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.

Comments

[Jason]

My company, which is relatively new, has spent the previous 2 fiscal years spinning our wheels during the annual strategic planning process, much like you describe above. We did some research and found some strategic planning software, which we are hoping will reduce the churn we've seen previously as well as assisting us in having meaningfull planning conversations. The site is http://www.mystrategicplan.com. I'd appreciate your feedback if you have any on these folks.
Thanks,
Jason