Writing Strategic Plans an Inside Job

Can someone from outside your company create your organization’s strategic plan? After all, if your future depends on the quality of this document, shouldn’t you hire an expert to do the job? At first glance, this makes sense, but as you contract with an outsider to execute the task, you may have misgivings.

 

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Writing Strategic Plans an Inside Job

Can someone from outside your company create your organization’s strategic plan? After all, if your future depends on the quality of this document, shouldn’t you hire an expert to do the job? At first glance, this makes sense, but as you contract with an outsider to execute the task, you may have misgivings.

As a consultant, I sometimes receive requests from potential clients (often via an RFP) to draft their strategic plan. It’s a bittersweet moment. While I’m happy to help, I also have a painful duty.

Now, I need to set about changing their mindset around the entire activity. Furthermore, I know something they don’t: these are non-negotiable. To be plain, if they refuse my efforts to change the definition of the project, I won’t work with them. What’s my reasoning for such a drastic demand?

  1. Strategic Plans Are Not Documents

While it’s the norm to equate a strategic plan with a document, the reality is quite different. It all has to do with where the document originates and what it’s intended to do.

The best plans lay out a very specific future. This is no 3-line vision statement with vague, undated aspirations which cannot be measured. Instead, it defines a detailed outcome and a realistic pathway to get there.

Ideally, its creation involves the top 10-18 leaders. Together, they seek to understand the current results and the external environment. Nowadays, this always includes the role of incipient and disruptive technology.

Once a baseline summary is created, a fresh, inspiring future can be defined. Usually, it’s selected from several possible candidates. Once the new vision is translated into numbers, it should be “backcasted” to the current year to produce a feasible

plan. This roadmap is converted into projects which are assigned to accountable individuals.

While there may be a document produced at the end of this process, it’s a poor facsimile of the hard conversations which preceded it. In retreats, we warn team members at the start: “Expect to make the 10 or so most difficult decisions needed to thrive in the future.”

Furthermore, they must do so with imperfect information. And they require courage to step into a world of uncertainty to declare a new Promised Land, even though they still live in Egypt.

As such, the document is optional – far less important than the final decisions, and the struggle to make them. Instead, the RFP I receive should focus on following rigorous, analytic steps as a team.

  1. There is No Real Delegation

However, there are companies in which the norm involves a CEO spending a weekend at a resort, locked away. During her hiatus, she writes the entire strategic plan. Her team receives the document on Monday morning.

One year, she may decide that she’s busy or needs outside input. She requests a quote from a consultant to perform the task instead. She explains: “My staff always agrees with the plan I come up with, and hardly give any comments. You should have no problem.”

When I share the bad news, she complains. “I just want you to write the plan, nothing else.” Is she making a mistake?

In a word, “Yes.” She hasn’t realized that her team has been left out of the process. Now, they are trained to give her “lip service.” They expect that by saying as little as possible, she’ll leave them to return to their operational, tactical jobs. Business as usual. They are “too busy to be distracted by strategic questions”, she complains.

By taking this path of least resistance, she makes a grave error. By relying on her strength alone, she under-estimates the need for their buy-in. Unless she’s in a tiny company, she actually needs them to do much more to succeed.

Instead, everyone in the leadership team should be engaged in crafting the strategic plan. This is the only way for the most important stakeholders to make challenging decisions. When she disappears for the weekend, she discounts their input.

Furthermore, she acts as if implementing the strategic plan involves no more than ordering people to play their part. This approach is far inferior to the alternative: involving the leadership team so that they can, in turn, engage others.

The bottom-line is, she’s been following a process that doesn’t work. Delegating it to an outsider only makes things worse.

If a consultant is employed, that may help. But the outside assistance shouldn’t diminish the challenge, it should only improve the experience and the final output.

True strategic planning, especially in these turbulent times, is no vacation-like exercise. It involves far more than prose. Instead, the stakes should always be high. The responsibility to confront tough choices and implement them lies with the leadership team.

