Category: Strategy

Have you ever played a part in crafting a useless strategic plan? You thought it was a good product, but it ended up languishing on the shelf or in unread email. However, you believed in the process followed, but something was missing… maybe from the final step which condemned the entire plan to the scrap heap.

As you near the season for developing your company’s strategic plan, you already know that engaging stakeholders is important. Getting everyone on the same page is the only way to implement the plan effectively. However, you may not realize that the final group handshake at your retreat isn’t a mere formality or nicety. Instead, it creates an emotional bond no participant should escape.

Compare this to the fond memories of a wedding. Most recall the fun. A wonderful ceremony. The party after. Delicious food. Engaging people you met.

But there’s only a single short segment that was essential. The vows between the bride and groom may be different each time, but the public promises they make are the ingredients which generate a permanent difference. Without it, the activity is not a wedding.

In the same spirit, a strategic planning retreat cannot skip over the ultimate promise attendees must make to each other. Dr Richard Rumelt from the Caribbean Strategy Conference calls it the “swearing-in ceremony.” (The phrase is borrowed from basic military training.) What makes this final activity – essentially a handshake agreement – so important?
1—It’s a Reckoning

A great retreat is an exercise in “managed disagreement.” Executives from different functions bring together disparate points of view. Collectively, they forge a future none of them could create by themselves.

When the planning horizon is 10-30 years out, profound conflicts are even more pronounced. They can only be resolved via in-depth discussions, including a heavy dose of individual give and take.

But the meeting is wasted if, at the end, everyone is not on the same page. This test cannot be left to a gut feeling. Instead, someone must be brave enough to publicly ask each attendee to commit to moving forward together. In other words, to make a vow equivalent to a wedding’s “I Do”. Or similar to an oath of office. Without this clarity, prepare to declare the meeting a failure. 

2 – It’s Not Compete Consensus

While it would be nice to get total agreement on every single point of the strategic plan, that’s not the best practice. If you follow that path, expect the event to drag on indefinitely. 

Why? A lone person with strong convictions could dominate and wreck the proceedings. 

The fact is, this isn’t a debate. Or a marriage. Or a competition. It’s a business activity intended to move the company forward. With hard realities looming outside the meeting room, the organization needs a plan to fulfill its potential.

The best practice involves the use of a lesser form of agreement…”Disagree-and-Commit.” In this method, which is ideal for time-limited activities like planning retreats, participants don’t need to resolve all their reservations. Instead, they are encouraged to keep them, but simultaneously join the group in moving forward.

This technique is usually taught at the start of the retreat, but its influence is fully realized at the very end. Before everyone departs, there needs to be no daylight between participants and the strategic plan so that a united team can implement it as one.

3 – Defang Backstabbers

This approach is also intended to take power away from those who sit back, waiting to say “I Told You So” at the first signs of failure. But the truth is, if such people exist at the end, the process was defective. At some level, they were excluded. 

Prevent this from happening by checking to see whether “Disagree-and- Commit” bonds are being formed during the retreat. Use your intuition to focus on those who seem to be withdrawn or disengaged.

Also, seek to forge solutions that combine the best elements of separate points of view. By the end, each component of the plan should be identified with the team, rather than any individual.

The bottom line is that the paragraphs and diagrams in the strategic plan don’t matter as much as the human element.

When the team hasn’t stepped up as a unit to make a visible, authentic commitment to the plan, you have nothing but empty words. The true test comes when people are alone in front of their laptops. Do they execute the strategic plan when they are tired, distracted, or just plain comfortable with the status quo?

Such moments are the ultimate proof that your final handshake agreement was authentic. Your plan is ready to be executed.

Each year, managers in your company sit down to devise budgets for the next twelve months. As a participant in the process, you see that each department’s spending reflects certain priorities. Where do these come from? Are some correct in calling them “strategic”? Should they be reconciled in some way?

Managing costs has become a bigger priority than ever in these pandemic times. The best method of control? It’s nothing new: negotiate budgets with your department managers. Then, hold them to account.

There is no question that this process works. It sets expectations and regulates purchases. In fact, some companies use the terms “budget” and “revenue targets” interchangeably in a nod to its universal acceptance.

However, as negotiations proceed each year, inevitable questions arise. Each department appears to be operating from its own background assumptions. Where did they come from? And what strategy is the unit pursuing? Is it related to the overall corporate plan?

