs to go and the executive leadership is behind it, how well do the employees understand and agree with the direction and need for change. Is it a predominate opinion across the staff that everything is fine and they are doing well? A good factor to analyze is the longevity of the employees. Long-term employees are much more resistant to change because they have a lot more invested in the organization. Strategic change usually means that people will move, organizations will change, lots of new skills will be introduced, etc. You’re not thinking about moving someone’s cheese here–you’re looking at throwing away the old moldy cheese and making new cheese–a much stronger version no less. You can always expect some resistance to change, especially in the employees, but massive resistance will cripple your effort. Understand it up front.

Before you really sit down and consider the strategy going forward, think about how things on a high-level need to change. Your organizational assessment should show you this, even though you haven’t formalized anything. Consider what potential knowledge, skills, and abilities will be required of your leaders and employees. Then assess if your leaders and employees have these things. For instance, let’s say that the consensus is, based on what you’re seeing in the organizational assessment, that your company needs to consider outsourcing several non-core functions to focus on core activities and the core activities need to be more process-focused activities. The overall plan would be to redirect non-core employees to the core activities as you outsource so employee strength remains the same, but capacity increases and you envision obtaining industry expertise at a reduced cost through a managed services model. Do the employees left behind to oversee the managed service have the current capabilities to perform this partnership management role? Do the non-core employees need to learn new core capability skills to be able to operate? If everyone is going to be process-focused, do you have a small team of expert practitioners and is there appropriate process-related knowledge, skills, and abilities at all levels of the organization?

The last major point of this type of assessment is if the organization has any current way to effectively recognize and reinforce successful change? It is important to leverage these opportunities throughout a change effort and if they don’t exist, then they need to be created. Positive reinforcement of successes and dealing effectively with resistance (negative reinforcement) are key to the long term success of strategic change.

Having a plan isn’t enough–being able to implement that plan is where the strategy emerges. However, strategy means change–change like you’ve never felt before. If your organization isn’t ready for that amount and type of change, your first strategic activity might be to build the organization’s readiness for strategic change. If you ignore the organization’s current readiness, then more than likely your strategy will fail.

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.

2. http://www.lencd.org/learning/howto-readiness

3. http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109019/chapters/The-Organizational-Change-Readiness-Assessment.aspx

Implementation of strategy is barely visible by the naked eye.

Change Management Meandering Genius Strategic Planning February 16, 2014

I think that one of the reasons most people see strategies as a failure is because they don’t ‘see’ them unfold when implemented.

Strategy is not about massive change, it’s about strategic change. Massive changes are tactical activities that slowly bring about the vision over many years.

Honestly, the best vision is a lasting one that you don’t have to change every three to five years. The Air Force Sergeants Association’ purpose is to fight for Air Force enlisted benefits on Capitol Hill. Their vision is simple, To be the professional organization of choice to Air Force and the families. This is a measurable long term vision that AFSA will strive to, but may never achieve.

So, why do I say that strategy is invisible?

Strategy is about placement and preparedness. To implement a strategy, normally, you are (to use a military term) prepping the battle space for operations. The strategic actions in themselves are seldom that noticeable, but what they do is prepare you for opportunities that are sure to reveal themselves–opportunities that probably would not have shown themselves if you were not prepared.

Recently, I had a senior leader tell me that all the successes the group I’ve been working with was happenstance (i.e., luck). I disagreed. The strategic activities that we were intertwining over the last two years allowed for the successes to occur.

This is why people who are implementing strategic plans seldom see the forest through the trees. They have to go on faith that what they’re doing will have impact. Even to the employees, they seldom see the subtle changes taking place in the organization.

It is the leader and the strategy experts job to watch for these changes and to stand on the mountaintop and scream out these changes so everyone will know what has happened.

Strategic programs being put in place, strategic organizational changes, strategic development of employees… These things happen over time and when something happens over time, it is often. Viewed as ‘normal operations’ — just part of the daily routine.

This is so far from the truth. In my current role, we started two years ago to “improve document management.” Today, everyone in the document management space meet once a week under a developed governance structure. Today their is a six-person team that matures the do unenthusiastic domain slowly every day. Today there is a 26-page document strategy that highlights how we got here and where we’re going. Today there is an end-to-end understanding of the document life cycle. Today there is a robust document metrics program with accompanying metrics collection strategy.

Those things were strategic in nature and have produced tactical actions, which will lead to us moving closer to our vision of being the leader in document management.

Strangely enough, after two years of discussing and working with ten to twenty industry consultants, we are beginning to think that we are already a leader in this space. The beauty of our strategic effort is that we see how far we have to go and if we can achieve that over the next several years, we will not only be a leader, but ‘the leader!’

A year ago, we researched the only book written on document strategy–written by Kevin Craine. Kevin is a nice guy, who wrote his book based on a Master’s program. Today, he has a blog and regular pod casts about document management and strategy. That’s the authoritative leader in this space.

The harder you look at your strategic implementation the clearer it will become that you are improving. Take the time to understand why you are doing the things your are doing and look for the subtle outcomes. You just might find out you’re well on your way to your vision already and you just can’t see it.