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Learning Long Term Planning from Tennis’ Williams Sisters

You know your company should be crafting long-term, post-COVID plans. Why? The pandemic has created once-in-a-lifetime opportunities waiting to be exploited. But you have been so busy just keeping the organization alive that you either have half-a-plan, or none at all. Should you make the investment in strategic planning now even though the times remain turbulent?

When Serena Williams won her first Wimbledon title, an interviewer asked her what surprised her about the experience. She answered – “Nothing.” When pressed, she added, “It was exactly what I had envisioned…since I was four years old.”

The casual listener would think this was mere chutzpah. Except that she was no ordinary tennis player. She was actually fulfilling the 20+ year, 78 page plan her father wrote before she was conceived.

But it wasn’t just a sport plan. The document covered Venus and Serena’s education, faith, family, responsibility, money…all aspects of their lives. It even inspired Naomi Osaka’s Haitian father to coach his daughter to the number one spot decades later.

Remarkably, the three champions have earned over US$180 million in their careers on the court. While some consider it to be all a matter of talent, the two coaches disagree. The success their daughters enjoy is due to advanced planning.

Like GraceKennedy’s 25-year plan and JMMB’s 23-year strategy, they were able to programme and accumulate small gains over time. While others focused on surviving the short-term, they were seen as crazy to create targets with dates so far into the future. Why did this unpopular approach work?

  1. Back from the Future

It takes skill and a dose of tenacity to stake a claim far into the future and make it stick. Even as Richard Williams had ribs broken and teeth knocked out by Compton gang members, he never relented.

Neither did Norman Manley and other heroes, each of whom lived “from the future”. This approach helped them sidestep creature comforts, sometimes putting them at risk.

Quote: “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” The Prince, by Machiavelli.

But those who do come from the future inspire themselves to make changes. They declare a stated vision and live from it. This makes them two-headed: able to live today, and in the future at the same time.

  1. Detailed Planning in Reverse

If your organization’s executives shy away from putting themselves in harm’s way, it could be a lack of courage. But it may also come from the lack of detailed planning.

While most teams know how to spout vacuous vagaries to be “world-class,” they rarely have a 20-year plan to do so. The shortage of specificity lets them off the hook.

But the truth is, there are numerous ways to craft detailed multi-year plans which work, even without a shred of college education (i.e. like Richard Williams.)

One method successful companies use is to:

a. Convert the vision for 15-30 years away into details to be accomplished by a set deadline.

b. Translate qualitative details into an array of metrics.

c. Backcast metrics from the target year to today.

d. Schedule staggered projects to drive the metrics.

These techniques are challenging to employ during an offsite meeting. But the detailed plan produced can galvanize an entire company because of its credibility.

  1. Stand Alone

In retrospect, Williams argued that he needed a meticulous plan due to the uncharted waters he was navigating. No-one had ever done the impossible.

Furthermore, the role models in the sport at the time were succeeding wildly following the traditional approach. He refused to follow their lead, causing many to accuse Williams of ruining his daughters’ prospects. “Stop being selfish,” they said.

In retrospect, his wisdom is apparent. Countless others have entered the women’s tennis circuit and burned out. Only a tiny handful have played as long as the sisters have.

Some say it’s all a result of the Williams’ “character”.

Again, he argues differently. While his family has lots of it, he says that having a clear plan helped them weather and repel the criticism of experts who publicly questioned his sanity.

In other words, a good plan helped the family to stay the course. They found it easy to decide next steps – simply stick to the plan. After all, it was easier to do so than develop the “character” needed.

In this context, families are just like organizations. There’s no plausible reason to put off long-term planning if your company is committed to high performance. Instead, take the challenge seriously and accomplish the impossible.

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Strategic Plan Implementation Reset

Your company is considering its next strategic planning retreat. But the last real one, held just before COVID, didn’t anticipate a pandemic. So, the plan had to be shelved. Now, attendees are reluctant to schedule a new session. Do you give up on the idea?

As a past attendee at strategic planning retreats, you have seen both big plans and grandiose commitments. However, you may never have seen these goals realized. Now, you remain a bit cynical.

“Take the same resources and invest them elsewhere”, you argue. But you harbour doubts about this idea. Here are three elements of strategic planning to consider so that implementation improves.

#1 – Big Decisions Don’t Make Themselves

In order to resolve a difficult strategic issue, there comes a critical moment when an executive team must make a final decision. The live occasion must include all the organization’s top leaders, armed with the best information possible. It’s the point of no return. “Argument done.”

The bigger the decision, the more intense the discussion, and the longer the deliberations can take. Why? The risk involved amps up expectations and fears.

Unlike lifesaving announcements to close offices to reduce infections, these big strategic decisions don’t make themselves. They require proactive, collective courage.

