I just returned from a two-day planning session with my business partner. As I said in a recent blog, a plan is nothing; planning is everything. This is the season of the budget and also, hopefully, strategy development, so I’d like to offer my perspective on the things that can make your strategy discussions more productive:
Get away if you can: staying in the office is a terrible idea, mostly because there is a clash of priorities; and the immediate and urgent (but not necessarily the critical) almost always win.
Begin with the end in mind: Thank you, Stephen Covey. For our business, this meant going out to 2014 for a lot of good reasons, including succession planning. Many initiatives can take several years to get right and leaving them until they are urgent is risky in today’s business environment.
Swim into a Blue Ocean: even if it’s going to take longer than 12 months (which may be a long time in American business), dare to create scenarios where your business is doing new and innovative things. This kind of activity expands your thinking and generates more options. Without ideation, your "ocean" gets redder by the minute, as the sharks circle the boat. By the way, reading Blue Ocean Strategy is good preparation for a strategic retreat.
Bite the bullet and take on the tough stuff: Effective strategic thinking means putting the skunk on the table. If you don’t talk about what’s hard, opportunities may never present themselves and, at the same time, challenges are never articulated until they rear up and bite you. Then you’re stuck spending a lot of useless time cleaning up after the skunk.
Boil down your strategy into a memorable sentence: a strategy statement by its nature can be complex and the risk is that a critical piece of your business becomes lost in verbiage. Try explaining two paragraphs of strategic direction to your employees and watch their eyes glaze over. We got ours down to “In It to Win It”. It means something to our company and it’s a lot easier to make decisions when judging them against an easy-to-recall strategy sentence.
The first step in any strategic thinking is to leave the spreadsheets and PowerPoints at the office and focus on the future. Whether your company is large or small; whether you head up a department or the entire business, strategy demands attention and dialogue. Are you using this budget season to take your thinking about your company to a new level?
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Barbara:
ReplyDeleteSound advice. Covey's "begin with the end in mind" is very similar to the techinque that futurists use called "backcasting." I think it is a great way to work.
I will be interested in finding out what your memorable sentence is.
Thanks for the comments, Mike. I'll have to do some futurist research as I'm not familiar with "backcasting". I always learn something from you!
ReplyDeleteOur memorable sentence is "In It to Win It". We have a sub-text but I'm keeping that within ICC!
Hi Barbara,
ReplyDeleteI don't have a catchy phrase or memorable sentence, but I offer two thoughts on improving strategy discussions:
1. Have participants describe what the future might look like with pictures only. That's always a real stretch but so powerful.
2. Sometimes just having a framework for how to look at the future is helpful--The old STOP-START-CONTINUE format seems work everytime!
Hi Patsi
ReplyDeleteThank you for your feedback.
I love the idea of visuals to describe the future; that definitely is something to add to the strategic toolkit.
At ICC we have developed a framework for evaluating the organization in the light of what the future could/would look like. I agree that without it, big and great ideas remain in that state and never become real and certainly are not implemented.