I spent most of the space in my most recent post, “Four Reasons Why Productive People Hate Strategic Planning,” decrying the barbarically tedious nature of most strategic planning processes.
To recap, most strategic planning processes:
- Take too long to complete;
- Focus on issues that aren’t easily or clearly actionable;
- Produce plans that are hopelessly long to read; and
- Produce plans that are filled with so much corporate jargon that they are essentially unreadable.
If your company is like ours, then you want:
- To be over and done with the strategic planning process in the shortest timeframe possible without producing a sub-par strategic plan;
- To be able to see all of the strategic factors in front of you without having to read through heavy tomes of business literature and documentation; and most importantly,
- You want to produce a strategic plan that’s easy to communicate to the rest of your organization.
Most modern strategic planning processes impede organizations from reaching these goals, which is why they suffer from the four problems l listed earlier. Thus, the solution to these problems is obvious: organizations need to try a different strategic planning process.
What is “Visual Strategic Planning?”
This is what SmartDraw.com did beginning in September, 2009: we engineered a visual strategic planning process and then implemented it within our own organization. Over the next few weeks I am going to outline how the visual strategic planning process works and share some documentation from SmartDraw.com’s own strategic planning efforts.
Obviously I can’t and won’t divulge sensitive information about our company, but I can certainly share the details of our strategic planning process with you.
Let’s start with the visual strategic planning methodology. Below is a high-level overview of a typical strategic planning process:
Most strategic planning processes contain these components, and the visual strategic planning process is no exception. What the visual strategic planning process does differently, however, is how it organizes and communicates information at each step during the process.
As we’ve discussed before, when you combine powerful visuals with written or spoken language, the outcome is up to six times more effective than written or spoken language alone. The visual strategic planning process leverages the power of visualization to produce strategies which are easy to communicate and easier to produce.
Examples
I’m going to go through the visual strategic planning process in detail over the next weeks, but allow me to give you a quick glimpse at some example visuals we used to help expedite the strategic planning process.
During the data collection stage (precursor to environmental and situational analysis), we decided to break out our key internal and external factors using a mind map; we began with a generic mind map like the one above. These are issues that virtually any business needs to consider during the course of its strategic planning.
The way a mind map works is thus:
- You begin with a central topic, “data collection,” in this case;
- You proceed to add new topics which encapsulate high-level concepts such as internal and external analysis; and then
- You and your strategic planning team flesh out the mind map with related sub-topics beneath each topic.
There’s no limit to the number of sub-topics you can use. Below is an example of how we fleshed out the “Operational efficiency & capacity” section of our data collection for internal analysis.
As you can see, this is as elegant as it is simple. Within an hour or two your strategic planning facilitator can flesh out all of the high-to-mid level concerns that need to be addressed in your organization’s data collection efforts. Compare this to say, painstakingly writing down a list of every possible concern on paper and you’ll see the difference; mind maps are easier to organize, easier to rearrange, easier to communicate, and easier to produce.
Our solution is thus: strategic planners need to effectively and conscientiously use visuals to help facilitate better and more productive strategic planning. In our formal solution we outline some explicit strategic planning activity to type of visual mappings (say, mapping data collection to mind maps) as well as some ways to integrate the different visuals at each stage into the greater process. Over the next weeks I will lay out some documentation that explains how SmartDraw.com’s own visual strategic planning process helped us produce an excellent (well, at least we think so) strategic plan in a relatively short period of time.
You will not be disappointed.
In the mean time, if you would like to learn more about the principles and practices behind visual strategic planning, click here to download our Visual Strategic Planning whitepaper.
Update: I was asked in the comments for a copy of this template in SmartDraw format. I've attached it as an .SDT file which you can download from here: strategic planning - data collection mind map.SDT.
This template will only work in SmartDraw 2010. If you have SmartDraw 2010 installed and run into some difficulty with this template, please download the latest SmartDraw maintenance patch.
To use the template, all you have to do is just double click on it and it will open a new instance of SmartDraw with the content shown in the picture above already pre-canned and ready for your use.
