Effective Strategic Planning: Embracing Business Success

To be successful, strategic planning must be open-minded and iterative, performed continuously rather than as a static snapshot. This ongoing process allows businesses to adapt and evolve in their rapidly changing business environment.

Choosing Value for Your Strategic Planning

Leaders approach strategic planning in diverse ways:

1. Some view it as a waste of time and avoid it, which might apply to about 30% of business leaders.
2. Others see its merit but invest minimally in implementing or following up on their plans. This also applies to roughly 30% of leaders.
3. A significant portion, perhaps 60% of large business leaders and 20% of small business leaders, value strategic planning and disciplined follow-up.
4. A smaller group, about 10% of leaders, values not only planning and follow-up but also embraces innovative approaches for efficiency and effectiveness.

The following messages will help you create and achieve growth & prosperity goals.

New Developments in Strategic Planning

With rapid technological and sector advancements, strategic planning now requires new values and iterative analyses. Examples include evolving from SMART goals to SMARTer and then to SMARTACRE goals, showing the progression of goal-setting methodologies.

Strategic Planning – Iterative Processes for Desired Results

Successful strategic planning involves iterative testing and understanding of both successes and failures. This requires objective reality checks, avoiding biases like confirmation, overconfidence, sunk cost, attribution, and hindsight biases. Iterative testing thrives when different perspectives are considered and open-mindedness is embraced.

Resistance to change is common, but early strategic planning should focus on open-mindedness, collaboration, and believability-weighted decision-making.

Strategic Planning – The Advanced Approach

1. Setting the Footing and Building the Foundation: The leader’s aspirations and beliefs form the business’s footing. Alignment with the leadership team sets a solid foundation.
2. Building Goals and Initiatives: Goals should be detailed for the immediate year and adaptable for future years. Mental model tools help answer key strategic questions.

Mental Model Tools: Tools like SWOT, enhanced by SOAR, and others such as Lafley and Martin’s “Playing to Win” questions, SMARTACRE Goals, Talents & Strengths tools, PESTEL, Porter’s 5 Forces, McKinsey 9-Box Matrix, and the Eisenhower Matrix coupled with the 80/20 Rule are crucial. These tools bring new perspectives, ideas, and solutions to light.

Recommendations

To extract full value and benefits through strategic planning:

1. Align Your Goals with Your Organizational Aspirations: Ensure that your organization’s purpose, vision, and values are reflected in its goals and initiatives.
2. Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Make strategic planning and cause-and-effect testing a leading part of your organization’s culture.
3. Encourage Open-Minded Leadership: Ensure your leaders are curious about the value contained in traditional and new information and decision-making processes.
4. Embrace Iterative Analysis Practices: Continually reassess and adapt plans and adjust actions to keep pace with accelerating changes.
5. Diversify Tools and Metrics: Use a variety of investigative tools and perform more-comprehensive analyses.