Strategic Planning

Some people assume that thinking strategically is a function of thinking up “big thoughts” or reading scholarly research on business trends. Most think that they are unable to achieve strategic planning due to being tied up with managing trivial and tactical problems, and they don’t have time to get to the big-picture stuff.

However, in most cases if you canceled someone's schedule for a strategic planning day, they would have no idea how to navigate the process.

How can we implement strategic thinking if we’re not even sure what it looks like?

The Strategic Thinking Institute found that 44% of managers spent most of their time firefighting in cultures that rewarded reactivity and discouraged thoughtfulness.

Practical ways to shift your role to assume the appropriate strategic focus required by their jobs:

*Identify the strategic requirements of your job.

What’s the most important thing your CEO and board want you to accomplish in this role?

Are you engaged in activities that enable you to touch on this at least once a day, once a week, once a month?....

Leaders with less clarity must work harder to etch out the line of sight between their role and its impact on the organization’s direction.

*Uncover patterns to focus resource investments.

Once a clear line of sight is drawn to a leader’s strategic contribution, resources must be aligned to focus on that contribution. Aligning budgets and bodies around a unified direction is much harder when there’s more of them, especially when reactionary decision making has become the norm.

This is a common symptom of missing insights. Without a sound fact and insight base on which to prioritize resources, squeaky wheels get all the grease. Great strategic executives know how to use data to generate new insights about how they and their industries make money. Examining patterns of performance over time — financial, operational, customer, and competitive data — will reveal critical foresight about future opportunities and risks.

*Invite dissent to build others’ commitment.

Strategic insight is as much a social capability as it is an intellectual one. No executive’s strategic brilliance will ever be acted upon alone. A leader needs those he/she leads to translate strategic insights into choices that drive results. For people to commit to carrying out an executive’s strategic thinking, they have to both understand and believe in it.

People’s depth of commitment increases when they, not their leader, are

talking. One executive I work with habitually takes his strategic insights to his team and intentionally asks for dueling fact bases to both support and refute his thinking. As the debate unfolds, flawed assumptions are surfaced and replaced with shared understanding, ideas are refined, and ownership for success spreads.

Reference

Carucci, R. Make Strategic Thinking Part of Your Job. Harvard Business Review. 2016.