Perhaps you are like many managers who notice these discrepancies. They exist, but you want them to disappear. The answer? Pull together a single “strategic plan” which covers all the budgets at the same time. Towards that end, a mandatory retreat is announced.

While this reasoning may appear sound, it’s often deeply flawed. A budget should not be conflated with a corporate strategy for many reasons. Why? Here are just a few.

Reason #1 – Required Budget vs Optional Strategy

In terms of immediate threats to your business, a broken budget process is a huge risk. Why? Compared to the existence of a strategic plan, a busted budget can cause cash to run out.

Consequently, managers who disregard budgets are likely to face severe sanctions. By contrast, when you ignore the strategic plan, you are probably safe in the majority. After all, it only serves long-term interests.

This is just human nature. We pay more attention to our anxieties than long-term concerns. In this context, strategic planning becomes a nice-to-have business activity which adds little real value. When a retreat is not scheduled, nothing changes from one day to the next.

Reason #2 – Strategy as an Afterthought

Your company may be like many. It only thinks about strategic matters when the fear of competition or disruption arises. The trigger might be a case study of failures, such as Kodak or Blackberry. Or a competitor’s advertisement for a new feature you didn’t even know existed.

In these moments, it becomes obvious: strategy matters. In fact, the right strategy probably earned your company the success and stability it experiences today. Someone had a vision of where the company should go.

However, history often reverses itself. I have led many corporate retreats in which the strategic planning activity was scheduled after the budgets were completed. They were merely last-ditch attempts to reconcile different points of view.

Today, the danger in leaving strategy as an after-thought is that your company might be heading into extinction without knowing it.

If you are a top executive, you may not be detecting slow changes underway in your industry. By focusing on budgets before strategies, you fail to scan the horizon for changes before setting priorities. This mistake renders the entire budgetary exercise impotent – a shuffling of the chairs on the Titanic.

But there’s no need to wait for a scare. Instead, examine your current strategic plan. A timeframe of five years or fewer is probably just an update of prior documents. It’s Business-As-Usual, plus some small changes.

If incremental improvements are all that’s expected, get everyone excited about producing a disruptive strategic plan instead.

Reason #3 – Game-Changing Results Become Impossible

Unfortunately, while your company rides on decisions made long ago, the world has continued to change. Before long, competitors will notice your slow-moving ways, leading them to look for disruptive ideas and technologies.

As they climb the learning curve, they anticipate transformations which build on each other. A dramatically different future comes into focus.

Such was the case of Apple’s iPhone division, and much closer to home, Digicel. By the end, thousands lost their jobs as the incumbents’ leaders failed to set a new direction.

If you’re interested in a new paradigm, consider the advice of Dr. Richard Rumelt from the recent Caribbean Strategy Conference.

He recommended that companies decouple budgetary and strategic activities. How? Ensure that they don’t follow the same annual cycle. Break them apart.

At the conference, we also learned to dream big by asking your team to contemplate 15 and 30 year scenarios. What does your company want to happen in decades to come?

Approaching your strategic planning in these new ways can preserve the integrity of the process. It might even keep your company from destruction.

For years, HR Professionals have lobbied: they must have a seat at the strategic planning table. Now, many companies agree. However, HR’s impact in retreats has not matched those of other functions. What can your company do to ensure talent management isn’t an after-thought?

Today, most Human Resource units have evolved well past the old “Personnel Departments”. Almost all executives in your organization are in support.

But it’s not enough. In two decades of facilitating strategic planning retreats, I have noticed a trend. The least effective participants are often HR Professionals.

I don’t say this lightly. Nor would I apply my observation to every situation I have encountered. But there is definitely a recurring pattern of behavior.

For example, when the HR Director makes his/her presentation, colleagues regularly stop paying attention. To them, nothing earth-shattering will be shared. They relax, sometimes get bored and may even leave the room altogether for busywork.

Also, from start to finish, the HR manager is likely to be the most quiet person. Sometimes, he/she could come alive near the very end, but it’s too little too late.

Instead of missing the chance, how can you ensure HR steps up from the first minute?

1. Be Strategic Before the Retreat

In general, many executives bemoan the fact that HR is too reactive. While this is a criticism, it translates to a great opportunity for improvement. For example, HR can establish itself at the forefront of strategic questions between retreats, perhaps focusing on the potential of human capital.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a wildly successful strategy that doesn’t involve human creation and execution. It’s not luck. Ingenuity, data analytics, foresight, business modelling, backcasting, deep listening – these are just a few of the skills needed to produce a game-changing plan.

