Strategic Planning Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

Who Should Be Involved In Strategic Planning?

The answer to this very basic strategic planning question is rather complex, because there are several parts of the strategic planning process, and each requires somewhat different things from different people, and there are practical considerations about who should be involved when.

The simple answer is that you need to involve the people who are essential to developing an effective strategic plan AND essential to implementing that strategic plan in the organization. And, you need to trade off "inclusion" for practical matters.

For example, should executives and senior managers be involved in strategic planning? Yes. Because they probably have information (input, if you like) essential to the construction of a plan that takes into account the right "variables", both within the company and external to the company. Senior officials are also essential to the implementation of the plan once it's created.

Let's look at the other end of the organizational hierarchy -- regular employees. Regular employees also have information (input) that will result in a more effective strategic plan because they interact with different people (particularly customers) than do those at the top of the organization. They also are part of the implementation process, and we know that plans get implemented when people in the organization feel some sense of "ownership" of the plan.

Clearly, though there are some practical issues here, particularly in large organizations. If you have 100 senior executives and several thousand employees, it is a) not practical to assemble everyone for all stages of the planning process, and b) it's costly to do so. To try to do strategic planning in a room with thousands of employees is, of course, simply impossible.

So, when deciding who to involve in strategic planning, you have to weigh the pro's and con's, cost and practicality of inclusion keeping in mind that inclusion, in theory is the best path to follow.

One solution is that different people can be involved in different ways, and in different formats and using different methods. For example, employees can be "included" indirectly, by having line managers collect information from them, and funnel it into the strategic planning process more directly. Surveys can be used to gather input from employees. But they need not be all gathered together in the same place in order to "involve" them.