More Effective Strategic Planning Processes —
Broaden 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 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:
1. Obtain input on planning issues from each of your key people.
2. Prepare an "action" summary of the input.
3. Distribute the summary to all contributors.
Sounds, simple, doesn't it? Of course, there are some tricks that you need to know to make this approach work.
The "action" summary is what makes this approach effective. Its job is not to document the process but to be part of the process itself and to move the process forward. An effective summary will be a "must-read" document — challenging and suggesting implications.
If you are interested in reading more about this approach, please check out our commentary on this subject, "Strategic Planning Participation" ... è
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