When it comes to strategic plans, and I see a lot of them, most of them leave me a bit puzzled and flat. Funny thing is they seem to leave most of the people working in the organization feeling the same way as they often get ignored, except for events like strategic planning retreats and occasionally board meetings.

As briefly as I can, I would like to share three secrets to keeping your strategic plan relevant in 2009. I say secrets, only because most organizations I work with don’t seem to know or recognize them, and.. well, you should, especially this year of all years.

1. The first secret has to do with the definition of a strategic plan. Yes, I know you seen, maybe created, many of them, but what should it really be? Let me create a quick image for a second, it may make more sense than just using a definition.

Imagine you are in an open boat at sea. You have oars, you have a sextant, so you can take a reading and get your relative bearing. The sky above you is clear so you can see the sun, but all around you the horizon is blocked by fog. You have a compass, but you’re not sure it’s accurate or working properly. You need to get to shore, to safety before nightfall, but you’re not exactly sure in which direction to row. The sea is getting rough, sometimes the waves seem to be changing directions in some sort of confusing pattern. How do you proceed?

This situation describes for me what a relevant strategic plan is. It is your guess on how best to get to safety, usually represented as profitable growth and risk reduction.

That’s it. The first secret is that your strategic plan, is your plan to get to some place better - so focus on that, nothing else.

The strategic plan, to be relevant, must focus on answering the question “How do we grow while operating within our value system?” This is real limited. Most organization’s strategic plan is way too broad. Imagine being in the open boat, day light is running out, and you’d better start executing a plan.  Hopefully it isn’t to yell for help or re-organize the cushions at the front of the boat, improve the tightness of your shoe laces, re-look for extra water in the boat or any of 50 things you could attend to.

2. As long as we’re in the boat together, let me share the 2nd secret. You don’t have a enough resources to do lots of things all at once - certainly not well. You can’t get to shore if you row in 9 different directions at once, even if it were possible. You can’t row and try to put up a sail, and check for leaks and … all at once.

The second secret is to keep your strategic plan brief, lean and based upon reality. Keep it to just the initiatives you believe will get you to shore. Remember you don’t have a lot of resources, not nearly enough to do all of the things you might like to in 2009. So prioritize and keep focused on just the initiatives you have the most faith in. The ones that seem to best fit your market environment and your organizational capabilities. Just the initiatives that will take you to shore. So you pick a compass heading and start rowing.

3. Here’s the third secret, and hopefully it is evident that you’re already ahead of me, given this analogy. After you row for awhile, you had better do a sighting, check the sun position with your sextant and determine your position, determine if you’ve made any progress, if you’re going the right direction.

Without checking, you could row in circles, you could get swept off course and not know it, you could change directions and be-unaware.

You know what I’m going to say, but here it is anyway, the 3rd secret to having a relevant strategic plan is to regularly measure if your plan is working.

By the way, most businesses I work with either create strategic initiatives they can’t figure out how to measure, or don’t budget for and invest the resources necessary to regularly measure their progress. It’s as if the thinking is “just keep rowing, we’ll get to shore”.  Don’t fall in this group.  Another way to think of this, is to only include in your strategic plan what you’re prepared to measure (do all the work to collect the data)… regularly. 

Let me know if those three secrets help.

Bottom Line:

Do yourself a favor this year, create a relevant strategic plan that takes you and the business to someplace better and remember the 3 secrets to keeping it relevant:

1. Keep your plan limited to just those initiatives that you believe will drive growth

2. Limit your plan to include just the initiatives that represent your best guesses within your current reality (you may want to check the facts again).

3. Regularly measure and adjust the plan as needed

Links:
Technology for Strategic Plans
Why is Executing a Strategic Plan so Hard for Management?

If you go back a few years, Magic Johnson of the LA Lakers coined the term “Winning Time” to talk about the last couple of minutes in a basketball game.  A time where focus and execution need to elevate to what-ever the outcome required.  If you think about it, the term “Strategic Time” might have similar connotations.  Is there a time to be strategic in your day?  Is there a time in the day that’s its more important to be strategic than others? 

Phyllis Korkki wrote an important article published in the NY Times on Nov 18^th entitled “Every Workday Needs a Game Plan”. She suggests part of improving your performance is, No, not to start with Wheaties “The Breakfast of Champions”, but to not turn off email for the first hour, and instead focus on what’s priority and create a plan to address those issues.One of my customers, Rob Cantor, wrote in and said,

“Rodney,  Take a moment to read the attached clipping (Phyllis Korkki’s article).  Your concepts are making the front page of the Business Section of the NY Times.  As I read the clipping I could hear you  speaking.  Scary!

As I read the article, I’m thinking email is certainly a time consumer for us all, but it represents something I’d like you to think about.  Email, like many other inputs (phone calls, people at the door, to-do lists) represent varying levels of urgent REQUESTS for your attention and time.  More requests than you can get to in a day, every day.   They are urgent, but not necessarily strategic.

Think about that before you start down the path of catching up on your email, as it’s a journey that you can’t finish.  Responding to requests, is a way of being busy that DOES NOT represent you being mindful of what’s critical to move the business you’re in ahead today.  That’s a very common state of mind to fall into, isn’t it? 

In fact responding to urgent requests doesn’t really require you to:

·         think ahead,
·         think strategically,
·         think in terms of priorities,
·         think proactively
·         think in terms of outcomes and what you need to do to get there, and essentially
·         plan and prioritize your time accordingly.

