Designing a Strategic Planning Workshop – It’s in the 11 Steps

“Can you show up and do a strategic planning workshop early next week?”

We get a decent number of requests from companies that resemble that question. Since a time is booked, and we do this all the time, why couldn’t we simply show up and immediately facilitate a company through developing its strategy? When someone makes a request like this, I’m sure they can’t imagine there is anything THAT complicated about designing a strategic planning workshop.

My question back to those executives are how comfortable they are with:

• Winging it during an important strategy meeting?
• Lacking a clear sense of where the meeting will wind up?
• Potentially wasting time for other executives?
• Working through a process that isn’t tailored to the organization?

If they can answer YES to all those questions AND really LOVE high-stakes surprises, then sure, let’s see if we have a Brainzooming facilitator available to show up next Tuesday.

11 Steps in Designing a Strategic Planning Workshop

When an executive cares about successful, productive results that move an organization forward, they UNDERSTAND it takes more than a few business days to make it happen. You need enough time to work through eleven steps we address when designing a strategic planning workshop:

1. Ask foundation questions to develop a strong sense of the objectives and desired participant experience
2. Figure out relevant and intriguing comparisons to the situation
3. Check internal information and comparable situations we've addressed
4. Prepare an initial engagement design and scope of work
5. Perform secondary research, looking for clues to explore additional sources
6. Identify intriguing ideas, themes, and inspirations from the secondary research results
7. Develop new insights and hypotheses
8. Conduct informational interviews
9. Develop the input opportunities for the broad audience
10. Analyze results and themes that emerge from the broad input opportunities
11. Finalize the workshop design

Not all these steps require significant time to complete. They do build on each other. In aggregate, they lead to designing a strategic planning workshop that delivers results.

Want to Dramatically Improve How You Develop Strategy?

You may not be thinking about scheduling your next strategic planning meeting right now.

Even so, it could be exactly the right time to start PLANNING and designing your next strategic planning workshop to improve the outcomes over the last one.

Have you been trying to identify new ways to make developing strategy more collaborative, simpler, results-oriented (and even fun)? Contact us, and let’s chat about the impact these eleven steps can have in changing how you think about developing strategy from now on.  – Mike Brown

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