HELP! What do I do with my strategic plan now? 3 choices
Over the last five years, we’ve seen experts implore organizations to stop strategic planning. The rationale goes… “the world is too unpredictable for long term planning.” Hello 2020! If there was ever a moment to call unpredictable, it’s this one! We’ve never boarded the “stop planning” bandwagon, and we are not going to start now.
Why keep planning?
It’s an act of leadership: Teams, stakeholders and colleagues need to know where you’re headed. Planning is the thread that keeps our actions connected with one another. When we stop planning or throw out a plan without considering a new one we lose one of our most important ways to align ourselves with a bigger vision.
It helps us avoid harm: Without planning, even during disruption, we may fail to consider how our short term choices could harm us, our stakeholders and our customers. For example, shutting down a location in a high need area may mean we are not trusted when we return. Or, shifting our service model without naming what we intend to preserve or resurrect as soon as possible may mean that we can never regain our market niche or our values. Or, chasing a new customer group during disruption may leave our traditional market thinking they’re not valuable and so they turn to new providers.
3 ways to move your plan and planning ahead
If you’re in the process of creating a new strategic plan:
Agree, Learn, Revise.
Gain agreement with your plan stakeholders (Board or C-suite for example) on the big headlines of where your organization is headed. Think of these as directional goals: we want to scale the number of people we reach, we want to diversify our services, we want to appeal to a new kind of customer/stakeholder). Pause on writing specific metrics/outcomes and multi year action plans.
Learn about the accelerators and inhibitors of reaching your goals through the experimentation you’re undertaking during this crisis (adding and subtracting services, using new messaging, new staffing configurations, etc). If you have bandwidth, this also time to engage in conversations with stakeholders and collaborators about what your initial goals and plans mean now. Be intentional in your learning and recording your learning.
Revise your plan with planning stakeholders when you can exhale. Remind them of the big ideas they agreed to and share your learnings. Use these two ingredients to shape an improved strategic plan that has already been pressure tested and fits a recovery environment.
2. If you’re in the middle of implementation of a strategic plan:
Review your plan, Make choices, Edit and recommit
Review your existing strategic plan, even if that means digging out of a folder from two years ago. While your present state may feel disconnected from your strategic vision, it’s likely that there are threads of connection, even now.
Make choices and experiment, for the short term about how you’ll address items laid forth in your plan. What, from your original plan should be accelerated because it’s more important now? What from your original plan, must be protected and sustained, even during this intense disruption? What should you release to make room for opportunities that have emerged. Share these choices with your stakeholders to remind them that your current actions may not match your original plan, but they have alignment to your vision.
Edit and recommit to your strategic plan once you’ve reached a point of being able to think about the future again. Your short term choices, and your new environment are the ingredients you can use to update your plan.
3. If you’re finishing implementation of a strategic plan and it’s time to start a planning process:
Generate questions, Learn, Launch planning process
Generate questions about the future. Rather than jump straight to planning, start by naming 3 - 4 central questions that will shape your future. These should be strategic questions like: in what ways can we increase our value with our customers and clients? Based on the strengths we’ve built to date, where are we ready to stretch? What are we doing well that we should 10x? How are our competitors and collaborators changing during this disruption and before? It’s best if your planning stakeholders (Board, C-suite, etc.) can help you create, simplify and agree upon the questions.
Learn, explore, listen and experiment to uncover insights about your future. During this disruption and the immediate recovery you may not have the bandwidth to move into robust planning, but you may be able to squeeze in reflection and learning that gives you hints about your organization’s path. Be intentional about the questioning and capturing the learning.
Launch a strategic planning process that harnesses the learnings. Bring planning stakeholders into the conversations by asking them to explore how your learnings answer the central questions you are facing. These discussions form the backbone of your planning process.
Author: Stacy Van Gorp