Also, most non-HR executives can’t assess the capacity of an entire workforce. But HR professionals naturally ask: “What specific future can this potential be used to accomplish?”

If you’re in HR, this is an inquiry to be led throughout the year, building an awareness of the organization’s human capability map.

While it’s obvious that talented thinking creates strategy, other executives struggle to articulate what this means operationally. As such, the company desperately needs HR to drive this conversation.

2. Be Data-Driven

Whereas a CFO is trained to think in terms of numbers, the same isn’t usually true of HR. As such, reviews of past financial results take up an inordinate amount of time. However, they are all about a history, telling stories about what has already happened.

By contrast, HR professionals can be all about the future. But you must use numbers to describe it.

Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment at a retreat, HR’s lack of data forces it into vague, qualitative measures which colleagues have a hard time grasping.

In a prior column in Nov 2021, I argued that CEOs and other executives are upset at this fact. They want HR to catch up to the analytics train, but it’s not for charity’s sake.

Unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of CEOs, Chairpersons and MDs have HR backgrounds. Even though most of their work involves people, these skills only become important late in their careers.

As such, they need HR analytics and dashboards, tools and summaries to appreciate what’s happening with their people. Sadly, most HR managers don’t give them what they want.

If you’re an HR Professional, consider becoming data-driven long before the retreat so that you can shine in the event. I have seen it done to great effect and the result was stunning.

In this context, a retreat is more like the grand finale – the finish line of a lengthy race.

3. Lead Analysis, Not Follow

The presence of data gives HR deep insights others miss. This would reverse the trend in which HR is the short discussion at the end of the retreat…the afterthought.

Instead, as an HR Professional, you can develop your ability to define different futures and advocate for them. With this information in hand, you alone can speak to gaps in staff capacity and the cost of filling them. In this context, HR is like the manager of a modern sports team, as depicted by the movie MoneyBall. It’s a baseball story, but a similar transformation has occurred in football and cricket.

If you had the detailed information top coaches have, every conversation about company strategy would start with such analytics. HR would be the chief interpreters of people’s capacity.

In these ways, HR moves from a back bench into the foreground, returning organizations to their original people power, altering the prior perception for good.

Your company is one which builds its strategic plan around an individual’s ideas. But even if the “Big Man” is a brilliant entrepreneur-founder, is it a good idea to include a host of other stakeholders in the process? If the current method isn’t obviously broken, why fix it?

Some argue: if a strategic plan is little more than words, who cares how they were written? This popular sentiment leads companies to assemble plans in a hurry, including as few people as possible. After all, “too many cooks spoil the broth”. And there’s always time to convince board members and staff that the soup tastes great…after the fact.

However, if you are interested in a more inclusive way, here are some methods. They promise a better product and a greater chance of success.

Missing Board Members

In some organizations, the board is excluded from strategic planning activities. Once the final product is completed, they are expected to offer cursory comments, if any.

This approach undermines advisors who have the time and wisdom to think about the big picture: the future of the organization. Untethered from the daily grind, boards are well-suited to consider PESTER forces: Political, Environmental, Social, Technological, Economy and Regulatory/Legal.

If they aren’t capable of this analysis, uninterested, or not permitted…then ask: “Why bother with a board?”

In both private and public sectors, this hard question is rarely asked. Consequently, some board members take a passive approach, failing to show up at meetings and retreats. Their abysmal performance goes unchecked, hidden under a veneer of collegial “blighs”. Friendship trumps stewardship, to the detriment of all concerned.

Instead, have a board which exhibits the highest standard. Or have none at all.

Checked-out Executives

Your senior managers are probably the best result-producers in your company. Why? After all, their track records helped them climb the corporate ladder.

However, these skills have little to do with strategic planning. As such, they feel uncomfortably ill-equipped to think for the long-term. Also, organization-wide cause-and-effect relationships are hard to grasp. Plus, there’s never enough data to make easy decisions and set targets.

They would gladly skip this year’s retreat and leave the whole awkward business to the founder/Big Boss. She can do the heavy lifting. All they need to do is provide a quick blessing once the dust has settled.

In simpler times, with a small organization, this may have worked. Unfortunately, today’s complex COVID-era challenges require more. The full team, with its wide range of skills and experiences, must bring all it can muster to the activity.

