Strategy Planning – While You Wait
The whole concept of strategic planning has become too complicated, in my opinion. It’s reached the point where developing a strategy, as espoused by many consultants, is simply too time-consuming, too divisive, and too frustrating a process. It’s dreaded at many organizations.
Years ago, I had a business partner, the late Jon Phelps, who, like me, always looked for practical solutions to assist clients with fast results. Most of all, we shared a dislike for the overly complicated style of strategic planning that’s taught in many business schools, an approach that requires weeks, wastes valuable time, and results in a plan that people either hate or never understand because it is so wordy and complicated.
So, we created the S-O-S approach to strategic planning, a way to keep it clear, easy, straight-forward, and, most of all, actually fun. It’s a method for developing a plan that gets people excited and delivers meaningful results, and on-time. Jon called it, strategy planning, while-you-wait.
The S-O-S approach to strategic planning is detailed in my new book, The Media Savvy Leader, and it is the style I use today with clients.
In summary, it means Situation-Objectives-Strategies. Add to that the components of identifying audiences, developing messages that resonate favorably with those audiences, tactics that bring the strategies to life, a timeline, and a measurement matrix … and an S-O-S results in an action-packed business plan that can be developed in a few days, builds consensus, and delivers.
The key is to use common sense, plain language, and never getting wrapped-up in silly things that don’t matter, like whether something is a goal or an objective (because it’s all the same).
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Useful for small businesses, which do not have the resources or the time for long drawn out planning processes.
Thanks, David, for some good tips. One of the things I do is called the 10% rule. Most people are 10% behind schedule. But in order to think strategically, you have to get ahead of the curve so you can see things from the 30,000 foot level. If you put in a little effort, you can get 10% ahead of schedule, which gives you a chance to see the big picture. Strategy is all about the big picture. Just a thought. Best, Jamie Turner
Jamie,
You are absolutely correct – strategy planning starts with that 30k perspective. I call it a Situation Overview, and it must be stated in not more than a couple of paragraphs – incisive, concise but nails the big picture. The alternative is that a strategy planning session turnsinto discussing Tactics, which is planning in reverse and ultimately never produces anything meaningful.
Thanks,
David