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Company leaders who are drowned in day-to-day urgencies often don’t take the time to strategize, to rigorously evaluate and then initiate strategic changes. Such changes are made recklessly, or not at all. The former wastes precious resources and time, while the latter invites stagnation and decline. But it does not have to be this way.
November is often the month when it dawns on business leaders that the New Year is right around the corner and they have put far too little time into strategic planning. In fact, I just received a call from such a CEO, to facilitate a weekend strategic offsite—with about a week’s notice. We did it as well as we could, devoting one day to strategy and the other day to an operating plan. I had to facilitate aggressively to keep on track and make every minute productive. The leadership team was amazingly cooperative and engaged. But the outcomes were necessarily limited. On the strategy day — since many important initiatives required homework — we couldn’t make final decisions. The team wanted to brainstorm and combine their collective wisdom to discover innovative approaches, but we had no time for that. This firm will have a solid operational plan by January 1, but it will be primarily based on last year’s strategic thinking.
Cramming our strategic work into a short time frame at the last minute may be a common approach, but it forces us to rely on opinions about market conditions, not solid facts. If we do have information, it is likely stale. Poorly articulated strategic proposals are much more likely to draw instant criticism than innovative thinking. The participants realize — and are rightly concerned— that a bad decision could be made without further consideration. The loudest voice (often the CEO’s) generally wins—not necessarily the best strategy. When teams make true consensus decisions, they usually gain approval without a written roadmap or goals and thus contain no accountability for execution.
Strategic planning must have its own place on the calendar, separate from operational planning. Leaders should collect, research, discuss, clarify in print then select the big initiatives before the annual operational planning process begins. Quality strategic decisions must be made, then and only then, followed by quality operational planning to implement them.
Place the planning activities on the calendar, to be executed at roughly the same time each year. If you work on a calendar year, start your strategic planning between May and July. Begin with a short session to brainstorm and identify those initiatives worthy of more study. Assign each a champion who will do the research and develop a business case. Download a suggested strategic planning cadence and schedule here.
With all the hubbub of day to day activity, you’ll need to appoint a planning process coordinator to keep the meetings rolling, check in weekly on how each case study is progressing (download a business case writing template here), and take responsibility for everyone producing their best research and thinking. In midsized companies which don’t have a chief strategy officer, this person can be the CFO, the CMO, or the CEO. An executive assistant can certainly help with meetings, but most EAs don’t have the power to push for results.
Some companies feel they don’t need a new strategy and if they’re growing as fast as they want to, they may not. But choosing to stick to last year’s strategy is in itself a major decision, which must also be carefully examined. Take at least a day to debate it. Other companies may feel they don’t have the money or resources to implement a new strategy. Yet this in itself may be a sign that the old strategy is failing and that change is required. We all have the same amount of time. Getting strategy right every year must precede the execution of that strategy.
If you too are awakening to the need to work on your strategic plan too late in the year to do it well, don’t settle for a puddle-deep process. Implementing new powerful strategies can begin any time of year. Create a first quarter or first half operating plan, then kick off a robust strategic planning process January 1, targeting implementation at the start of Q2 or Q3. Better late than never.
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