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 Understanding the principles of strategic planning

- What is a strategic plan, and why is it important? A strategic plan defines what your organization stands for. It defines the market where you compete, and how you compete in that market. It's the definition of the goals you're going to pursue and, more importantly, the initiatives you're going to pursue to achieve those goals. It's also going to help you allocate your very limited resources to pursue those initiatives and reach those goals. Why is a strategic plan so important? 

First, it provides focus for your efforts and your limited investments. It gives your team something to rally around and be excited about. And lastly, it helps you identify the risks and opportunities you're going to face in the market, and then plan for those risks or exploit those opportunities. 

There are three principles of strategic planning that you should follow. First, set a clear direction and stay in your lane, versus meandering and pursuing strategies that change every year. Second, say no to distractions. It's very easy to get caught up in the wow, that looks like a cool initiative, let's pursue that. The third is making sure you diversify your bets. You have limited pools of money and people and time, making sure you don't put all your eggs in one basket and instead pursue initiatives that are spread across different time horizons, different markets, and different products. And if you follow these three principles of strategic planning, you're going to have a clear direction that you're able to follow over time and achieve your goals.

Avoiding major strategic planning risks

- Strategic planning takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. It is a high resource type of exercise. Unfortunately, many times that process can be a worthless pain, and the worst thing that can happen with a strategic plan is everybody puts in all this effort, and then it gets archived, put on a shelf, and never looked at again. Now there are some warning signs that you can look for to determine if your strategic planning process is flawed. First, initiative proliferation. Do you have to use multiple pages just to add up all the different initiatives you're thinking about pursuing?

 The second risk is thinking too small. All the initiatives that are on your list are really small, incremental improvements to your business and don't really advance you to your strategic goals. A third is thinking too big. All the initiatives are huge, and everything has to line up perfectly, and it's a really large bet that you're taking with the organization. Sometimes you can do what I call starving the kids. Many organizations have a large profitable business unit, and then they have a lot of smaller ideas that are going to be more rapid growth. And the risk is you invest all your resources in the big known business and you starve those smaller businesses. The problem is you're starving your future in doing so. 

And, lastly, I call it the random initiative generator. You look at all your initiatives, and they all seem really great, but when you try to figure out where they're taking you, there's no clear direction. An example I've seen when I worked in a strategic planning group, and I first arrived in the group. I said, "Let me see our strategic plan." I was handed a list of 37 acquisition targets, and I said, "This is great. "These all look like interesting companies "that we should think about pursuing, but where's the plan?" Well, that's the plan. It wasn't a plan. It was a random list of companies that competed in the market we were in, and we didn't know which of those acquisitions was going to be attractive and which ones were distractions. 

And our first task was fixing that strategic planning process, setting direction and putting some focus to the initiatives that we pursue. So take a look at your strategic planning process. Ask yourself if you're showing some of these symptoms and make sure you set direction so that you can pursue initiatives that will add value and help you reach your destination.

Strategic planning process: Overview . The three principles of strategic planning are set direction, say no, and diversify

- Strategic planning is an inherently simple process. 

There are some major tools and steps that you're going to follow as you pull together your strategic plan. First, you need to set direction and stay in a lane. That begins with articulating the vision, the mission and the goals of the organization. Once you've set that destination, it's important to define the organization's core competencies. What are you great at? And how are you going to compete in the market? 

The next step of the process is defining strategic filters. This is the heart of the method. These filters are going to be the objective functions you're trying to achieve. They'll be the evaluation criteria you'll use as you analyze the initiatives that you are or are not going to pursue. Next, you're going to say no to distractions. You're going to stay focused. You'll use tools like a two by two matrix to evaluate which opportunities should we pursue? And which ones should we avoid? You'll take all the initiatives on your list and run them through those strategic filters to identify the ones that are high value and high potential and the ones that should be avoided. 

Next, you're going to draw the line. Strategic planning is about focus and you'll have your list of initiatives. You're going to identify the top ones, the bottom ones and resource them appropriately, and only work on things above the line for which you have resources. Next is making sure you have a diversified portfolio of initiatives, and then executing the strategic plan. 

You'll look at your initiatives in terms of are they long term? Short term? Do they balance your core competencies? Are they balanced across products or markets or services? You'll look at your portfolio and how it evolves over time. So as you go through the strategic planning process, there will be major tools and frameworks you'll apply at each step, and you're going to come up with a very clear plan with a prioritized set of initiatives.

Strategic planning process: Tactical needs

- When you run your strategic planning process it's important to be aware that there will be times you're working together as a team and people are off on their own doing individual work. The typical cadence of a good strategic planning process will have people working individually doing some pre work. 

Then you'll come together as a team and work on things like your vision, your mission, guiding principles. Then the team will go away and do individual work to evaluate some initiatives. They'll come back together to go through a prioritization meeting. They'll go away again as individuals and do deeper analysis on initiatives. 

And come back together to do final planning and resource allocation. And the deliverables that come out of this strategic planning process will be a strategic plan in the form of a document. You'll have a defined set of core competencies for what your organization is great at. 

You'll have a prioritized list of initiatives that you're going to pursue. And an implementation and sequencing plan where you've identified which initiatives, when and what resources are we going to allocate. Now, I'll cover all of these tools in future chapters of this course, but just remember that your planning process is going to be a balance between working together and working as individuals.