In this context, you shouldn’t use past failures (such as pre-pandemic plans) to avoid making critical decisions today. Why?

Consider the biggest, scariest decisions you don’t want to confront in your next retreat. For each day you delay, you make things worse for future stakeholders. In fact, they’ll probably look back and regret your indecision.

On the other hand, even a strategic plan which isn’t implemented fully can benefit the organization. Why? It represents a brave step closer to ultimate success.

#2 – Support New Micro-Behaviors

All strategic plans comprise both single actions versus slow, steady behavior changes.

For example, a single action may be the purchase of a new machine. This investment is relatively easy to implement.

However, slow, steady changes in habits or routines are much harder. And those which require a new mindset are even more difficult.

For the most part, organizations approach these behavioral changes as if they can be bought with financial incentives. Research shows that this is true, but only for a subset of work. In fact, more money leads to more output for simple, physical tasks.

However, knowledge workers don’t become smarter or more creative with better bonuses. A big raise does not foster better decision-making.

When these slow changes are called for in the strategic plan, it’s time for HR professionals to step up. Usually, they understand the culture of the organization. Using the latest change management theories, they can help teams craft realistic tactics…the kind which actually can be implemented by motivated people.

#3 – Tactics to Overcome Inertia

However, the strategy will require more than sound planning. Starting the day after the retreat, when the excitement has worn off, things will be tough.

By definition, attendees return to a world which does not support the new vision. Instead, it is filled with inertia, such as past email messages, which still need to be answered. Plus, each person’s calendar still reflects old priorities.

Finally, attendees are surrounded by folks who weren’t in the retreat and have old habits. They were perfectly tuned to meet the demands of a prior age and a now-obsolete performance review system.

Consequently, the change required at the individual level to support the new strategy is considerable. In fact, the likelihood of success can be predicted. Just look at the support provided to help individuals make the transformation needed. If they are left to their own devices, the inertia will lead to failure.

At this point, this isn’t an HR problem: it belongs to the entire organization. If this fact isn’t embraced, you can expect more of the same: a strategic plan which sits on the shelf, alongside all the others.

Taken by themselves, the three ideas I have provided are not big. But if you bring them together, they become a foundation strong enough to forge a new direction.

Such is the nature of game-changing strategic plans. They are painstakingly slow to put in place, but become an unstoppable force that employees in the distant future will see clearly, in retrospect.

As such, this isn’t about COVID-era, short-term survival tactics which are in such vogue today. Instead, it’s about future generations and the legacy they are left to contend with.

Herein lies the motivation needed to implement the most challenging changes and the most outrageous strategies. While success isn’t guaranteed, they’ll help your organization move past prior failures to accomplish a brand new future.

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.

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Is Your Company Being Led by a Great Strategist?

Each day you go into the office, you want to be inspired by your work. Elevated by what your organization can accomplish. But if that’s not your daily experience, does the quality of strategic leadership have something to do with it?

Perhaps you have seen the stories of companies led by executives with breathtaking strategies. These top teams produce game-changing innovations which revolutionize industries. Millions of lives are transformed. The likes of Facebook and Netflix displace also-rans who look stale by comparison, capturing hearts and minds in every corner of the world.

But when you compare what happens in these model organizations with your own, you see a big gap. Are you making an unfair contrast? Are the elements you focus on the right ones to examine? What are the naked truths you wish you could explain to your leaders if you had the chance?

  1. Bold Vision

COVID has led many CEO’s to limit the scope of what they say they want to achieve. Times are hard and uncertain, they admit, and things are changing too fast to think about big goals.

All they have is energy for survival. A vision would be a distraction.

Unfortunately, research shows they are likely to fail. Creating Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) is, according to Jim Collins and Jerry Porras of Built to Last fame, essential. Their comparison between companies that use BHAGs versus those which don’t is stark.

However, this doesn’t mean you should throw together yet another vision statement. In fact, these pronouncements can damage productivity if they are vague, undated and insulting to the average person’s intelligence. When employees deduce a lack of seriousness, such declarations destroy motivation.

Instead of nebulous promises to be “world class”, create the kind of vision that paints a clear picture of a single destination. This means it must have a date, and an unequivocal set of target metrics, at minimum.

  1. Feasible Pathway

BHAGs are an essential part of great strategies, but in 2022, they aren’t enough. We have become more immune to aspirational statements than we were in 1994 when Collins/Porras published their book. Why? Oftentimes they include little more than wishful thinking.

The way to bring corporate dreams into existence is to go deeper in the planning stages. How? Craft a credible pathway between today’s reality and the final destination.

