Strategy Planning

How are strategic plans formulated: Cooking a Good Meal

If strategy is as important as we said it was last month, then clearly there must be some complex and convoluted way to write one, right? Wrong! The process is amazingly simple. But to adapt a quote from Clausewitz, we’ll say that “the simplest thing is difficult.”

You have to think of writing your strategy like making a tasty and healthy meal. You might disagree, but making a good meal is pretty simple, too. Yet it sometimes feels so complicated and difficult, and that’s because you need good tools, good ingredients, and time.

Tools: The tools you use are important; facilitators, collaborative spaces, whiteboards and easel paper are like the pots, pans, and knives. If you’ve got dull knives in the form of poor brainstorming tools, your process will take longer and frustrate you. If you’ve got clean and appropriately oiled pots and pans, like a facilitator who keeps people on task and maintains the clarity of thought needed, ingredients mix and cook well. Good tools make the foundation for a good meal—and good strategy.

Ingredients: But while tools are necessary, it’s the ingredients that really make a meal healthy and taste great; people and ideas are the ingredients to the strategic planning process. Just as you would never use rotten vegetables or spoiled meat, participants in strategic planning can’t bring negative energy to the table. You also want to use the freshest material you can get; you want the latest information and participants who have the intellectual nimbleness—the freshness—to understand that information. But the material can’t be so fresh that it’s unripened; you want experienced and wise participants who are comfortable with smart assumptions and taking risks. The people and ideas that are the ingredients of strategic planning are absolutely critical.

Time: And just like in cooking it takes time to make things right—undercooked ingredients can range from causing minor stomach problems to serious illness, strategic planning takes time. Ideas have to simmer; people need to mix. Most important, the participants in strategic planning need to dedicate time to do this. You can’t devise strategy while dealing with the crises in email or a zillion other distractions.

Once you’ve got the tools, ingredients, and time in place, then the process to get the strategy is not so different from following this recipe:

  1. Understand yourself: what are your strengths, your weaknesses?
  2. Understand your environment: what opportunities and threats are out there?
  3. Understand others: who are your stakeholders, and what do they care about?
  4. Agree on purpose: why do you do what you do? What’s your mission, and how do you envision your community looking down the road?
  5. Design value: given yourself, your environment, others, and your purpose—your why—what value can you bring that your stakeholders will care about?

The process is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. Many people screw up the simplicity and lose the focus and clarity of thought needed to develop a good strategy, because they want to feel comfortable. They want to quantify everything. They want to study things further. They want to constrain business to what already exists or costs that can be measured. Strategic planning can be quite uncomfortable. We’ll end with our last reference to the cooking analogy though: if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Bon appetite!

 

Our Compass

Here at HDH & Associates, LLC, we are starting this blog on “Citizen Leadership.”  This is where we want to engage in thoughtful conversation about what it means to be a citizen—at home, at work, in private, in public—and what it takes to lead citizens.  It is our fundamental belief that thinking about citizenship is central to what makes individuals and entities responsible, and each of our personal reflections on the idea of citizenship is the prerequisite for being agile and strategic.

Our belief is that this phenomenological sense of “being a citizen” and “citizenship” are not just legal constructs and a passive characterization of someone’s or some entity’s existence, but rather revolve around norms of social cohesion.  Said more simply, but clumsily, citizenship is about how we as social beings invest in social bonds to make society work.

From a negative standpoint, this shared sense is why we decry

  • Enron’s executives cheating
  • Military prison abuses at Abu Ghraib
  • Political gridlock in Washington, DC (the shutdown and impending debate on the debt limit is on the forefront of our attention)
  • Our neighbors who show no consideration to others
  • Our careerist workmates only in it for themselves.

From a positive standpoint, this shared sense is why we celebrate

  • Corporate giving
  • Military service
  • Political leaders who got us through the toughest times
  • Our neighbors who pick up our mail and watch our houses while we’re gone
  • Our workmates who are teammates.

In this blog, we’re going to start this conversation on citizenship because it seems we, as a society, may have either lost a shared sense of or have lost agreement on the importance of citizenship.  And it’s important we talk about this because it’s this sense that allows us to work together for shared purposes, whether they be to address a social ail for a non-profit, provide services to constituents for a government office, or provide a valuable product or service that someone will pay money for to a private sector entity.

We promise to bring in interesting research and the occasional controversial thought.  We promise to keep this approachable.  Most important, we promise to make this useful to you, those with whom you interact, and your organization.