Strategic planning is big business. Companies spend millions of dollars working with consulting firms to chart a path forward. Not only does a lot of money change hands as part of this process, but the amount of time employees spend working on the plan likely doubles the cost of the entire process.
In the end, leaders get a brilliant report that they can send to employees, shareholders, external stakeholders, and others. However, often much less money and time is spent implementing that plan than was spent creating it. As a result, there is a lot of cynicism around participating in strategic plans.
In many ways, this is a lot like New Year’s resolutions. With great fervor, people will identify a change they want to make in the new year. Now is the time to get physically fit, develop deeper relationships, or get an education. However, most people have abandoned their resolutions within a few weeks.
The central problem with strategic plans is in the name itself. Every organization must be concerned with both strategy and tactics. Strategy defines the north star of the organization. What are the general elements you are trying to achieve? Tactics are the method to get there. What specific steps will team members take on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to achieve the desired outcome? Ultimately, a strategy is unlikely to succeed without a tactical plan to achieve it.
There are several things leaders can do to increase a strategic plan’s chances of success. In many ways, these reflect the steps people should take to best achieve their New Year’s resolutions.
Focus on resources
A big part of the problem with the strategic planning process is that the focus is almost entirely on the strategy rather than the resources needed to execute it. Organizations take their plan and then develop other teams tasked with turning that plan into reality.
This creates two central problems. There are inevitable trade-offs that must be made to begin implementing a plan, which dampens enthusiasm for the golden future that the strategy promised. Additionally, the resources (human, financial, and material) needed to implement the plan are rarely identified in advance, leading to significant battles during implementation.
A planning process should put most of the effort into tactical planning rather than strategic planning. Responsibility for particular elements of the plan should fall to specific groups. The money needed to advance the plan must be identified in advance. The new work to be done should not simply be thrown on top of the existing load carried by employees. Instead, responsibilities should be transferred so that people in the organization have time to advance in the new job. Otherwise, the plan will fail.
Identify concrete steps
If an organization is going to do things differently in the future than in the present, people will have to take different actions than they did before. That means you need to know what people are doing now. How do the actions people take now advance the organization’s mission? How can the elements of that mission that cannot be lost be integrated with tasks that will advance the new direction?
Much of the success of this planning process also requires careful thought about the employee reward structure. In any organization, there’s what you say, what you do, and what you reward, and people hear that in reverse order. What you reward is what drives much of daily behavior. So if you want people to do something different tomorrow than they were doing today, you’ll have to change what they’re rewarded for doing so that more actions related to the new goals are incorporated into the workday.
This type of workday-specific exploration isn’t as fun as imagining a bright future, which is why strategic planning processes often delay that issue. But this type of detailed work is directly related to the plan’s likelihood of success.
Try it and then adapt
As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The other reason the planning process is fun (if unproductive) is that it is blissfully free from reality. It is impossible to imagine the problems that will inevitably arise when implementing a plan.
Success in achieving a strategic objective is achieved in successive approaches. Try something, measure the results, and then evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Keep what works and fix what doesn’t. Ultimately, their plans are more like software than hardware. The hardware is as good as ever out of the box. The software improves by fixing bugs and adding new features. When you commit to continually improving your tactical plans, you greatly improve the likelihood of achieving strategic objectives.