Dear Readers: Strategic Planning Zen

It's time to get strategic planning on your executive board calendar. Starting strategic planning in mid-September allows you to complete your fiscal budget by year-end. Too many companies make the mistake of wrapping up the process in January or February, then waiting for approval at the Q1 board meeting. When this happens, it feels like the entire organization is trying to get caught up the rest of the year. Strategic partners get behind because they have not received your commitment for budgets, and since customers are waiting on approvals, too, our whole interdependent economy has trouble getting up to speed.

Strategic planning is simply making decisions in advance, with one important caveat: provided the environment and execution continue to align with the plan. If circumstances change, you ought to revisit the plan. Don't think of this document as fixed and rigid at a time when nothing in our economic environment seems to be constant or predictable.

If anyone on the management team believes there is a reason to change the plan, they ought to call the team back together. Before adding something new to the plan, though, you ought to be prepared to remove something from it. Often this stops the process cold because it draws attention to the fact that a business is a system. When you make a new move, all others must be contemplated. In a vacuum, an idea may sound great, but it may lose some of its luster as its impact on other endeavors is fully understood.

Follow the Steve Jobs-style of planning: Keep the shiny new objects to a minimum. Make sure each new item and, for that matter, each old item is essential to meet the organization's objective. If it does not support the organization's values, vision, or mission, then it doesn't belong in the plan.
Some strategic-planning questions to consider for the next year:

1. What would be considered a successful strategic plan?

2. Have our past efforts been successful?

3. If not, what have we done in the past that has failed and why?

4. Do we choose too many goals or activities to realistically complete?

5. What could have been eliminated off of last year's plan while still enabling us to make our numbers?

6. Do we have too many massive actions to complete in the first half of the year?

7. Do we align our strategic direction with measurable outcomes?

8. Do our forecasts look like a hockey stick--all weighted to the end of the year for revenue & earnings?

9. Are we reformatting from the beginning of the first quarter?

10. How do we align departmental objectives, strategies, and actions to the overall plan?

11. Do we have an agreed-upon process to change the plan mid-course if the environment has changed? Does everyone know this process?

If the strategic planning process has failed you or you have failed it too many times to count, don't give up. It's a process that can work--when the plan is streamlined, clear, and attainable. Bear in mind that just because your business is large doesn't mean your plan must be, too. Do some zen planning. Move from tangled complexity to effective simplicity.

The planning process should take between 3 to 4 days in total. Don't rush it, but don't make the mistake of not spending the resources up front because budgets are tight this year. One minor decision made early on will save small businesses tens of thousands of dollars and large businesses millions.

Gary

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