Strategic Planning Process – 2 Fun Ways to Frame Important Questions

Short Story: You can take serious questions and wrap them in child-like situations to add fun and new thinking to a strategic planning process.

One way to create greater engagement during a strategic planning process is through framing important questions in new ways. Sometimes that means asking familiar questions completely differently. Other times it means changing the perspective from which participants are answering questions.

Then there are times in a strategic planning process when the questions are mainly serious, but the premise is mostly silly.

Here is one of those times.

Based on someone reaching our website looking for reflections to kick off a strategic planning process, I started imagining adapting and wrapping strategic thinking questions in nursery rhymes. Except now, I can’t remember WHY I was thinking about using nursery rhymes. They must have seemed like a way to add fun.

Never wanting to waste an idea emerging from the Brainzooming R&D lab, here are two surprising (and fun) ways to frame important questions as nursery rhymes.

Goldilocks and the Three Competitors

If you have strategic planning process participants who are knowledgeable about your competitors, you may want to collaboratively tap their insights. How about framing the exercise as Goldilocks and the Three Competitors? Ask them to address:

• Which competitor has been too hot? (Growing faster, making aggressive product or pricing moves, expanding operations or markets)
• Which competitor has been too cold? (Seem to have lost its way, losing share and/or people)
• Which competitor is just right to target? (Clear weaknesses you can better exploit, opportunities to create a major advantage)

Ask the group to identify not only the three competitors, but reasons for their situation, and the best offensive and/or defensive moves your brand can take against each of them.

Jack and his Extreme Creativity Beans

Suppose you need extreme creative thinking. The kind of extreme creativity that comes from people with their heads in the clouds! Take the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and imagine the magic beans are extreme creativity questions. Use questions such as those below to grow ideas that will reach into the blue sky!

• What would we do if these magic beans let us ignore resource limitations?
• What if these magic beans prevented anyone from ever telling us “no”?
• What would we have if these magic beans allowed us to grow ideas bigger and bolder than anything we’ve ever done before?

As you use these questions, look for ways to turn the blue-sky ideas they generate into reality.

See what we mean?

These are a mix of serious and silly. But then again, that mix keeps business interesting! – Mike Brown