Upgrade Your Strategic Planning Process
Whether you know it or not, you probably need to upgrade your strategic planning process if you want to create an understandable, winnable, and implementable strategy for your business. Unfortunately, the odds for strategic success are not in your favor:
What we hear repeatedly from leaders is that their finely crafted strategic plans are not being implemented at the quality or speed that they expect. What we hear from employees is that the strategy is not clear enough, believable enough, or agreed-upon enough to work. We believe it’s time for a fresh look at the entire strategic planning process.
7 Steps to Upgrade Your Strategic Planning Process
For a much greater probability of success in executing your strategy, try a different approach. Your strategy will be more likely to succeed if you:
Schedule regular strategy retreat sessions with your leaders to review the big moves you had planned, the progress executing them, and the barriers that must be addressed.
Focus on the two or three big moves that will give you the greatest chance of achieving your vision for success. Then ruthlessly allocate resources accordingly.
Consider, challenge, reflect, and then commit.
For example, if new leadership thinks they are inheriting a “dumpster fire” as one CEO put it, but employees believe that things are fine, it will be difficult to rally the troops to change their ways.
Make sure that everyone starts on the same page.
Focus on team, rather than individual, agreement, commitment, and accountability.
Actively involve stakeholders in describing their own reality, influencing the design of the vision for success, and developing the first steps to make the vision a reality.
The Bottom Line
Increase your chances of becoming one of the elite organizations that gets strategic planning and strategy execution right. Re-think your strategic planning process in a way that is innovative, flexible, productive, and leads to successful implementation.
To learn more about how to upgrade your strategic planning process, download 3 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Cascading Your Corporate Strategy
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