The Association Renewal Blog

Tired of Strategic Planning?

Virgil Carter points to two great articles over on his post on the Acronym blog. They are from McKinsey, so to read them you have to register, but you can do that for free (I think it’s worth it!).

The first article is about biases in strategic decision making, but my favorite is the second article, titled “Tired of Strategic Planning” (amen!). Although their focus is on corporate strategic planning, Eric Beinhocker and Sarah Kaplan have some words of wisdom for association execs too. They point out that CEOs themselves recognize the mismatch between the intention of strategic planning and the result. Instead of actually preparing executives to face the strategic uncertainties ahead, it

frequently amounts to little more than a stage on which business unite leaders present warmed-over updates of last year’s presentations, take few risks in broaching new ideas, and strive above all to avoid embarrassment.

The authors suggest that strategic planning processes should do two things instead. First, prepare decision makers in organizations (which is everyone, by the way) to make better strategic decisions on the fly, because that’s where strategy is really made. Second, generate some creativity in strategic thinking and acting, because traditional processes tend to squeeze out creativity.

I think these are critical points, and traditional strategic planning fails to address them adequately.

In terms of preparing decision makers, the authors suggest that you must get a number of critical details right in your planning process in order to effectively prepare decision makers to be more strategic.

• Get the right people at the table
• Spend the right amount of time on it (more than you do now)
• Separate strategy conversations from budget conversations
• Those who implement must be part of the conversation
• The culture and tone of the conversation is critical

What I love about their points is that not once to they mention a plan. Strategic planning in associations is above all about the plan, and that is a huge problem. Strategy must be about the conversation (as all the above points are). You can do your planning too, but that is different work than the work of strategy. A lot of people in the association community are figuring out that they need better strategic conversations, but they then go back to their PLANNING process and try to reconfigure it to be more strategic (strategic planning 2.0—yuck!). I think this is a waste of time. There is so much more room for improvement simply in the way your organization has conversations about strategy. Once you make those improvements, it will be easy to shift your planning process to incorporate the increased strategic capacity. But don’t start with the planning. That’s the part we are already pretty good at.

Plans and Blinders

Jason at the Signals v. Noise blog has an interesting post about how much he dislikes plans. I particularly like the point he makes about plans becoming “blinders.”

Opportunities are spontaneous, but when you’re sticking to your five year plan you don’t deviate. You’re putting the blinders on. “This is where we’re going because that’s what we said!” When you don’t have a plan you can pick up on an opportunity that comes along. You’re taking the blinders off. “This is where we’re going because it makes sense today.” I’d rather stroll into the future with my blinders off.

Of course it all depends on what you’re doing. Boeing probably needs a pretty stiff plan when building a new airplane. NASA needs to plan rocket launches many years in advance. If you want to be a doctor you’ll need a longer-term educational plan. But most businesses most of the time could benefit by just keeping their eyes open, being aware of what’s going on now, focusing on the basics that will be important to their customers today and tomorrow, and not looking too far ahead.

Silent Auction: Coping with "SD"

ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership put on a silent auction each year, which closes during the Annual Meeting. Once again Jeff and I have donated a consulting package to be auctioned off, benefiting the Center. This year we are donating a one-day workshop on Strategy for an Association’s Board and/or staff. This is NOT a strategic planning session (but you knew that)! Jeff and I will work with the winner to explore their strategic capacity and discuss what it takes to design and execute a great strategy in today’s changing environment.

You can read about the prize at the auction site (I encourage you to read the description—if nothing else it will remind you that everyone needs to laugh now and again).

There are lots of great prizes in the auction. David Gammel is giving away some consulting, Jeff is donating one on behalf of Principled Innovation LLC, and I have one under Notter Consulting as well.

Learning

Guy Kawasaki has an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer on his new book, What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management. I like a lot of what he has to say, but one question and answer made an important point about strategic capacity:

Question: What can companies do to get smarter?

Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.
Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.

One of the cornerstones of strategic capacity is “Learning by Doing.” It seems so simple, yet we don’t actually do it, so that’s why Pfeffer has to point it out.

Most strategic planning processes are biased against both experimentation and learning. Once you break up the plan into your functional areas, you realize that most of your resources will go into just getting the basics done. Maybe next year we’ll have that fund for experiments. You don’t learn that way. And I’m not sure that the way we add metrics to our strategic plans actually contributes to learning. Is that really self-reflection?

Seeking the Relevant, But Not the Obvious

I have a couple of posts on my blog about an article by Roger Martin (whose articles have generated posts on this blog before). There are some nice comments over there too. His article talks about a new way of thinking that he says successful leaders have in common—one that is integrative.

When he compares conventional thinking with integrative thinking, he lays out a process, the first step of which is “determining salience.” Conventional thinkers “focus only on obviously relevant factors,” while integrative thinkers “seek less obvious but potentially relevant factors.”

That point reminded me of traditional strategic planning for associations. One of the cornerstones of strategic capacity that Jeff and I are currently writing about is creative foresight, and I think Martin’s point about looking for less obvious but still relevant factors is in line with what we are talking about. You can’t come up with effective strategies by looking at the same old issues over and over again. Creativity isn’t about drawing pretty pictures. It’s about thinking more broadly.