Keith E Rice - Strategic Planning

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Strategies are the building blocks to achieving Mission and Vision and need to be derived directly from them.

As with the leadership defining of Mission and Vision, it is the ORANGE vMEME running a Move-Towards meta-programme which should take the lead in strategy creation. Again there is a role for the ‘naysayer’ – BLUE with a Move Away meta-programme.

ORANGE will be the ideas generator while BLUE picks holes in them.

For a number of years now I have found it highly beneficial to centre the strategic planning process on the Present State-Desired State Planning model, illustrated in the graphic below.

Firstly, the Present State and the Desired State should be fairly well-defined from the Mission and Vision processes - though it can be beneficial to revisit them, especially if the planning team is different in any respect from the Mission and Vision process. (In reality a Present State-Desired State Plan often starts as part of the Mission and Vision processes.)

Within the nominated timeframe to achieve the Desired State, milestones should be set as measures of progress - milestones being significant targets which need to be achieved on the journey to achieving the Desired State. Hitting the milestones will tell you you’re on target; missing them will tell you something is not as it is intended to be. Failure to hit milestones needs to be investigated. It actually may be that nothing is wrong as such but the plan needs to be amended - eg: perhaps market conditions external to the organisation and outside its influence have changed?

One of the benefits of Present State-Desired State Planning is that it obliges the planners to consider the impact on the people - the stakeholders involved. In conventional business planning - the kind the old Department of Trade & Industry favoured - the organisation largely ignores the ‘people issue’ (except as a kind of Investors in People afterthought) and focuses on what it has to do (systems and task) and the resources it needs to do it. In Present State-Desired State Planning there is constant cross-referencing between the attitudes and capabilities of the stakeholders involved and what the organisation actually intends to do.

Of course, the need for involving people and processes for doing that should be considered as a part of a Change Management programme.

A conventional Business Plan vs a Present State-Desired State Plan?

For all that is has certain limitations, there is a place for the ‘conventional business planning’ approach. This is to put the detail on a Present State-Desired State plan.

Whereas the construction of a Present State-Desired plan should bring together key players from all areas in the organisation - what Ichak Adizes (1989) calls CAPI - the detailed plan is best left to Administrative types, with BLUE running Little Detail and Procedures meta-programmes. However, they need to be guided by the Entrepreneurship role with ORANGE Move-Towards. Otherwise the plan is likely to be overly-detailed, tedious to read for people with different psychological profiles and unlikely to be used as any kind of working document.

It can sometimes be very helpful for the board of an organisation to use a Present State-Desired State plan as a working document for strategic meetings to do with review and progress. On a number of occasions, I have persuaded senior management to cover a wall with paper, draw the outline of the plan on the paper and then make all the entries with post-it notes. This provides a good visual ready-referencer which everybody in the meeting can see while the post-it notes can be moved easily as ‘real life’ changes around them. In every instance I have persuaded the board to do this, they have not only reported that it improved decision-making exponentially but they have continued to use the approach after my formal involvement with the organisation came to an end.

My approach to Strategic and Business Planning

A number of years ago I received, via their agents, the Department of Trade & Industry's highest commendation for business planning for a business plan I wouldn't have put into practice myself! (It wouldn't have suited my goals in those circumstances.) However, the client was delighted and has come back to me twice since to assist with further cycles of business planning. From working with me, that client has now gathered enough experience to carry out the full process themselves. However, they still consulted with me recently over a major potential change of direction in the business.

Too many consultants write business plans either simply to get money from the bank or an investor, or based on what they think the organisation should do.

Consequently the plan will not be a working document that the organisation uses to monitor its progress towards its goals. My approach to planning is holistic; everything (internal and external to the organisation) that can impact needs to be taken into account. Hence, I favour Present State-Desired State Planning to overview and set strategies, with perhaps a more detailed business plan to detail implementation of the strategies.

However, the strategies that the organisation sets must be determined by the key decision-makers (not me!) and must be capable of being owned by the workforce.