Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity, organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions, and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.
The span of strategic plan may be as short as two to three months to 30 years or more. For most organizations, the planning span is three to five years.
As part of the planning process, there is opportunity to determine whether previous strategic plan have been met. If the plans have not been met, the organization needs to determine why.
Answers may range from a flawed planning process that needs improvement, to unrealistic objectives, to organizational weaknesses.
Traditionally, strategic planning is composed of two phases. The first phase is the formulation, in which strategies and objectives are formulated or defined. The second phase, implementation, encompasses the tactical and operational plans.
Measurements complete the process by providing feedback to the various levels. Measurement closes the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) loop by providing the information needed to make course adjustments over time, thus ensuring that the strategic plan is met.
A potential shortfall of traditional strategic planning is that the resulting plan may, because of lack of committed deployment, end up on someone’s shelf unfulfilled.
There are two principal things a leader can influence when it comes to producing results: your strategy (or plan) and your ability to execute that strategy. Stop for a moment and ask yourself this question: Which of these do leaders struggle with more? Is it creating a strategy, or executing the strategy?
Now, ask yourself a second question: If you have an MBA or have taken business classes, what did you study more; execution or strategy.?
Once you’ve decided what to do, your biggest challenge as a leader is in getting people to execute it at the level of excellence you need.
Why is execution so difficult.? After all, if the strategy is clear, and you as the leader are driving it, won’t the team naturally engage to achieve it? The answer is “no,” and it’s likely that your own experience has proven this more than once.
Whether you call it a strategy, a goal, or simply an improvement effort, any initiative you as a leader drive in order to significantly move your team or organization forward will fall into one of two categories: The first requires mainly a stroke of the pen; the second requires behavioral change.
Stroke-of-the-pen strategies are those that you execute just by ordering or authorizing them to be done. Simply put, if you have the money and the authority, you can make them happen.
Behavioral-change strategies are very different from stroke-of-the-pen strategies. You can’t just order them to happen, because executing them requires getting people-often a lot of people-to do something different. And if you’ve ever tried to get other people to change their ways, you know how tough it is. Changing yourself is hard enough.
It’s also not uncommon to find many stroke-of-the-pen strategies that, once approved, evolve into those that require significant behavioral change. It’s natural for a leader to assume the people are the problem. After all, they are the ones not doing what we need to have done. But you would be wrong. The people are not the problem!
W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system. As a leader, you own responsibility for the system.
At Agla Consult Ltd we have designed the most actionable and impactful insights and disciplines that will enable you as a leader and your team to produce extraordinary results.
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