Strategic Planning - Stop Wasting Your Time By Robert Bacal

Pick up any management book and you'll see coverage of the importance of developing a strategic plan, and instructions on how to go about the process. You'll also find literature that suggests that strategic planning is doomed to fail, because long term planning is "impossible" in a rapidly changing business world built on shifting sands. The truth lies somewhere in between, whether for a small business, micro business (one or a very few people), or large corporations.

Strategic planning can, indeed, help you get focused on what you need to achieve over the next years, what you need to achieve it, and how to go about achieving it. The problem is that the benefits of doing strategic planning are almost always lost. Why? It's not because people don't understand what a mission statement is. It's not because they don't understand what goals are. They fail primarily because of what happens AFTER strategic planning. Typically, a great amount of effort goes into creating a strategic planning document, which is then promptly filed away and forgotten, even by the people that drafted it.

The gold of strategic planning lies not in the creation of the plan, but in the implementation of the plan. Implementing the plan can only work if you are clear about what this "thing" -- the plan -- can bring to you.

Let's back up, then. What use can we make of the strategic plan so it has value, not only to the company, but also to each and every employee, since that's the only way the plan's cost can be justified. It needs to be used by everyone. A strategic plan needs to be useful as a guide to decision-making, from the top of the organization to the bottom. The CEO should be able to use it to decide on business direction, mergers, staffing. Managers should be able to use it to decide the priorities of their work units' goals and objectives, and to align the work of their units with the overall goals of the larger organization. And, each employee should be able to use the plan (or at least parts of it) to understand his or her own goals, and where s/he fits in the bigger scheme of things.

In other words, the plan tells everyone what is important, what is not, and why they do what they do, and that applies to those at the top of the hierarchy, and those at the bottom. When properly implemented, a strategic plan helps to add meaning to each person's work, to focus each person's work, and to align each person's work.

If it's not doing those things, the effort put into the process is almost certainly wasted.

The Key: After-Planning Cascading

Cascading refers to the process of taking your strategic plan, and "driving it down" into the organization, deeper and deeper, so that it can be used to make decisions, and add meaning to the work of employees. Cascading is done after the plan is complete, and it can be used regardless of who formulated the plan. And, it makes the difference between a dead plan that gathers dust, and one that returns value. Cascading works whether the company has two people, two hundred people or 20,000 people working in it. The principle is the same.

Here's how it works. Let's say the senior executive group creates a strategic plan that includes a statement of values, a mission statement, and set of goals and objectives for the next five years. The next step is to "move it down" the hierarchical ladder, to division managers. Each division manager is brought into the process (often by their immediate superior in the organization), and the overall plan explained so that the division mangers understand the corporate direction, and what is important on a more global basis.

Now here's the key point. Those division managers take the information from the overall plan, and create their own divisional plans that are ALIGNED with the overall direction. They create mini-plans for their own divisions.

Then the division managers repeat the process with those that report to them. Let's call them middle managers leading smaller work units. The process repeats until it reaches the bottom, where the employees (the people who do the real work) "live".

At that bottom level -- the employee level -- the cascading process is linked to the specific goals and objectives that each employee has for the upcoming period of time. So, by the end of the cascading process, everyone's goals and objectives should be aligned with those of the work=unit they work in, the division the work-unit is part of, and upwards to the entire company.

Why? Because we want everyone working towards the same goals and objectives.

It would be a mistake to focus only on cascading goals and objectives. Everyone in the organization, from top to bottom, needs to know what is important, valued, and of high priority, and why their goals and objectives are critical to the success of their units and the company. So, part of the cascading process includes the "WHY". Why does the employee have a particular set of objectives? Why are they important?

That's key. The process puts everyone on the same wavelength.

Keeping It Alive

If cascading is the only thing you do, you will get limited value. Managers, executives and supervisors are responsible for keeping the plan alive by a) making their decisions based on the plan (values, mission, goals) and b) they need to communicate to their peers and employees how their decisions are guided by the plan.

The latter is very important. It makes the plan constantly visible and important because it is talked about by decision-makers. If decision-making ignores the plan, or the linkages between decisions and the plan are not explained, people forget, or they conclude that the strategic planning exercise was simply the result of a lot of hot air, and that the plan is i

rrelevant to them. They don't, and won't take the plan, or the planning process seriously. Which kills it.

Conclusion:

It may seem that a high degree of time and effort is required to make a strategic plan work. And there's truth to that. But with a little more commitment and effort, companies can have dynamic plans that align everyone so they are shooting at the same targets, understand why they are asked to do their job tasks, and can make informed decisions that are consistent with the overall direction and goals of the organization.

Without that extra commitment, all that's been created is a document that goes in the backs of drawers, and ends up forgotten. Simply put strategic planning is a waste of effort and time unless the organization makes the plan relevant and useful, and understood by all in the organization.