This is no easy feat to accomplish. It takes a small team an intense effort to lay out a plan that covers 15-30 years. It gets complicated: within each time period, certain financial and operational milestones must be hit.

While there are projects introduced during this planning horizon that drive the numbers, these should be realistic. In fact, it pays to be conservative.

This powerful exercise forces teams to confront realities that otherwise would be ignored. For example, a client’s strategy called for entering Latin America in a big way. The price? Moving the company’s headquarters to Miami.

This was too heavy a tax to pay and the plan was moderated.

Another client required the acquisition of competitors. But the firm had never undertaken such an activity and would need to hire expensive specialists. It shelved the idea.

Weak strategists leave such details to others. To save face, they pretend to buy-in, which dooms the effort to failure.

  1. Customer Obsession

Who would think that Carnival revellers would pay more for amenities such as mobile bathrooms, cool-down mist and makeup facilities? Tribe Carnival from Trinidad and Tobago has introduced a slew of innovations like these ever since its inception. Over time, they have produced exponential growth for the business, even though it charges a premium.

In a similar manner, clients of JMMB swear by a comparable approach to innovation in its investment operations. Like Tribe, the company has a relentless focus on the customer that leads it to do things other institutions scoff at.

From a strategic point of view, few companies understand their customers well enough to innovate around their deepest unmet needs. Such in-depth study is simply too hard and expensive to undertake.

As such, they end up following the lead of competitors like Tribe and JMMB. But this is the coward’s approach to innovation…to copy what others are doing after it’s been proven to work.

If your company is being led by a strong strategist, expect to see a struggle to capture customers’ unspoken sentiments. Once these are defined, they should be driving every new product and process development. If no such link exists, the strategy is likely to be ordinary.

This list of three activities great strategists undertake is not exhaustive, but it is essential. Use it to judge how your company is being led (not just managed) and to distinguish if today’s actions are inspired by more than mere survival.

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Why Your Strategic Plan Needs a Deep Handshake Agreement

Have you ever played a part in crafting a useless strategic plan? You thought it was a good product, but it ended up languishing on the shelf or in unread email. However, you believed in the process followed, but something was missing… maybe from the final step which condemned the entire plan to the scrap heap.

As you near the season for developing your company’s strategic plan, you already know that engaging stakeholders is important. Getting everyone on the same page is the only way to implement the plan effectively. However, you may not realize that the final group handshake at your retreat isn’t a mere formality or nicety. Instead, it creates an emotional bond no participant should escape.

Compare this to the fond memories of a wedding. Most recall the fun. A wonderful ceremony. The party after. Delicious food. Engaging people you met.

But there’s only a single short segment that was essential. The vows between the bride and groom may be different each time, but the public promises they make are the ingredients which generate a permanent difference. Without it, the activity is not a wedding.

In the same spirit, a strategic planning retreat cannot skip over the ultimate promise attendees must make to each other. Dr Richard Rumelt from the Caribbean Strategy Conference calls it the “swearing-in ceremony.” (The phrase is borrowed from basic military training.) What makes this final activity – essentially a handshake agreement – so important?
1—It’s a Reckoning

A great retreat is an exercise in “managed disagreement.” Executives from different functions bring together disparate points of view. Collectively, they forge a future none of them could create by themselves.

When the planning horizon is 10-30 years out, profound conflicts are even more pronounced. They can only be resolved via in-depth discussions, including a heavy dose of individual give and take.

But the meeting is wasted if, at the end, everyone is not on the same page. This test cannot be left to a gut feeling. Instead, someone must be brave enough to publicly ask each attendee to commit to moving forward together. In other words, to make a vow equivalent to a wedding’s “I Do”. Or similar to an oath of office. Without this clarity, prepare to declare the meeting a failure. 

2 – It’s Not Compete Consensus

While it would be nice to get total agreement on every single point of the strategic plan, that’s not the best practice. If you follow that path, expect the event to drag on indefinitely. 

Why? A lone person with strong convictions could dominate and wreck the proceedings. 

The fact is, this isn’t a debate. Or a marriage. Or a competition. It’s a business activity intended to move the company forward. With hard realities looming outside the meeting room, the organization needs a plan to fulfill its potential.

The best practice involves the use of a lesser form of agreement…”Disagree-and-Commit.” In this method, which is ideal for time-limited activities like planning retreats, participants don’t need to resolve all their reservations. Instead, they are encouraged to keep them, but simultaneously join the group in moving forward.

This technique is usually taught at the start of the retreat, but its influence is fully realized at the very end. Before everyone departs, there needs to be no daylight between participants and the strategic plan so that a united team can implement it as one.

3 – Defang Backstabbers

This approach is also intended to take power away from those who sit back, waiting to say “I Told You So” at the first signs of failure. But the truth is, if such people exist at the end, the process was defective. At some level, they were excluded. 

