My Approach to Strategic Planning

My methodology is founded in a military planning process, but has been adapted to the needs of non-military companies, organizations and nonprofits.

• Gathering the right people
• Taking a disciplined approach
• Asking and answering the right questions
• Synthesizing the work into a strategic plan
• Assessing the progress

Gathering the Right People for the Strategic Planning Committee:

Gathering the right people is essential to developing a holistic plan that will lead to success. If leaders create a strategic plan in a vacuum, they will miss the blind spots and opportunities that the employees experience on a day to day basis. This leads to a plan with no buy-in from the larger organization. If too many people are involved in the process, it can cause the planning effort to slow to a crawl as consensus becomes the enemy of moving forward. If your organization has a Board of Advisors/Directors, these individuals can bring very experienced insight into the planning process. Many boards establish a governance committee or some other task force that will or should be focused on your organization’s plan. Along with the “right people” there is front end homework that must be accomplished. Is there a current plan and are all the participants familiar with it? Many organizations conduct a SWOT analysis. What are our Strengths, Weaknesses,Opportunities and Threats? This is essential in helping the group start on the same page.

Taking a Discipline Approach:

Using a disciplined approach helps keep the effort focused. My participation in your process will be one of guiding a collaborative effort to ensure we stay on the right path while allowing inputs from all the members involved. Without discipline, you will find lots of good ideas or actions that could be taken, but they are not tied to overarching goals and objectives. In order to clearly identify your goals, you need to revisit your vision and the mission of the organization. 

Asking and Answering the Right Questions:

• What is the purpose of the organization?
• What does success look like three to five years from now?
• Where are we starting from? 
• What are the major goals that will help to achieve that success?
• What are the objectives for each of those goals?

Synthesizing the Work into a Strategic Plan:

Now, all the great ideas from the strategic planning committee can be examined to see where they fit within the goals and objectives. These ideas can be called action items, strategies or tasks.  This is where the leadership and the staff really solidify the implementation of the plan: assigning responsibilities, timelines and resources. 

Assessing the Progress:

Finally, you need a mechanism or a process for assessing the progress once the plan has been implemented. Did the actions or strategies you undertook result in the progress towards meeting your goals? In other words, are you doing what you said you would do and is it making a difference? I found that incorporating assessment as part of routine board activity is an approach that works well.