I have a confession to make – I consider myself to be extremely productive employee; even on days when I’m off my game I probably accomplish twice as much as the average person (and twice as modest about it.) Like most diligent people, most of my fulfillment from work is from the satisfaction of a job well-done. If I feel like I’ve spent my workday doing something productive that advances the company’s goals and my personal goals, then I go home feeling pretty good. And this is precisely why I hate strategic planning with every fiber of my being.
Allow me to explain: nobody questions the necessity of strategic planning – companies need to routinely reevaluate their activities and objectives to see if they are on-course for success. If a company isn’t on the best heading for success, then strategic planning is the process by which it can find a better way to fulfill its missions and achieve its goals. The outcome of strategic planning, if done right, is invaluable for companies.
What productive people hate is the strategic planning process itself. Here’s why:
Problem one: the strategic planning process is heinously time-consuming
Strategic planning consists of hours upon hours of data collection, analysis, followed by endless meetings to discuss said data and analysis. Every external threat or internal weakness requires hours of discussion and debate, followed by more data collection, followed by more debate, and so on.
Once you’re organization is done done deciding what its most pressing problems are, the fun part begins: determining how to resolve them.
In preparation for writing this article, I innocuously asked some folks via LinkedIn Answers how long their average strategic planning process takes. Aside from the smart-aleck answers I received (which, admittedly, I probably deserved given how poorly worded the question was), the loose consensus seemed to be that strategic planning can take anywhere from four weeks to three months. Three months. Wars have been started, fought, and won in less time.
Strategic planning processes can take months to execute, and it’s no small wonder why – there’s a lot of moving parts in play for any organization, but that doesn’t make it any less agonizing for the members of the company who have to sit through endless meetings for painfully long stretches of time.
Problem two: most strategic plans focus on items that are not easily actionable
Strategic planning would be a lot easier for the average businessperson to swallow if they could connect the dots between their daily work and the corporate strategy which precipitates from the strategic planning process. However, too many strategic plans focus on items that aren’t appreciably actionable by the average businessperson – they focus on elements such as predictive financial models, cost estimates, market trends, product adoption rates, and other business abstractions.
Although those concepts are important, what’s an entry-level employee in the R&D department supposed to make of it? Is he or she supposed to look at those models and go “oh, of course! I know what I exactly need to do differently in order to support the company’s new strategy! I need to make my department’s operations increasingly value added while simultaneously decreasing overhead. It’s all so clear to me now!”
Many organizations make the pound-foolish choice to leave the so-called “implementation details” of the strategic plan up to the “individual contributors,” and thus they never fully address what the company’s employees are actually supposed to do in accordance with the new strategy.
One major reason why corporate strategies fail is because the strategy is planned and conceptualized in a space where it is conceptually disconnected from the action required to execute it. The executives in the ivory tower conceptualize some brilliant strategy, but they never address how the contributors in their organizations are supposed to actually execute it. And as Fred Nickols has pointed out on this blog before: strategy IS execution.
Problem three: strategic plans are too hopelessly long to read
You know what’s worse than too little documentation? Too much.
Strategy can be expressed succinctly, but the data and documentation necessary to validate and implement that strategy often cannot, which leads strategic planners down the path of inevitable documentation explosion.
The resultant strategic plan document itself is often a collection of tedious Word® documents where every piece of minutia is written out in long-form prose and a hodgepodge of unreadable models depicted via Excel® charts; the plan and its supporting data is often large enough to fill a giant D-ring binder.
So what happens when members of the implementation team, who were not privy to the discussions of the strategic planning committee, actually try to learn the strategy by reading the darn thing? Well, if they don’t suffer a severe back injury in the process of carrying the printed strategic plan back to their desk due its massive size and girth, they usually scan over the table contents, cherry pick some items of interest (I’m being generous,) then give up trying to get a sense for the overall strategy and their particular parts to play once they realize that the executive summary of the plan contains nothing more than a morass of buzzwords. No productive person has the time for this, and if they did, they would certainly opt not to spend it in this manner.
Problem four: most strategic plans aren’t understandable
IBM captured this concept best when they produced their “Buzzword Bingo” commercial:
For reasons that are beyond me, some authors of strategic plans insist on using language that never enters the lexicon of normal human beings. If I started referring to my friends as “value-added persons of interest,” I might very well be committed. We know why buzzwords exist – they exist purely for the benefit of the people writing the strategic plan in order to make it sound modern and “cutting-edge.”
But all it really does is compound the primary problem strategic planners face: buzzword-crammed language makes it harder to translate strategy into action, because it muddies the top-down communication required to implement said strategy.
So is there a better way to do strategic planning? Is there a method that avoids the gruesome headaches of traditional strategic planning practices? Perhaps, and that is something that I will be posting more about in the very near future.