Prevent this from happening by checking to see whether “Disagree-and- Commit” bonds are being formed during the retreat. Use your intuition to focus on those who seem to be withdrawn or disengaged.

Also, seek to forge solutions that combine the best elements of separate points of view. By the end, each component of the plan should be identified with the team, rather than any individual.

The bottom line is that the paragraphs and diagrams in the strategic plan don’t matter as much as the human element.

When the team hasn’t stepped up as a unit to make a visible, authentic commitment to the plan, you have nothing but empty words. The true test comes when people are alone in front of their laptops. Do they execute the strategic plan when they are tired, distracted, or just plain comfortable with the status quo?

Such moments are the ultimate proof that your final handshake agreement was authentic. Your plan is ready to be executed.

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Stop Conflating Budget with Strategy

Each year, managers in your company sit down to devise budgets for the next twelve months. As a participant in the process, you see that each department’s spending reflects certain priorities. Where do these come from? Are some correct in calling them “strategic”? Should they be reconciled in some way?

Managing costs has become a bigger priority than ever in these pandemic times. The best method of control? It’s nothing new: negotiate budgets with your department managers. Then, hold them to account.

There is no question that this process works. It sets expectations and regulates purchases. In fact, some companies use the terms “budget” and “revenue targets” interchangeably in a nod to its universal acceptance.

However, as negotiations proceed each year, inevitable questions arise. Each department appears to be operating from its own background assumptions. Where did they come from? And what strategy is the unit pursuing? Is it related to the overall corporate plan?

Perhaps you are like many managers who notice these discrepancies. They exist, but you want them to disappear. The answer? Pull together a single “strategic plan” which covers all the budgets at the same time. Towards that end, a mandatory retreat is announced.

While this reasoning may appear sound, it’s often deeply flawed. A budget should not be conflated with a corporate strategy for many reasons. Why? Here are just a few.

Reason #1 – Required Budget vs Optional Strategy

In terms of immediate threats to your business, a broken budget process is a huge risk. Why? Compared to the existence of a strategic plan, a busted budget can cause cash to run out.

Consequently, managers who disregard budgets are likely to face severe sanctions. By contrast, when you ignore the strategic plan, you are probably safe in the majority. After all, it only serves long-term interests.

This is just human nature. We pay more attention to our anxieties than long-term concerns. In this context, strategic planning becomes a nice-to-have business activity which adds little real value. When a retreat is not scheduled, nothing changes from one day to the next.

Reason #2 – Strategy as an Afterthought

Your company may be like many. It only thinks about strategic matters when the fear of competition or disruption arises. The trigger might be a case study of failures, such as Kodak or Blackberry. Or a competitor’s advertisement for a new feature you didn’t even know existed.

In these moments, it becomes obvious: strategy matters. In fact, the right strategy probably earned your company the success and stability it experiences today. Someone had a vision of where the company should go.

However, history often reverses itself. I have led many corporate retreats in which the strategic planning activity was scheduled after the budgets were completed. They were merely last-ditch attempts to reconcile different points of view.

Today, the danger in leaving strategy as an after-thought is that your company might be heading into extinction without knowing it.

If you are a top executive, you may not be detecting slow changes underway in your industry. By focusing on budgets before strategies, you fail to scan the horizon for changes before setting priorities. This mistake renders the entire budgetary exercise impotent – a shuffling of the chairs on the Titanic.

But there’s no need to wait for a scare. Instead, examine your current strategic plan. A timeframe of five years or fewer is probably just an update of prior documents. It’s Business-As-Usual, plus some small changes.

If incremental improvements are all that’s expected, get everyone excited about producing a disruptive strategic plan instead.

Reason #3 – Game-Changing Results Become Impossible

Unfortunately, while your company rides on decisions made long ago, the world has continued to change. Before long, competitors will notice your slow-moving ways, leading them to look for disruptive ideas and technologies.

As they climb the learning curve, they anticipate transformations which build on each other. A dramatically different future comes into focus.

Such was the case of Apple’s iPhone division, and much closer to home, Digicel. By the end, thousands lost their jobs as the incumbents’ leaders failed to set a new direction.

If you’re interested in a new paradigm, consider the advice of Dr. Richard Rumelt from the recent Caribbean Strategy Conference.

He recommended that companies decouple budgetary and strategic activities. How? Ensure that they don’t follow the same annual cycle. Break them apart.

At the conference, we also learned to dream big by asking your team to contemplate 15 and 30 year scenarios. What does your company want to happen in decades to come?

Approaching your strategic planning in these new ways can preserve the integrity of the process. It might even keep your company from destruction.