Why “Short-Term Strategy” is a Misnomer

Have you ever been stuck in a strategic planning session, complaining to yourself: “This is nothing more than a continuation of old, tired thoughts?” You need to intervene and somehow shift the level of thinking. But you don’t know what to say, and you certainly don’t want to make things worse. Do you suffer in silence? Or attempt to provide some leadership?

The truth is, you may already be someone who has been looking ahead and wondering why your company isn’t seeing the future the way you do. If you are, realize that this is uncommon. Most of your peers are fine going with the flow.

Want to be different? Don’t sit back waiting for a juicy, post-retreat “I told you so.” Instead, harness your commitment by challenging your team to think strategically. Here are some ways to steer the ship.

  1. Insist on planning for the long-term

Start by insisting that “strategies” are not the same as “tactics”. In this vein, there is no such thing as “short-term strategies”. Tactics should only exist to implement a strategic plan, which should always be long-term. While it’s entirely possible to engage in daily tactics without a strategy, it’s not likely to be sustainable. At some point, your lack of foresight will lead to actions which make things worse.

While some say they have a “long-term, 5-year strategy”, you should immediately object. Once again, there is no such thing. If asked, explain that a 5-year strategy is just a lazy extrapolation of past events, plus a few tweaks. It’s the easy way out – the path of least resistance.

However, this is the same thinking that dooms companies. There’s a reason GraceKennedy created a 25 year strategy in 1995 and subsequently left its competitors in the dust. Most can’t even remember who they were.

Remember Kodak? The reason Fuji (their arch-rivals) became a chemical company as Kodak went bankrupt is a case study in short verus long term thinking. In 2000, both were on top, but only 12 years later, Fuji’s pivot was paying off while Kodak was reaping the results of stale, tactical judgment.

The point of a long-term strategy is to future-proof the organization, and assure its ongoing success. That won’t come by restricting your thinking to the comfortable future, as Kodak did.

Instead, your company needs to look over the horizon and pick a destination. In other words, it must be like Columbus. Fellow sailors in the 1490s were afraid of sailing off the edge of the world. Today, managers are just as scared to craft plans too far into the future. Consequently, they limit their companies.

  1. Emphasize the next generation

Short-term planning also tends to be a selfish exercise, by default. After all, it’s only human to care about oneself first.

However, a team which creates outcomes 15-30 years in the future instantly turns on a switch. As if by magic, it automatically focuses on the next generation.

For example, a Caribbean company that intended to enter Latin America crafted big market-share goals. However, via detailed planning, they discovered they would need a headquarters in Miami. Over time, the corporation would become American.

After confronting this fact, they decided not to permanently disenfranchise future generations of Caribbean leaders. To keep the company in the region, they scaled back the plan significantly.

But even in the face of such useful thinking, some argue that technology is moving so fast that you can’t plan for it. However, in long-term planning sessions, teams learn that customer’s core needs don’t change. The only question they need to keep asking is, “How will they be fulfilled?”

In this context, technology changes the way customers’ unmet needs are addressed, so emerging innovations must be considered. But the overall goal of serving customers doesn’t change from one generation to the next.

Therefore, the main question to ask now is “Where is our company headed in the long-term, and what technologies and human capabilities should we invest in…today… in order to get there?” Good answers are hard to find, yet executive teams have no choice but to embrace the struggle. Why? In part, they will always have limited information. And disruptions have become a fact of life.

In the face of these limitations, you must still employ long-term thinking. As Churchill said, “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”

The point of a long-term exercise is not to be correct. Or accurate. Instead, it’s to engage in the difficult planning and decision processes that can make or break an enterprise. As a participant in a session, it’s a worthy challenge to inspire your team to tackle.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

Why ”Short-Term Strategy” is a Misnomer

Have you ever been stuck in a strategic planning session, complaining to yourself: “This is nothing more than a continuation of old, tired thoughts?” You need to intervene and somehow shift the level of thinking. But you don’t know what to say, and you certainly don’t want to make things worse. Do you suffer in silence? Or attempt to provide some leadership?

