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Finding The Right Direction Should Not Be Hard In his new book, Winning, GE’s former CEO Jack Welch said that getting strategy right is not as complicated as consultants make it out to be. It certainly shouldn’t be as complicated as many consultants would like you to believe. A good strategic plan has three parts: Understand The Situation; Choose The Best Option; Implement The Right Way. Creating a good strategic plan requires input from stakeholders to make sure their needs are listened to and the plan reflects the best contributions possible. Understand The Situation. Begin with a review of the situation today. Do you understand what your customers and clients want? Review the literature and current data to make sure there is a proper understanding of the environment. What are the competitors doing, and what are the best practices in the field? Doing a SWOT analysis will provide a structure for understanding the situation. At this early stage it is useful to form a small team to be responsible for delivering the strategic plan for approval. In any kind of blended organization where there are multiple stakeholders now is also the time to ensure their input is solicited and acknowledged. Stakeholder input will help determine the vision of what the organization aspires to, and the values that are important in getting there. Choose The Best Option What is the information telling you? Choosing the best options from all the information can be a daunting task. Usually there are two reasons management boards fail to do strategy well at this stage: not enough time, or not enough distance. The most common solution is to plan a “strategy retreat”...anything from a few hours in a quiet room to a day-and-a-half or two day offsite. The SWOT analysis can help at this point in finding the best options. The SWOT analysis is often completed without participants knowing how it should be used. A good analysis will help confront threats by playing to strengths and avoiding weaknesses. It should also be able to identify opportunities in the environment that you can take advantage of with your current strengths, while searching for new opportunities in areas where you are currently weak. A simple SWOT analysis done well can identify strategic goals and objectives, and factors critical to success. Implement The Right Way The right people, the right practices, the right communication and a good performance management process are essential to make the plan work. Once you have all that, you need to be willing to continuously revise the implementation and adopt the very best practices available to you. A diligent process and capable participants with respectful acknowledgement of input and a purposeful approach to the future will ensure that the outcome is reasonable and achievable. Strategic planning that fails usually does so for one of three reasons: a lack of discipline in follow up, a lack of communication, or a failure to engage the commitment of the key stakeholders. |
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Strategic Plan: The roadmap that engages stakeholders, defines the future, generates commitment and guides action. |
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A skilled facilitator can help the team make sense of the data, and enable everyone to participate while leaving an objective third party to manage the process. |
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Strategic Planning |
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