Given the fact that your company should be developing a game-changing strategy for 2023, it’s folly to disengage the best minds. Instead, help stakeholders to embrace their incompetence in this area and start learning.

Uninterested Staff

Jamaican executives are often dismayed at their staff’s reaction to the announcement of their grand strategy. First there is silence, followed by a seeming lack of curiosity. No questions are asked, and most employees seem happy to delegate 100% ownership (and blame) to the organization’s leaders.

The conclusion senior managers draw is that staff is disengaged.

That may not be the best interpretation. Consider that the typical non-executive spends most of his/her time on daily tactics. Unfortunately, when faced with questions about the strategic future of the company, they flounder.

The general remedy might be the same for board, executive and staff: engage them all at the start of the process. Conduct open sessions defining the challenges the organization faces. Use PESTER to describe the environment. Ask for stories about competitors, especially if they are indirect, or based outside the Caribbean.

Arrange interviews, focus groups and online surveys to ensure these three levels consider the future and the cost of inaction. At one level, you are asking for their input. But at another, you are sharing responsibility.

Now, your planning retreat becomes more than a mere meeting. It’s a venue to place bets about the future of your enterprise. While it’s not as random as a casino, you need everyone’s best thinking to come together to make the most of your industry’s uncertainty.

This task is so hard that many organizations skip the exercise altogether. They hope that the status quo should suffice. By contrast, leading companies embrace the challenge. They don’t shrink away, but see their courage as a competitive advantage.

Winston Churchill said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” You may not have a country to defend against Nazis, but your stakeholders will need to do some heavy lifting. It’s the only way to bring everyone onto the same page.

As a manager, you may find it hard to engage in fruitful discussions about the future. You are able to speculate informally over lunch, but be unable to plan strategically in a formal session. You sense that this needs to change, but how? Where will this new skill-set come from?

Few things are more distressing in organizational life than a manager who was good at his old job, but still tries to perform it after being promoted. While he was elevated based on his technical ability, these are of little use now that employees report to him. They expect something new: leadership.

The same applies to the executive suite, and in particular the role of a CEO. More specifically, newly minted executives often don’t think strategically. The truth is, they gained their reputations based on reaching short-term results and fighting fires.

While every company needs middle-level managers who can demonstrate these skills, as leaders they are entrusted with something different: the company’s future.

If they are lucky, mentors take them under their wings, and deliberately stretch their capabilities with well-designed assignments and training. But this is rare. In general, a new executive’s lack of strategic planning skills isn’t revealed until the situation desperately needs them. By then, it’s too late. Instead, here are three competencies you can proactively develop.

1. Thinking *about* the Future

I have met many CEOs and MDs who don’t talk about specific future outcomes at all. In their minds, all they need to do is react to stuff that might happen.

However, the best leaders don’t sit back: they create the future. For example, Facebook has a 15-year plan for the Metaverse which is intended to shape the way the internet is used globally.

By so doing, they confront the natural inertia of the vast majority who prefer to stay in their comfort zones.

As an executive, your job is to coach top managers to think about the future as a malleable object. They can become visionary. But you may need to do some convincing. In other words, you must educate, challenge and confront. And demote the unwilling or unable.

The fact is that as a member of the leadership team, you should develop the best long-term planning skills, and encourage others to follow your path.

2. Thinking *from* the Future

While a good facilitator can drag any executive team through the creation of a specific vision, it’s not enough. Once it exists, the participants must take charge of the vision. Inhabiting it means thinking from the future, while they implement it in the present.

Some reduce this to a matter of project management, but it actually requires far more. Great leaders carry out special practices to help people think from the future. Examples include regular strategy updates using current information.

They also have a knack for bringing up the vision in everyday conversation. Each time, they create the specific future as the context behind every decision. By recalling its importance to stakeholders, they bring the future closer one step at a time.

Finally, they help staff see that Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) must be translated into projects, then tasks. This connection is easily lost. Why? Daily emergencies hijack people’s attention, along with the distractions of social media/Netflix. To keep people on track, you should repeatedly bring the vision alive.

3. Speaking from the Future

Unfortunately, very few executives know how to inspire others on demand. Call it a recurring failure of organizational life: the few who are inspiring often leave to start their own companies. Those who remain learn to survive the corporate grind by keeping out of trouble, rather than leading.

If this fits your story, you may be annoyed. Now that you have been promoted, you are asked to inspire staff. But where would you have learned to do so?