For past issues from 2010, visit https://blog.fwconsulting.com

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This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Strategy: Intentions or Predictions?

As a leader of your company, you may notice managers and board members struggling to be strategic. Trapped in low-level thinking, they habitually think micro when macro is needed. How do you help them craft inspiring visions that shift the way your organization operates?

At the start of each year, it’s only natural to aspire to be new, lofty and game-changing. As your followers look to you for direction, you know you need to say “something”. But the past couple of years may have led you to become cautious.

Perhaps your COVID-era plans now seem like bad jokes. You went out on a limb and called for big results, only to see them crushed. Today, you are gun-shy. You would be happy to exit 2022 without being forced to close your business. And if you don’t own a company, you just want to keep your job. It’s only natural to “small up” in the face of such realities.

However, these are exactly the fearful instincts that will turn out another Blockbuster Video, Nokia or Blackberry. They crashed out of industries they once dominated in a matter of years.

What do you need to do to lead your company effectively from the future rather than the past, even when your recent track record has been spotty?

  1. Stop Trying to Predict

By definition, a prediction is an extrapolation of the past. In stable, predictable times, you could use this tool to plan the future and your strategy.

But that’s exactly what you were taught. Your job as a manager was to produce results in the short term based on the recent past; tactical thinking that won’t help you when strategy is needed. Unfortunately, those days are over.

Now you must lead even if your prior predictions were terribly wrong, and you looked bad, foolish or stupid. Your natural tendency may be to think in shorter time-frames in order to make fewer mistakes.

As a leader crafting a fresh future, you need to stop predicting. Coming up with a new vision was never about making predictions and never will be.

  1. Replace Predictions with Intentions

The best strategic planning is about crafting intentions rather than predictions. They are always born in the future. Imagine a six-year-old saying “I want to be a doctor!” Good parents don’t scoff at such intentions, even though they aren’t based on facts.

However, the same child, if asked to predict, would probably say, “I want to keep playing with my toys!“

As an adult, you should gather all the facts you can muster. But at the end of the fact-finding, you must still craft an intention that is merely informed by the data, not limited by it. In other words, there will always be a risk when creating intentions which are meant to be ground-breaking, or transformational.

But what if your last few intentions produced nothing at all? What should you do then to be an effective leader?

  1. Close Out Prior Intentions and Craft New Ones

Even if recent efforts have failed, your organization still needs you to lead from the future. However, you could be hampered by your track record.

If so, consider bringing previous intentions to closure so your followers can hear a new one.

This may sound challenging or painful, but it isn’t. Simply take a critical mass of employees along a journey to explore the facts regarding the last failed intention. Doing so will lay the ground for whatever is coming next.

But be clear about your role. As a leader, you are the limiting factor. When you fail to create an effective, inspiring vision, don’t expect your managers to take up the slack. Their skills are limited.

However, as the leader, you have no excuse.

Your job is to get up in front of your staff each and every year with a vision of breakthrough results. When you shy away from doing so, you are dooming your organization. Don’t be surprised when it returns the favor with mediocre performance.

Seems impossible? If you can’t manage, get expert help. As the new year starts, your company needs you to be at your best, on top of your game. Call your personal development the recurring price to be paid by anyone who is in your position.

Also, you may need to train your managers and board members to think from the future, and be inspiring. At the very least, they should understand what a strategic vision is meant to do, so they don’t become obstacles.

But the buck stops with you. It’s your job to demonstrate that everyday management may be about predicting, but strategic leadership is about crafting inspiring intentions.

In summary, your people want to be led. As the occupant of an executive position, do your job.

Strategy: Intentions vs. Predictions

As a leader of your company, you may notice managers and board members struggling to be strategic. Trapped in low-level thinking, they habitually think micro when macro is needed. How do you help them craft inspiring visions that shift the way your organization operates?

