Strategic planning: Models and making sense of the organisational whirlwind

Organisations are complex. Each week presents dozens of issues and opportunities from a range of stakeholders to which the manager or leader can decide to plan, react, or ignore.

The role of a leader and manager is to bring order to seeming chaos.  In the irrational storm, they are positioned as the height of rationality, fighting a likelihood of failure to consolidate complexity into succinct “n-step” change programs to achieve profitable outcomes. While vision may give context to the storm, it is strategy that provides any hope of converting the noise to an outcome.

Strategy planning models

Three basic questions answered by strategic planning are: 1) where we are now, 2) where we are going, and 3) how we will get there. How these questions are answered and in what context will determine the model used:

• Vision or goals-based: Start with vision and develop strategies for how we will get there.
• Issues-based: Start with known issues and develop strategies for how we will address them.
• Alignment: Start with connection points and develop strategies for how to improve them.
• Scenario: Start with one or more scenarios and develop strategies for how to best make them happen.
• Organic: Start with agreement of the underlying culture and vision and support the strategies that emerge to support that agreement.
• Real-time: Start with what is known about the situation and known priorities and develop and continuously review strategies to address those priorities

I went to an executive breakfast where a Franklin Covey consultant shared about their 4 Disciplines of Execution program. It was from this presentation that I borrowed the whirlwind metaphor as well as the distinction between lead and lag goals.

It was fascinating to watch as everyone in the room resonated in agreement that their jobs were difficult and gravitate to the hope that it could be less difficult with something as simple as four easy to understand disciplines:

• Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important
• Discipline 2: Act on the lead measure
• Discipline 3: Keep a compelling scorecard
• Discipline 4: Create a cadence of accountability

Other models such as the Argenti System  share similar attributes. Argenti talks about “hunting your strategic elephants”, ignoring anything that is not of significant importance and consolidating smaller symptoms into underlying causes similar to a “5 Why” program. The five stages of the planning process include:

• Stage 1 THE START: Form the planning team
• Stage 2 CORPORATE AIMS: Corporate purpose, Setting targets, Making forecasts, Calculating the gap
• Stage 3 SELECT SWOTs: Select the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
• Stage 4 THE STRATEGIES: List alternative strategies, Select the strategies
• Stage 5 COMPLETING THE PLANS: Evaluate, Get approval, Action plans, Monitor

These are just two of a myriad of models all following a similar path. A Google image search for “strategic planning models”  produces enough flow charts and diagrams to add to the confusion.  With so much free advice at our fingertips, you would think we as a society would have strategic planning down to a fine art.

Looking at results we experience in the market each day, I would say this is not the case.  What is often lacking is focus, discipline and accountability, hence why the planning process often requires an external facilitator.

Back to fundamentals to address the “should”

Most of my career has involved taking companies from “here” to “there” through delivery of a strategic plan.  I am perceived as helping a few companies along the way, with my LinkedIn connections considering “business strategy” as my most endorse-able skill. I find this interesting as strategy has not been something I have “strategically” set out to cultivate, but has just happened.

I am now in a position to see if their sentiments are validated as I take my own medicine in a strategic planning process with two organisations I am involved in, one a digital agency and the other a not-for-profit youth engagement program. My review here of the fundamentals is in part to address a feeling that I “should” by now know the best approach.

Strategy is often defined in hindsight with the outcomes already realised. It is as if academic prescriptions of planning processes are deemed either unwieldy or irrelevant by many business leaders.  Rather than a formal strategic planning process, leaders make decisions based upon gut instinct and experience, then support those decisions with a strategic statement.

The downside of this approach is that it relies on the charisma and communication skills of the leader to maintain motivation and momentum. The larger an organisation gets, the more impossible this becomes, thus mandating a more formal, structured and collaborative strategic planning process. A strategic planning process also helps executives who have a propensity to drop down into tactics or remain higher up in vision.

The number of competing priorities can have organisational leaders feeling like they are operating in a whirlwind. Strategic planning helps consolidate those competing priorities into five or six strategies that justify why we do some things and explain why we don’t do others at this time. It also brings everyone on the same page and addresses feelings that leaders “should” know the next step in a constantly changing situation.