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Change the Perception of HR in Strategic Planning

For years, HR Professionals have lobbied: they must have a seat at the strategic planning table. Now, many companies agree. However, HR’s impact in retreats has not matched those of other functions. What can your company do to ensure talent management isn’t an after-thought?

Today, most Human Resource units have evolved well past the old “Personnel Departments”. Almost all executives in your organization are in support.

But it’s not enough. In two decades of facilitating strategic planning retreats, I have noticed a trend. The least effective participants are often HR Professionals.

I don’t say this lightly. Nor would I apply my observation to every situation I have encountered. But there is definitely a recurring pattern of behavior.

For example, when the HR Director makes his/her presentation, colleagues regularly stop paying attention. To them, nothing earth-shattering will be shared. They relax, sometimes get bored and may even leave the room altogether for busywork.

Also, from start to finish, the HR manager is likely to be the most quiet person. Sometimes, he/she could come alive near the very end, but it’s too little too late.

Instead of missing the chance, how can you ensure HR steps up from the first minute?

  1. Be Strategic Before the Retreat

In general, many executives bemoan the fact that HR is too reactive. While this is a criticism, it translates to a great opportunity for improvement. For example, HR can establish itself at the forefront of strategic questions between retreats, perhaps focusing on the potential of human capital.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a wildly successful strategy that doesn’t involve human creation and execution. It’s not luck. Ingenuity, data analytics, foresight, business modelling, backcasting, deep listening – these are just a few of the skills needed to produce a game-changing plan.

Also, most non-HR executives can’t assess the capacity of an entire workforce. But HR professionals naturally ask: “What specific future can this potential be used to accomplish?”

If you’re in HR, this is an inquiry to be led throughout the year, building an awareness of the organization’s human capability map.

While it’s obvious that talented thinking creates strategy, other executives struggle to articulate what this means operationally. As such, the company desperately needs HR to drive this conversation.

  1. Be Data-Driven

Whereas a CFO is trained to think in terms of numbers, the same isn’t usually true of HR. As such, reviews of past financial results take up an inordinate amount of time. However, they are all about a history, telling stories about what has already happened.

By contrast, HR professionals can be all about the future. But you must use numbers to describe it.

Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment at a retreat, HR’s lack of data forces it into vague, qualitative measures which colleagues have a hard time grasping.

In a prior column in Nov 2021, I argued that CEOs and other executives are upset at this fact. They want HR to catch up to the analytics train, but it’s not for charity’s sake.

Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of CEOs, Chairpersons and MDs have HR backgrounds. Even though most of their work involves people, these skills only become important late in their careers.

As such, they need HR analytics and dashboards, tools and summaries to appreciate what’s happening with their people. Sadly, most HR managers don’t give them what they want.

If you’re an HR Professional, consider becoming data-driven long before the retreat so that you can shine in the event. I have seen it done to great effect and the result was stunning.

In this context, a retreat is more like the grand finale – the finish line of a lengthy race.

  1. Lead Analysis, Not Follow

The presence of data gives HR deep insights others miss. This would reverse the trend in which HR is the short discussion at the end of the retreat…the afterthought.

Instead, as an HR Professional, you can develop your ability to define different futures and advocate for them. With this information in hand, you alone can speak to gaps in staff capacity and the cost of filling them. In this context, HR is like the manager of a modern sports team, as depicted by the movie MoneyBall. It’s a baseball story, but a similar transformation has occurred in football and cricket.

If you had the detailed information top coaches have, every conversation about company strategy would start with such analytics. HR would be the chief interpreters of people’s capacity.

In these ways, HR moves from a back bench into the foreground, returning organizations to their original people power, altering the prior perception for good.

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Stop Ignoring the Next Technology Disruption

Your industry may be the same as it was 50 years ago. Change comes slowly, if at all, so your future appears to be secure. But you’re worried, anyway. As you look around the world you see entire sectors in upheaval. New technology has led to companies being “Netflixed” – completely destroyed with sudden speed by outside innovations.

How can you be sure that won’t happen to your organization?

The fact is, you can’t prevent such external forces. Somewhere, bright people are invisibly trying out fresh ideas, experimenting. They intend to revolutionize and displace whatever product or service you offer. More recently, COVID has shown just how small the earth is, and how vulnerable we are in the Caribbean. Your company isn’t safe, and the barriers that kept competition away are falling faster each day.

In the face of increased risk, how do you respond? Some are fatalistic, believing that you can’t stop a hurricane, epidemic or technology from upsetting the best -made plans. However, if your organization intends to do more than put its head in the sand, here are some steps to follow.

  1. Plan Scenarios

If you can divine the small beginnings of a disruptive technology, congratulations. You’re halfway there. If you can’t, start looking by scouring the trade press.