 

 

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

WhatsApp Groups for Employee Engagement

In today’s COVID era, local companies have seen a dramatic rise in the use of WhatsApp groups among staff. It’s been a love/hate relationship for most, but online groups have become a critical channel of communication. Is your organization boosting employee engagement via these groups, or sitting by hoping the fad will die off?

Remote work has made virtual, intra-company communication more important than ever. By replacing its digital sibling, email messaging, WhatsApp has become the popular default choice. Now, your official email updates are being ignored. Your employees’ habits have shifted; they are using the app over a hundred times per day.

Unfortunately, a number of poor practices have also arisen. In response, most executives and HR departments watch from the sidelines as the software shapes their organization’s culture. No-one knows what to do, or even whose responsibility it is to ensure this channel adds productivity. How should your company influence a change which is already underway?

  1. Accept WhatsApp’s power and limitations

Understand that you can only influence WhatsApp, not control it. Unlike email, the messages being shared aren’t sitting on IT’s servers, where management can observe and dispose of them at will.

Also, individual accounts don’t belong to you. Disgruntled ex-employees can continue their hourly gripe sessions with key workers for months to come.

As such, WhatsApp groups have a life of their own. For example, a small chat between friends can quickly grow to reach the limit of 256 users. Any hot topic can dominate the space and take over attention, including office gossip. Individuals can use it for self-promotion, or to attack others.

Unfortunately, the range of responses is limited. For example, when a group develops a nasty sub-culture, an administrator may only see a single course of action – to delete the group. However, this final act of desperation doesn’t prevent former members from forming a brand new chat to continue the discussion.

Yet, despite this danger, WhatsApp remains the most effective way to have a conversation within a small to medium-sized group of people. It’s already your employees’ most popular app. Some companies try to counter its power by launching their own app. If you try this tactic, “Good luck!” Be prepared for staff to bypass it. Instead, they’ll discuss your attempts to take over their chats in their groups.

Your best bet? Accept WhatsApp’s role as today’s trusted, and most frequently used, channel of corporate communication between staff.

  1. Play the Role of Coach

If the channel is already out of your control, the best option is to provide workers with skills to use the platform effectively. Essentially, this “if you-can’t-beat-them-join-them” strategy is your way of spreading sound WhatsApp principles to others. You hope that they’ll act in ways that support the well-being of your employees.

This means that someone needs to become versed in the apps’ best practices, such as:

  • realizing that group chats are not the same as individual chats – once the number of participants grows beyond 10, a unique space is created.
  • setting up a moderator and establishing guidelines or rules of engagement.
  • developing a strategy for large groups, such as splitting it when the number of members reaches 100.

Where do these come from? This short list is based on my experience in regional WhatsApp groups of all sizes. Your company needs to develop its own insights in keeping with your policies and strategy.

The sad fact is, most companies don’t train their employees to be productive in either meetings or electronic messages (email and WhatsApp). The net effect? A ton of waste, even as these activities take up a reported 25-50% of employee time.

  1. Encourage Exception Reporting

Unfortunately, WhatsApp’s design encourages users to think of themselves as individuals, not corporate citizens. Therefore, they act in their own interests, first and foremost.

However, there’s another dimension which you must consider: the impact of online discussions on the entire staff. For example, when an employee quits, but doesn’t exit a WhatsApp group discussing sensitive company matters, everyone is affected.

Your organization should act to introduce this broader perspective.

In cyber-space, employees need to ask a new question: “What is best for all concerned?” In this context, someone can act to protect a fellow employee, a department or their entire company by intervening and alerting others when trouble is brewing.

The truth is, these are uncharted waters. Executives who ignore the powerful immediacy of WhatsApp Group communication are putting their heads in the sand, hoping it will go away. It won’t. Gear yourself and your staff for the new reality of remote work dominated by digital messaging at scale.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

WhatsApp Groups for Employee Engagement

In today’s COVID era, local companies have seen a dramatic rise in the use of WhatsApp groups among staff. It’s been a love/hate relationship for most, but online groups have become a critical channel of communication. Is your organization boosting employee engagement via these groups, or sitting by hoping the fad will die off?

