It’s always important to have a clear strategic plan for your business, mapping our where you want to go. Right now though it’s vital. Recently we’ve been reviewing some different planning methods and these are some of the ideas we have been exploring.
Have a clear view of where you want to go.Right now you might be focused on survival but it’s important to have a longer term goal. It’s important keep this goal in mind to ensure any short-term decisions don’t jeopardise the long-term goals. Think about what you ultimately want your business to achieve? What could your business be like in 10 to 15 years when all this turmoil is behind us?
On top of this having a clearly defined long-term vision will enable a more efficient decision making structure. A clear vision helps you make faster decisions, it becomes much clearer when something is aligned with the vision or not, helping you short cut the decision making process. Also depending on the way the vision is developed, it can be a powerful motivational element for the team.
See, Scan and Sense.Once you have a clear vision for the business it’s important to develop a realistic picture of the present. This process allows you to see the gap between right now and where you want to be. Obviously a big vision needs be broken down into a series of base camps on the way to achieving your goal but you need to know how things are right now in order to determine the right route to the next base camp.
These exercises can be very useful as they sometimes raise issues that are totally unexpected. We had a client recently where a number of HR issues were raised; unclear role definitions, lack of communication and undefined decision-making process. This was completely unexpected by the executive team. So managed properly, with the right group of people, these processes can highlight opportunities to make big improvements in unexpected areas.
Understanding and Action.The last part of the planning process is to define what to do, the action plan. What’s important here is to link the sense of right now, to the vision of the future. To do this involves some individual planning and some group collaboration to get a buy-in across all the actions.
It’s important to work in large group settings to make sure a core group of people are involved and committed to implementing the outcomes of the process. Although this typically can slow things down there are a number of techniques you can use to speed things along. Two things we use regularly are to break big groups into smaller groups to encourage more discussion and using group voting methods to get to a consensus or priority quickly.
Strategic Planning Lifecycle.While it’s important to think about all the actions and goals you want to achieve over a year, often when you do planning over this time horizon you get a whole lot of activities in the first and second quarters and not much in the second half of the year. It’s easier for us to organize and arrange what we have to do now and harder to think about things further out. In the world we living now who knows what it’s going to be like in six months time! Because of this we are increasingly moving to use an annual business plan with a rolling 90 day action plan.
A 90 day action plan allows a clear focus on the next three months, it also allows you to develop a clear process to review and replan for the next 90 day cycle. This ensures the plan is continually worked on and becomes part of your business rather than an exercise you do and then file.
This thinking is built into our
Accelerated Strategy Development Process™. This process helps to develop strategic thinking and planning faster with a higher level of robustness and deeper level of buy-in and commitment. For more information read this post about developing a
mission and vision framework. If you would like to develop your strategic planning process don’t hesitate to
contact us.