Why Rethinking Your Strategic Planning Process Is Vital

What's your biggest strategic planning process challenge?

We're always asking about your strategic planning challenges. Looking through readers' responses, increasing engagement and finding time for strategic planning rise to the top. The difficulties include:

• Lack of engagement among core team members
• Spending more time in, than on, the business
• Challenges in getting participants to think strategically
• Pushing people out of reactive perspectives to embrace strategy.

While each of these strategic planning process challenges differs, they are obviously related. Each one presumes that strategic planning is a pre-defined process whose success involves moving executives through the process. That thinking creates challenges because:

• Participants are expected to engage in the process whether it makes sense or adds value for them and for the organization
• People avoid strategic thinking and planning because they don’t see how it relates to running the business
• Unfamiliar strategic planning processes and concepts are more easily avoided than learned and applied successfully
• Cumbersome and unclear traditional strategy planning approaches push executives to see reacting as easier and better than contemplating strategies about uncertain future events

When you, as a strategist, think about it that way, it’s obvious why your executive team chafes at wasting time on a complex and ill-fitting strategic planning process.

That’s why you need to rethink your strategic planning process!

Instead of forcing everyone through needless process steps, start by identifying what you need from strategy planning to run the business more successfully. Which of these outcomes will improve your success?

• A clearer picture of your organization’s future and a way to communicate it
• Deeper insights into what will create marketplace success for your organization
• A stronger understanding of changing competitive dynamics
• Fresh, innovative ideas and strategies to grow
• New product concepts to quickly bring to market
• Greater collaboration and less competition among executives and initiatives
• Clear implementation plans with metrics and tangible action steps
• Tools to support implementation success
• Something else

When you start with what you really need to fuel success, strategic planning doesn’t have to be about the process. Instead, you open the door to varied activities and interactions that will lead to what you need to run the business.

The Answer to Improving Your Strategy Right Now

We have a new eCourse to help you bring the new approach to strategic planning that you have been seeking. In bite-sized modules, it will teach you proven ways to simplify strategy and make it engaging, fun, and results-driven for your organization.

There is still time to rethink your strategic planning process and bring strategy and results to life for your organization. Take this important step now, while there’s still time to positively shape your 2020 results!