Also tune into what younger staff are seeing and saying. They could be closer to determining the outlook than you are. Why? They’ll be the ones who will deal with it. In fact, if they sense a disruption, expect them to test your leadership team. “Do these executives even have a clue?” they may ask. When they conclude the worst, they’ll leave.

Use these inklings to capture future scenarios for your organization. Go out at least 20 years and see what happens when different possibilities play out. For the ones which are most likely, craft a single preferred outcome. Then, backcast to this year to determine what your short-term actions should be.

But sometimes this won’t work.

I have seen teams realize: “The company has no future.” Like the old photo film industry, they realized that the tides are turning for good, and they need an escape plan. Working harder would just deepen their dependency, as it did for Kodak. Today, its rival Fuji is thriving in entirely new lines of business while Kodak is defunct.

  1. Get the Timing Right

Another lesson which emerged from the Fuji vs. Kodak battle is the fact that the latter invested in bad bets.

Some believe Kodak didn’t foresee the advent of digital photography, but a closer look at the record shows otherwise. They were one of the first to predict that the technology would replace their more profitable film business.

However, their response to the threat was mistaken. They invested in digital kiosks around the world, mostly in shopping centres. Their belief? Customers wanted to make prints in a convenient location.

They were correct, but they missed the growth of desktop computing. Customers shifted to managing their photos at home, powered by computers and printers built by HP, Compaq and Apple.

Unfortunately, Kodak’s timing was wrong. Their strategy failed.

The best solution to this problem? Bring in a wide range of team members to craft your plans. This task is too difficult to be left to a single individual, even if he is the company founder and a certified genius.

  1. Focus on Todays’ Implementation

Even if you capture the perfect plan for the next disruption, it’s easy to be swallowed up by today’s emergency. No surprise: your organization isn’t designed to adopt unfamiliar ways of doing things.

For example, the day after the retreat, the easiest thing someone can do is go back to what they were doing before. After all, their calendar looks the same, email messages haven’t gone away and the same meetings are scheduled.

Consequently, internal processes don’t change. Projects fail to be launched. Strategic initiatives never leave the retreat.

It takes incredible energy to bring about such a transformation and Caribbean people won’t switch if they don’t know why they must. In other words, just being told to do something different will not work.

Instead, company leaders should win over hearts and minds. They need to inspire staff to see the reasons why change is imperative and urgent. But this is no one-time task: it requires constant reinforcement and performance management.

In summary, the real villain isn’t innovative technology but your company’s ineffective response. Delay these three actions and you’ll probably fall behind, never able to catch up.

The upside is that these steps are within your control and will prepare you for the introduction of a new technology that threatens to “Netflix” your company into oblivion.

Francis Wade is the host of the Caribbean Strategy Conference on June 23-25. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

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How to Sell a Disruption to Your Executives

You’re the member of an executive suite who has battled the COVID-19 pandemic alongside your colleagues. As the world adjusts to accommodate the virus, it’s high time to look beyond the mere survival of your company. But…surprise! Not everyone on the senior team or board agrees this is urgent. Do you garner full support first or power ahead, hoping laggards will catch up later?

Now that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, most leaders are ready to move past survival mode. Today, companies must thrive in waters churned up by COVID-19, inflationary recession, armed conflict and unsteady supply chains.

However, a few visionary managers have outgrown a yearning for the old normal. Some are convinced that customer behavior has changed…permanently. They also expect new competitors to attack from anywhere in the world.

In their minds, there is no going back. They see once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to transform everything by moving forward.

However, their impatience to seize the future and disrupt their markets isn’t shared by all their fellow leaders. Board members, executives and senior managers are showing a mixed bag of commitment and reluctance. Why can’t they see the obvious?

  1. They are stuck in short-term habits

Disruptive thinking requires an ability to think in the long-term. But the past few years have prioritized short term, firefighting skills. Many corporate leaders have thrived by learning how to set everything aside, other than the bare essentials. In this emergency mode, they have adapted by becoming hyper-alert, flexible and willing to exert a great deal of energy at a moment’s notice.

But it’s not enough. In fact, their transition up the organizational ladder requires more strategic thinking, not less.

The bad news is that these skills aren’t taught, nor is their need emphasized. Consequently, you find top executives and even board members silent in strategic planning retreats. While they can rally to any emergency, they lack the practice of asking themselves: “Where is the organization headed?” They become the kind of leaders who win battles, but lose wars.

However, it’s never too late for a reboot. Long before your next planning session, create opportunities in meetings at all levels to explore strategic choices. These discussions should help develop staff’s willingness to think in both short- and long-term dimensions at the same time. This crucial skill will make its way into the culture of the organization, preparing it for later disruptions.

