The Association Renewal Blog

The Myth of Limited Options

One of our complaints about strategic planning is that it generates weak strategy. How many associations out there could sum up their current strategy as “last year plus three percent.” Too many.

Of course, we’ve also actually heard an association exec say “Yeah, but how much innovation do we need in the association community? We know what our work is: meetings, education, advocacy, etc.”

This lack of creativity is criminal!

I was reminded of this in reading a post on the Signals v. Noise blog. Their post was about web design, and the frustration they have with people who copy their designs (and then give a similar excuse: “well, there are only so many ways to design a web page.”).

They debunk that myth with the following image.

View this photo

The wristwatch is a very simple thing to design, with very specific limitations and parameters. But design flourishes. As Jason says in the post:

As a web designer you have a lot more options and variables and possibilities than a watch designer. Build something that’s yours. Make something you can call your own. Make your own mark. Cut the excuses and be a designer.

Feel free to substitute the word “leader” for “designer” in that last sentence.

More on Strategy versus Planning

Richard Rumelt is a professor at UCLA, and he has some interesting things to say about strategic planning in an interview with McKinsey quarterly:

Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection. Calling this strategic planning creates false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy.

Look, plans are essential management tools. Take, for example, a rapidly growing retail chain, which needs a plan to guide property acquisition, construction, training, et cetera. This plan coordinates the deployment of resources—but it’s not strategy. These resource budgets simply cannot deliver what senior managers want: a pathway to substantially higher performance.

There are only two ways to get that. One, you can invent your way to success. Unfortunately, you can’t count on that. The second path is to exploit some change in your environment—in technology, consumer tastes, laws, resource prices, or competitive behavior—and ride that change with quickness and skill. This second path is how most successful companies make it. Changes, however, don’t come along in nice annual packages, so the need for strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.

Now, lots of people think the solution to the strategic-planning problem is to inject more strategy into the annual process. But I disagree. I think the annual rolling resource budget should be separate from strategy work. So my basic recommendation is to do two things: avoid the label “strategic plan”—call those budgets “long-term resource plans”—and start a separate, nonannual, opportunity-driven process for strategy work.

I think there is room for annual strategy work processes as well, but I agree you need an established opportunity-driven process. Too many associations, unfortunately, have neither. They only do planning.

Why do we Mock a "Best Practice?"

I am back from the ASAE & The Center Annual Meeting in Chicago, and for the second time in three years, ASAE’s entertaining plenary session production mocked strategic planning. In Nashville, they used a country-music theme (“Strategic Plan” to the tune of Stand By Your Man), and this year it was Broadway musical theme, but the result is the same: we all laughed at traditional strategic planning processes. Yet when we are serious (say, in a session), strategic planning becomes a “best practice.”

This does not make sense. Strategic planning cannot be a farce and a best practice at the same time. I think we need to make up our minds about this.

There was one interesting discussion about this in Chicago: Jeff and Bob Rich (of the American Chemical Society) and Jolene Knapp (of the Society for College and University Planning) led a discussion in the CAE lounge titled “Strategic Planning: Dead or Alive.” You can guess which side Jeff and I were on.

One thing I learned at this session was some insight into the mindset of those who stand by strategic planning. When they mock strategic planning, they are apparently mocking the “old style” strategic planning—the kind that was slow, too rigid, or overemphasized the document. The “new” version, of course, has solved these problems. When Jeff and I talk about a different approach to the work of strategy, the other side simply says “that’s what we do, but we call it strategic planning; the terminology doesn’t really matter.”

Wrong. The terminology matters a lot. I appreciate the efforts of those who try to make their strategic planning processes more effective. Bob Rich, for instance, talked about interesting things he was doing with technology to get broader input from members for ACS’s planning process. I’m all for broader participation.

But as long as the process is “strategic planning,” it will be doomed to mediocrity (that is, it will produce mediocre strategies). The work of strategy and the work of planning are fundamentally different. When we “bolt” them together, we can’t help but focus on the planning part, and the strategy part suffers. That is why association strategies are so…uninspiring. As I said at that meeting, most association strategies are, essentially, “what we did last year plus three percent.” They choose flowery language like “Member value Initiatives,” but it’s the same stuff. That is what you get when you turn strategy work into planning work.

I think we need to refocus our attention onto the REAL work of strategy, and we need to separate the work of strategy from the work of planning (note: I’m not abandoning planning. Planning is good. It’s just not the work of strategy). If we can start doing the work of strategy more effectively and create effective feedback loops with our planning work (instead of bolting them together), I think we’ll start to see greater growth in the association community.

Strategy and Discipline

There is an interview in HBR with Katsuaki Watanabe, who is the head of Toyota (I blogged about it on my blog too). Toyota is a role model when it comes to clarity of strategy, in my opinion.

During the interview, Watanabe was asked about managing the short time horizon, where many people make hundreds of decisions every day to improve things, and the long-term, where the company grows steadily and patiently. His response:

I don’t believe the two rhythms are different. Once you indicate the direction in which the company should move, and as long as you have that direction right, you can leave other people to do the things that are necessary to get there. When people are heading in the right direction, the small movements and the major ones will stay aligned. In fact, the small changes are linked to the big changes; the people making all those small decisions together make the major movements possible…. There’s no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little it and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.

Tom Peters just gets it

Check out these two posts from Tom, written in the last two days:

The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan

First There Was The Word.  And The Word Was "Non-linear."

Tom's money quote for today's post, taken from Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning :  "Strategic plans work wonderfully ... when you don't need them, when tomorrow unfolds as a natural extension of today. They are useless, or even detrimental, when you do need them—in discontinuous times."

Amen.