If the workplace doesn’t offer them, seek out other opportunities. Volunteer in your service organization, church or alumni association. Allow the discomfort of vision-filled speaking to become the norm. Experience the thrill of filling others with the hope of accomplishing remarkable things by working together.

In these challenging times with a pandemic, recession, and war ever-present, the natural human tendency is to withdraw and see performance fall. Great leaders realize this and put themselves at risk. This is your avenue to accomplish the extraordinary.

Start by telling the truth. If, as a CEO or MD, you have never been trained in this dimension, some honesty will help. Embrace this fact, and propel yourself forward with experiments which take you outside your comfort zone. Use the results to learn what works and become someone who can connect the future with the present. Your people are waiting.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.

Do your managers complain about key strategies their predecessors failed to craft? It seems as if they have all the answers, but you suspect that they may be kidding themselves. The truth is, they may not be very different. If so, how should you intervene so they don’t handicap future generations with more poor decisions?

Hindsight is 20-20 vision. After the fact, it’s easy to be an expert. On Monday morning, after the contest is over, you can say exactly what the coach and players needed to do.

The same applies to your company. If it’s been around for more than a few years, then your firm is benefitting (or suffering) from strategic plans created and applied by prior executives. They made some decisions (and failed to make others), forcing your organization into its current position. Like the Monday morning experts, it’s tempting to sit back and criticise them. With disbelief, you wonder out aloud: “What were they (not) thinking?”

However, as a leader, you could be committing the same mistake. In other words, you and your colleagues may be so engrossed with today’s issues that you are “kicking the can down the road” i.e. setting up traps for the next generation of managers. Essentially, you are abandoning them to a future they can’t influence today.

It’s a perpetual cycle which will only continue until your company is blindsided by a new competitor, technology, pandemic or other disruption. These occurrences are ones you wanted prior leaders to foresee, and prepare your company to handle. How do you break the cycle? What if you want to quit setting up new obstacles for your successors? Try these thought experiments, preferably conducted during a leadership retreat.

1) Imagine Your Organization Doesn’t Exist

In this thought experiment, ask yourself: “What if our organization didn’t exist?”

Look to the future and predict what would happen in your industry in regards to the products and services you deliver. What would customers and stakeholders come to expect as the norm? From whom? What new technologies or market realities would have an outsized influence?

Understand that your answers rely on present developments, maturing trends, and items becoming obsolete. In this experiment, you have no control – you can only observe.

The only real question to ask today is: What is your current relationship to these external forces? How are you preparing your company to deal with them? Unfortunately, many executives do little more than complain: “Someone should do something before it’s too late.” But they fail to act, only becoming victims. Don’t make this mistake.

2) Fast-Forward Far-Away Developments

Even if you can clearly discern market or technology trends, some managers won’t. They’ll pretend these threats can be ignored. Their inertia makes the company passive.

In a strategic planning exercise several years ago, we asked a leadership team: “When will a majority of Jamaicans prefer to use online banking?” After a long discussion, the group came to agreement: “2030.”

In today’s world, in light of COVID, we can see they were far off the mark. However, by back casting from 2030, they created a feasible course of action. As such, when the pandemic broke out, they could revisit their plan, have a laugh at their assumptions, and fast-forward their transformation. Instead of going into a panic, they made a tweak.

As you can imagine, future managers look back at this kind of exercise with gratitude. Even though it was inaccurate, it wasn’t incorrect. The same might apply to your industry and company with respect to inevitable changes that may arrive far more quickly than imagined.

3) Think in Terms of a Market Winner

Finally, imagine if all the competitors in the world were to disappear, leaving a single provider. Ask the retreat: “What did this team do to be the last one standing, serving customers, while others failed?”

Chances are, this is probably the company that invested early in some critical capability that others didn’t recognize.

Bring that thinking to your situation today. How do you ensure that you become more like Netflix/Apple/Fuji rather than their failed counterparts: Blockbuster/Nokia/Kodak? Can you stop postponing long-term decisions which guarantee your failure?

Arguably, there are few companies which arrived at their dominant position by accident. For example, Grace Kennedy’s competitors in the mid-1990s are no longer major players in their industries. Why? GK’s 25-year plan helped it surge ahead, via far-sighted moves some thought were foolish.

Don’t fall into that trap and inadvertently make your company obsolete. Instead, let future generations be proud of your decisions and willingness to set ego aside for the greater good. They may even thank you for your courage.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.