  1. They lack the skill of precise long-term planning

Newly promoted executives discover that an enthusiasm to be strategic is just the beginning. For example, in the middle of a retreat, when they are asked to create a detailed 20 and 30 year plan, they balk: “I can only think five years out.” Or, “Things are changing too quickly to look that far ahead.”

Too many leaders assume that because they can’t see how long-term planning works, it must not be possible.

When shown multiple examples of successful cases, their resistance softens, but the point is not to change their minds. It’s much more important to give them the necessary skill of long-term planning.

Unfortunately, even the best business schools only hint at this capability. If you’re an MBA, you may recall courses on strategic planning. But the case method of discussion which most use isn’t intended to teach you actual steps. That comes from real-life, and some lucky exposure.

However, the process is easy enough to follow, even for skeptical team members. In prior columns, I have laid out the steps in detail. Observe them, and you will have a skill which can be yours forever.

Don’t ignore the need to develop this competence among your leaders.

  1. They won’t collaborate

If you’re a top executive, you probably hate the occasions when you have to force people to act. At most, you receive grudging compliance. But you don’t get true understanding or intrinsic motivation, i.e. buy-in. Therefore, you feel forced to micro-manage.

Nevertheless, you won’t produce a disruptive strategy following this method. Why? A lasting, game-changing plan is beyond the brilliance of a single individual. Instead, it takes a multi-disciplinary team to envision the breakthrough and implement it together.

While a collaborative approach requires more time and interpersonal skills, it’s the only one which is sustainable. Selling a disruption to teammates calls for extraordinary capabilities, but these aren’t ordinary times. The remaining months of 2023 are a chance to separate your company from the Blackberrys in your industry…the failures. Make the most of it by including your colleagues from the very beginning in a smart way.

Francis Wade is the host of the Caribbean Strategy Conference on June 23-25. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

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Getting Everyone Aboard the Strategy Development Train

Your company is one which builds its strategic plan around an individual’s ideas. But even if the “Big Man” is a brilliant entrepreneur-founder, is it a good idea to include a host of other stakeholders in the process? If the current method isn’t obviously broken, why fix it?

Some argue: if a strategic plan is little more than words, who cares how they were written? This popular sentiment leads companies to assemble plans in a hurry, including as few people as possible. After all, “too many cooks spoil the broth”. And there’s always time to convince board members and staff that the soup tastes great…after the fact.

However, if you are interested in a more inclusive way, here are some methods. They promise a better product and a greater chance of success.

Missing Board Members

In some organizations, the board is excluded from strategic planning activities. Once the final product is completed, they are expected to offer cursory comments, if any.

This approach undermines advisors who have the time and wisdom to think about the big picture: the future of the organization. Untethered from the daily grind, boards are well-suited to consider PESTER forces: Political, Environmental, Social, Technological, Economy and Regulatory/Legal.

If they aren’t capable of this analysis, uninterested, or not permitted…then ask: “Why bother with a board?”

In both private and public sectors, this hard question is rarely asked. Consequently, some board members take a passive approach, failing to show up at meetings and retreats. Their abysmal performance goes unchecked, hidden under a veneer of collegial “blighs”. Friendship trumps stewardship, to the detriment of all concerned.

Instead, have a board which exhibits the highest standard. Or have none at all.

Checked-out Executives

Your senior managers are probably the best result-producers in your company. Why? After all, their track records helped them climb the corporate ladder.

However, these skills have little to do with strategic planning. As such, they feel uncomfortably ill-equipped to think for the long-term. Also, organization-wide cause-and-effect relationships are hard to grasp. Plus, there’s never enough data to make easy decisions and set targets.

They would gladly skip this year’s retreat and leave the whole awkward business to the founder/Big Boss. She can do the heavy lifting. All they need to do is provide a quick blessing once the dust has settled.

In simpler times, with a small organization, this may have worked. Unfortunately, today’s complex COVID-era challenges require more. The full team, with its wide range of skills and experiences, must bring all it can muster to the activity.

Given the fact that your company should be developing a game-changing strategy for 2023, it’s folly to disengage the best minds. Instead, help stakeholders to embrace their incompetence in this area and start learning.

Uninterested Staff

Jamaican executives are often dismayed at their staff’s reaction to the announcement of their grand strategy. First there is silence, followed by a seeming lack of curiosity. No questions are asked, and most employees seem happy to delegate 100% ownership (and blame) to the organization’s leaders.

The conclusion senior managers draw is that staff is disengaged.

That may not be the best interpretation. Consider that the typical non-executive spends most of his/her time on daily tactics. Unfortunately, when faced with questions about the strategic future of the company, they flounder.

