Commentary -- Strategic Planning Process Productiveness

The most productive part of many strategic planning meetings is the socializing and golf. Meetings themselves tend to be consumed in bringing participants up to speed (who ever reads pre-meeting handouts any more?). Productive discussion typically gets squeezed into a few hours at the end, just as people start drifting away or preparing for their next meeting.

Even though the meeting's lengthy preparation phase is often useful from a communications standpoint, it makes the meeting as a whole not very productive. For the few who did prepare, the meeting can be largely a waste of time.

Wouldn't it be nice to have most participants come to the meeting reasonably well-prepared on most issues that will be discussed?

This would leave the bulk of the meeting for productive discussion of alternatives, priorities and action planning. You may even be able to shorten the meeting itself.

Did you prepare thoroughly for the last planning meeting you attended? Probably not, unless you were the leader or facilitator or a major presenter. Why? Because, for most meetings, enough participants come unprepared to require a lengthy period of going through background material to get these folks conversant enough to proceed. You can count on it, so why bother wasting precious pre-meeting time in preparation.

Preparing properly for a serious planning meeting takes a lot of time. Most have a big binder full of background material that can be tough going. Thinking about issues raised by the material takes some more time and mental effort. Why would anyone do this if the alternative was to be prepared in a group session (i.e., the planning meeting)? The answer, I have found after trying many approaches, is to make the preparation part of a valuable pre-meeting process.

If participants feel that their preparation will be rewarded by something of value, most will prepare adequately. What can you offer them in practical terms that will persuade them to prepare? Here is our approach:

1. Ask participants for input on issues raised by the background material itself.

Participants will have to read the background material, or be at least reasonably familiar with its content, to provide input to a well-designed interview (traditional) or input software tool (our approach). Because their input will be summarized and fed back to all contributors, there is peer pressure to make the input reflect well on the contributor. Few will want to miss what others may be saying prior to going into the meeting.

The conventional way to obtain input on background material is to interview each participant. Some will try to talk around their lack of preparation but the presence of an interviewer usually motivates at least some preparation. The problem with this approach is time and cost. Scheduling interviews with busy people today is extremely difficult. Most have only a short time to offer, making it hard to cover more than a very few issues. If the interviews are done by an outside party, the cost can be substantial.

Our approach is to create an input tool based upon the background material that asks provocative questions about issues raised by the material. We review your material and create an appropriate input tool. The tool can be distributed by e-mail and participants can complete it whenever they have time — waiting in an airport, in their hotel, at home on the weekend, or in a plane. They can return it by e-mail.

This approach makes use of some otherwise unproductive time that all managers have on a regular basis.

The key to making this approach work is the summary. It has to be a "must-read" document — concise, insightful, engaging, and challenging. It must push ideas offered by contributors to some likely conclusions. It must point out conflicts and offer some ideas for resolving them. It should identify information gaps and logical inconsistencies, each time providing a constructive remedy. A good summary will be an action document in that it can move the planning process forward by stimulating thought and discussion.

Whoever develops your summary must be able to provide an objective, agenda-free, candid and open point of view. It cannot be political or unduly sensitive to favored views among the contributors. The role of the summary is to encourage contributors to read it and think about it.

The last important step is to reward contributors with an opportunity to read the summary, while denying the opportunity to non-contributors. Obviously, there may have to be an exception or two since some willing contributors may simply be unable to contribute but it is vital that able but non-contributing folk by excluded.

A good summary will be passed around, of course, so the exclusion is far from complete but it will force non-contributors to seek out bootleg copies and to see their views absent in most cases.

Having gone to all of this effort to make your planning meeting more productive, it is a shame to leave the meeting schedule open to business as usual. Schedule the meeting for half its normal duration and set an important action item as the first topic on the agenda. Even if you still have to spend a few minutes helping diehard non-contributors get up to speed, you will have dramatically increased the productiveness of your overall meeting.

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