Commentary -- Strategic Planning Participation

The typical organization limits participation in its strategic planning process to a dozen or so executives and senior managers. Larger groups — I have dealt with a few as large as 30-50 people — are so unwieldy that the process is rarely productive. Process effectiveness begins to drop rapidly as meeting participation exceeds 15-18 people.

Yet, most larger organizations have dozens of key people whose contribution to the planning process could be extremely valuable. To get their input, the usual approach is to rely on each participant in the planning process to conduct informal interviews on strategic issues with their key players. Does this ever happen? Rarely — one-on-one meetings with key people nearly always focus on work-related issues, with strategic planning concerns hardly being mentioned.

So, how can you expand participation without having half your organization at the planning meetings? You might want to try out an approach that I have used successfully many times:

Sounds, simple, doesn't it? Of course, there are some tricks that you need to know to make this approach work.

Having planning meeting participants conduct interviews with their key people on strategic issues is not especially productive, as noted above. The solution is usually to have a person outside the group conduct the interview to avoid the shoptalk that tends to dominate meetings between people within a team or business unit. This person must be conversant with both strategic issues and the organization and reasonably free from political and personal agendas. It is this last requirement that makes it hard for an insider to provide a neutral channel for communication of a key person's thoughts on strategic issues. An alternative is to engage a third-party to conduct the interviews but this can be costly and time-consuming if there are many key people. There is a third alternative that I will outline in a moment.

To make this approach work, the summary cannot be simply a set of interview notes or an executive summary developed from interview notes. It must be what I call an "action document" — a document that both summarizes and extends the source material. It is part of the process rather than being just a record of process.

Contributors to the planning process must be motivated enough to carve out the time to provide input. To motivate them to do so, you need to offer them something that is of value to them. The summary can fill this requirement if it is candid, objective, constructive and provocative so that it will engage and challenge readers. Most people are eager to find out what others have said about important issues and how their viewpoint may fit into the broader picture.

By agreeing to distribute the summary to all contributors, but not to non-contributors, you should be able to get solid, thoughtful input from the majority of those on your key people list.

Nearly all strategic planning meetings include a few controversial issues. The summary should focus on these to generate interest in the document as a whole. Making the summary a "must-read" document is vital.

The summary should extend contributors' ideas to suggest implications and outcomes. It must identify missing information and logical inconsistencies. It must lay out opposing viewpoints and suggest possible resolutions. It should also offer ideas that were not among those contributed but are relevant and important nonetheless so that the summary can present a reasonably complete picture for planning meeting participants.

With such content, the summary can effectively move a planning process along a few steps before the planning meeting takes place. A good summary will generate a good deal of discussion among participants and key people that may well produce some valuable new ideas and perspectives for the meeting.

It is this discussion between participants and their key players that serves to expand planning process participation most effectively.

For most organizations today, the cost of interviewing even a fraction of their key people is prohibitive, whether done by an internal resource or a consultant. Our solution is to have key people respond to a computer-based, "intelligent" questionnaire designed specifically to elicit input on strategic issues identified by the organization. Where follow-up is needed, this can generally be handled by phone or e-mail.

Another major advantage of this approach is the fact that most people will respond more openly and completely in an electronic communication (e.g., e-mail) than in an interview setting with an unknown interviewer, or perhaps an interviewer with a known agenda. Not having to deal with interpersonal dynamics is reassuring and can lead to much more reliable, accurate responses. For more information on this subject, see our commentary on "Acquiring Information and Knowledge Using Software".

Not so long ago, few people were familiar enough with computer-based communications to make this a practical approach. Today, nearly everyone in the organization from the top person down uses e-mail and a variety of other electronic means of communicating and collaborating. Responding to a computer-based questionnaire is no longer an obstacle to acquiring input. What can be a problem is a questionnaire that is unable to organize content in terms of importance to the respondent, to omit content that is irrelevant based on earlier input, or unable to flexibly accept text input on most topics. Our diagnostic and feedback software tools provide easily-customized content as well as the ability to organize content by importance and to strip out irrelevant content — dynamically.

But no matter how you go about getting input, an effective summary is the key to broadening participation in your planning process. The discussions generated by the summary should extend well beyond the small planning group.

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