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Overcoming the Flaw of Forgetting Tasks

Like most people, do you share the challenge of keeping track of your to-dos, especially during the holiday season? You may think it has something to do with your personality, but…surprise: it doesn’t. Here’s why.

We human beings have a flaw. When we make future commitments, we find them hard to track, manage, and trigger at the right instant. Consequently, quite often, we simply forget to do what we intend.

In fact, the further away in the future a tricky activity must be performed, the more likely it is to fall through the cracks. In those moments, we blame our memory, or psychology. We suspect it reflects a lack of personal motivation.

But the most effective professionals have found a way to recall tasks later, every time. But their performance has nothing to do with their mental ability or willpower. What can you do to be more like them?: flawless.

1. Forget About Using Memory

Some believe that the right answer is to cut down your commitments, but that isn’t a real solution for people of even average ambition. Don’t surrender. Instead, craft task management techniques which match your aspirations.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. First, you’ll have to undo mistakes you are making and untruths you were taught.

One mistake is to continue using your memory to track tasks. Why? Unless you have relaxed into a simple retirement, you are already committing to more tasks than you can recall. This is the direct outcome of being an engaged employee.

Unfortunately, your brain is no longer 11 years old. It cannot track tasks the way it once did, without help. Inside of a complex life, it doesn’t keep up.

Instead, give your memory the sack. Take away the job of tracking tasks and hire an external tool. You’ll stop complaining about the onset of early dementia, and, like the most accomplished professionals, your focus will shift.

When these exceptional individuals fail to manage their tasks, they talk about systemic issues instead of personality weaknesses. They know they use a system comprised of a range of paper and digital tools, and they are willing to upgrade it as needed to stay on top of a growing task volume.

As such, when there’s a failure, they change their system, rather than feeling guilty, or stupid.

Thus, they reverse a pernicious untruth. In school, we were shown that smart kids who did well on tests could remember everything; hence, their high marks. The irony is that, as an adult, the wise move is to do the opposite and stop using what’s called “prospective memory” for to-dos.

It’s fine to use “retrospective memory” to recall facts and figures. If you’re in the horse racing industry, don’t forget the number of yards in a furlong. You need this kind of memory to perform your job.

But when it comes to prospective memory, the best practice is to overturn what you were taught.

2. The Replacements

Once you make the commitment to unlearn the use of memory, don’t delay. Most start with a task or to-do list, usually written on paper. But nowadays, some of your younger colleagues are skipping over paper, going straight to a simple task app on their smartphones. So can you.

That should work for a while until you take on more tasks. Then, you should upgrade to a more powerful task management app. After that, with more growth, you will need to switch to using a calendar or even an auto-scheduler.

But these aren’t just matters of taste.

You should follow the described sequence in order to augment your capacity. To illustrate, think of a spoon as a device to transfer some soil. But if you want to move more earth, you should probably switch to a hand-trowel, shovel, wheelbarrow or tractor. Notice that each tool has greater capacity. But the “right” solution is the one that fits the job at hand.

The same applies to your choice of paper task list, simple task app, complex task app, digital calendar, auto-scheduler or trained administrative assistant. Once again, pick the right one from the lineup for your current circumstances. Then, keep an eye on early warning signs, which indicate it’s time to switch.

These aren’t common lessons taught in school. However, as quality task management becomes a hallmark of high professionalism, they are becoming widely accepted.

It’s ironic – the best memory for all your adult to-dos isn’t actually memory at all – not if you want perfection. Use a system that matches the depth of your commitments. In these tumultuous times, this is a terrific aspiration to create for 2022.

P.S. Registration is now open for the Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit coming up on March 3-5, 2022.

A Perfect Memory for Your ToDos

Like most people, do you share the challenge of keeping track of your to-dos, especially during the holiday season? You may think it has something to do with your personality, but…surprise: it doesn’t. Here’s why.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe