You’ll never guess what I’ll be doing during my rare free time the next few months.
Serving on a strategy planning team for an organization where I am a member! (See busman’s holiday.)
I’m part of one of ten small teams within a seventy-plus-person volunteer group developing a multi-faceted strategic plan. An external consultant is leading the process along with the organization’s top leaders. Our first meeting was last week. Reflecting on it the next morning, something struck me: this is the first time I’ve participated in someone else’s strategic planning process in over a decade. That means it’s perfect for:
Since we were promised an “easy, five-step strategy planning process” extending through early December, the timing overlaps many of you conducting your own strategic planning process cycles.
5 Reactions to Someone Else's Strategic Planning Process
Here are early reactions relative to how we’d facilitate a collaborative strategic planning process at The Brainzooming Group.
What Worked?
- Engaging a Big Group of Participants – It’s fantastic to reach out to seventy volunteers to participate in strategy planning. The final plan can’t help but benefit from so many different perspectives.
- Using Humor to Make Strategy Planning More Fun – The facilitator was funny, conveying humor both through his comments and slides. Plus, he took the required shots at strategic planning as a discipline to put participants at ease.
What Didn’t Work?
- Providing a Template to Inexperienced Strategic Planners without Structure –Typical of most strategic planning processes, the facilitator showed us a three-column template to complete for a meeting next month. Each team is on its own to fill out the template. Other than defining the template’s three column headings, no one provided any structure or strategic thinking questions to help the ten teams effectively do their best work.
- Not Incorporating Previous Strategy Planning Experiences to Make the Process Smarter and Easier – The facilitator works for a local organization that does this type of plan for related organizations. Each organization deals with many of the same issues, yet the strategic planning facilitator didn’t provide any frameworks or exercises to better address these issues. That’s where we’d want to speed up the process by eliminating redundant steps.
- Leaving People to Gather Information Completely on their Own – For many of the areas in the strategic planning process, there are reference sources and experts pertinent to our organization’s priorities. Yet, the facilitator didn’t offer any materials beyond suggesting some people to call. Honestly, this omission creates a huge time waster for volunteers surrendering their off-hours to participate.
What’s Next
It will be interesting to see how rapidly and successfully our team and others move the planning ahead toward our mid-October deliverable.
Looking back, there were no major surprises among the things that didn’t work. Those are all fundamental strategic planning process shortfalls. The Brainzooming Group works hard to eliminate these.
If you’re thinking about how you can avoid these and other gaps in your own strategic planning process, contact us at The Brainzooming Group. Let’s chat about how to streamline your strategic planning this year in dramatic, results-oriented ways. – Mike Brown