The general remedy might be the same for board, executive and staff: engage them all at the start of the process. Conduct open sessions defining the challenges the organization faces. Use PESTER to describe the environment. Ask for stories about competitors, especially if they are indirect, or based outside the Caribbean.

Arrange interviews, focus groups and online surveys to ensure these three levels consider the future and the cost of inaction. At one level, you are asking for their input. But at another, you are sharing responsibility.

Now, your planning retreat becomes more than a mere meeting. It’s a venue to place bets about the future of your enterprise. While it’s not as random as a casino, you need everyone’s best thinking to come together to make the most of your industry’s uncertainty.

This task is so hard that many organizations skip the exercise altogether. They hope that the status quo should suffice. By contrast, leading companies embrace the challenge. They don’t shrink away, but see their courage as a competitive advantage.

Winston Churchill said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” You may not have a country to defend against Nazis, but your stakeholders will need to do some heavy lifting. It’s the only way to bring everyone onto the same page.

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Why 5-Year Plans Aren’t Strategic. They’re Dangerous

Almost all corporate plans cover the next five years. However, many companies go not a single month further. In other words, they survive on one five-year plan after another. If you have ever questioned the wisdom of this practice, keep reading.

Your strategic planning team meets and decides to limit its time horizon to only five years. Why? “It’s too hard to know what will happen in the future.” It’s true. The past two years have brought COVID, the recession, a war and other rude surprises. Companies’ best intentions lay in tatters.

Given the amount of change we have experienced, some say it’s folly to think past the short-term. In their mind, leaders will be so wrong about the future that it makes no sense to think too far out. The idea seems perilous.

If your managers are thinking along these lines, they aren’t alone. Around the world, the focus of attention has been on survival tactics. They keep the top line viable, limit costs, micro-manage workers performing their duties and secure supply chains.

Why then, should your company consider the creation of a new long-term plan? Here are three reasons we have gleaned in two decades of experience with clients who craft 15-30 year plans.

= Your 5-Year Plan is Just a Dull Revision

If your executive team is like many, it may be “mailing in” the strategic plan. In a half-hearted effort and minor revisions, the old plan merely becomes the new one.

Your Pre-COVID thinking is fully preserved.

This contrasts with the best companies, which are undertaking a fundamental re-think. They realize that more changes have taken place in two pandemic years than in the prior 20, shifting the underlying unmet needs of customers.

Furthermore, competitors are using the opportunity to craft “Blue Ocean” spaces which have never existed before. Consider the way Digicel entered the mobile phone market in 2001. Inside the walls of the incumbent, C&W leadership fought the notion of a pent-up demand for cell phones. The long lines on the first day of free competition propelled the new entrant to regional prominence.

If your company is too busy or lacks the energy to do a rethink, prepare for its own rude surprise.

= Your 5-Year Plan is For You, Not Them

While the Great Resignation is slow to reach the Caribbean, this hasn’t stopped the Big Disengagement. Your most talented and accomplished employees are withholding discretionary effort, searching for outside opportunities, and starting side-hustles in the meantime. Their faces are on the screen, but their dreams lie elsewhere.

However, when you announce a fresh strategy, their ears perk up. They want to see whether or not there is something worth staying around for.

Unfortunately, if all they hear is a “new” five-year plan, they will accelerate their plans to leave. It’s written proof: the company’s leaders are just as clueless as they suspected. And self-serving.

The fact is, a long-term strategic plan signals that the future is being secured by savvy creativity, rather than lost by selfish short-sight. It could craft a legacy to be celebrated.

= Your 5-Year Plan Ignores Technology Trends

The whole point of planning for a long horizon is to place intelligent bets now that shape the future. Understanding technology trends helps you do so effectively.

In your industry, these transformations have probably accelerated due to COVID. Companies who have accepted this fact and planned accordingly, are thriving. By contrast, the laggards are stuck teaching their employees how to use Excel and PowerPoint in face-to-face classrooms. They already failed. Perhaps they believed that the digital future would take care of itself.

Today, you know the truth. Organizations which fail to invest in younger, digitally savvy talent will reap the sour fruit of stale thinking. Their strategies won’t disrupt their industries.

This isn’t to say that it’s easy to create a 30-year strategic plan. However, some believe it can be captured in a nebulous vision statement.

Unfortunately, in today’s fast-moving world, these pronouncements arouse the suspicion of staff. Fancy words aren’t enough. Without a roadmap, they simply won’t trust grandiose statements which have no foundation.

To carve a credible route, adopt tools like back casting and the Merlin Process to connect the future to today. Yes…people want Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG’s), but they must be grounded in feasible logic.

The timing may be right for you to create more than a mere five-year plan. It could exploit opportunities which, perhaps for a limited time, beckon your organization to achieve great things. It’s the best way to stay out of danger.

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.