If you think about how you spend your first few minutes of each work day, I think you’ll find it is a unique time to be strategic.  You can spend it reviewing emails, looking at your calendars, reviewing what’s on your todo list.  Or you could allocate it for time to reflect on your goals, your intended outcomes, and exactly what has to happen in the day to get you and your team closer to that outcome.

While you’re thinking about having a time daily to be strategic, consider the option to be more mindful about and focus on what’s priority with your time.  Think of the role that the calendar plays in that. Your calendar is typically full of meetings and a task list.   Whoops, no strategic priorities sticking out there, unless you enter them as tasks.  So not only does email tend to distract us, most people’s calendar isn’t a help in terms of being strategic either.

One of the techniques I have of inserting my priorities into my calendar is to drag them over in ManagePro.  It’s a simple right click option, then drag them into a time slot, so my calendar represents my priorities for the day.  Then open your email after identifying and setting aside time for your priorities and adjust as needed.  Try it, and let me know if it works for you.

Bottom Line:  Being strategic, is a goal of everyone in management.  In fact, the first 15 minutes of every day may be your most powerful Strategic Time.  Don’t mis-spend it on email and calendar reviews, you’ll have missed an unequaled opportunity.

Leveraging Time

I saw a quote the other day from Fortune that said, “Less than 10% of strategies effectively formulated are effectively executed.”  The author, like most I’ve read, went on to cover a comprehensive approach to solve this problem.  Comprehensive starts to get complex pretty quick, pretty soon it looks harder than ever to execute a strategic plan.

What if there’s something really quite SIMPLE that explains why people struggle with executing their strategic plan or reaching their strategic objectives and initiatives?  What if it’s not doing the simple that trips people up, not something complex?

I think success is in the middle of SIMPLE.  If it’s complex, complicated, involved… guess what, its probably going to get pushed to the back when something simple and immediate is pressing every day.  Here’s two SIMPLE observations about succeeding at executing a strategic plan:

1. If you have a strategic goal, you must have a plan for accomplishing it (not milestones or high level initiatives, but an actual step-by-step plan), and you must have one or more metrics for measuring if you are on track - if you don’t, it’s not going to work. 

2. The second simple is, if you want to execute the plan, assign people and follow-up regularly.  E.g. someone has to work the plan, report what happened, such that you can make adjustments to the plan on the way to the strategic goal. - If you don’t do this the goal will remain an aspiration or best intent.

Strategic Execution starts looking really SIMPLE:
1. Goal +
2. Plan +
3. Metrics +
4. People working the Plan +
5. Regular Follow-up to Review Progress & Adjust the Plan. One more SIMPLE observation, if you don’t do these SIMPLE STEPS… for whatever reason, you’re most likely going to be in the 90% group that doesn’t execute. 

three (3) Critical Guidelines to Improve Your Strategic Plan

If we (Performance Solutions Technology) were consulting with you today, and looking at your Strategic Plan, we would be emphasizing three important constructs that dramatically improve the ability of your Strategic Plan to deliver business results. They take it from being a plan, to something you can put into place and execute… all year long. Let’s go over what we emphasize:

 1. The Strategic Plan is about “must have” growth - nothing else. Bottom line, all of your strategic goals should be about growth, example: growing sales, growing people’s effectiveness, growing internal efficiencies. Growth is what we are after; not mission statements, not organizational philosophy, not politically correct statements (to insure every group has a line item in the Strategic Plan) - just growth.And not just any growth. Not just nice-to-have growth, “wouldn’t it be nice/good/we really should” growth - you want to keep your Strategic Plan very lean and mean, and limit it to just the areas of growth that will power the business forward.  Be thinking in terms of the opportunities given your strengths and the market landscape that are mandatory for the growth of the business.

2.  Aside from tracking financial returns as part of your strategic plan, every goal has to have a plan, represented as initiatives.  Every initiative supporting a growth goal has to stand two tests. If your strategic goals and initiatives don’t link to goals and projects in your business operations, they will typically be under-supported in the day-to-day work process and shouldn’t be in your Strategic Plan.  This is our working definition for alignment.  But what about those tests? 

 Note: All non-critical initiatives should be in your Operations section, not your Strategic Plan. Don’t fill up your Strategic Plan with multiple layers of initiatives, many, if not most, of them should be represented as projects under different business, product and service initiatives in the Operations area of your business in a strategic management software tool like ManagePro.

3.  If a goal isn’t measured, it doesn’t belong in your strategic plan.If you haven’t figured out a meaningful way to measure each strategic goal and supporting initiative - it doesn’t belong in your plan. If you’re not tracking it via your scorecard, don’t keep it. Said another way, if it’s not worth the time to measure and track, it doesn’t belong in your Strategic Plan.

It’s that simple.  Whether or not a strategic goal is measured and tracked, is one of the best indicators for predicting what you will actually execute through the year.  Conclusion:  To construct a strategic plan that can really empower your entire organization, focus on three areas:1.    Make sure the strategic plan is focused only on Growth2.    Every strategic goal has to have an action plan of initiatives3.    Whatever is worth including, is worth measuring – regularly 

The author of this series, Rodney Brim, is CEO of Performance Solutions Technology (PST).  PST develops and assists organizations in deploying performance management software solutions, and presents these guidelines based upon our work with 1,000’s of companies to help ensure your success in the pursuit of strategic and performance management.  Performance Solutions Technology is found on the web at http://www.PerformanceSolutionsTech.com