More Effective Strategic Planning Processes
You may think of strategic planning in terms of vision creation, broad strategy development and high-level action planning. Many years of facilitating and participating in such planning sessions, however, suggests that most planning is really about sharing and using knowledge.
In your experience with strategic planning, how much of the meetings were devoted to bringing participants up to speed on each meeting issue? More than half, and probably closer to 80% if your experience is typical. Although commonly regarded as wasted time, this preparation is extremely valuable to the process because it is how much organizational knowledge is shared among managers.
Once the planning group's knowledge is available to all participants, attention can turn to using the knowledge effectively. This is the real foundation for effective strategy and action plan development. If you don't take the time to build the foundation for each meeting, your process output is likely to be flawed.
Our services are aimed at knowledge sharing and process facilitation. We can help you broaden participation in planning processes by including input from key people outside the small planning group. We can help you improve meeting productiveness (and possibly shorten your meetings) by facilitating pre-meeting preparation. We can act as meeting facilitators to bring an expert outside perspective to meetings-as-usual. And, we can help you track your execution of action plans and help you assess results.
Examples
¥ Broaden planning process participation
¥ Improve meeting preparation to make planning sessions more productive
¥ Planning process facilitation
¥ Action planning and implementation support