Does your strategic planning process grow your team?

Strategic leaders drive better team thinking through the disciplines of good planning.

THINK ON IT: Does your strategic planning process grow your team? 

How effective is your strategic planning process? 

If you don’t even have one, pause right now and go read this article first.

When I consult with leaders about their organizations, there are two common flaws in their strategic planning process that I see more than any other: 

• Recency Bias: The idea that what happened most recently is bound to happen again, or that what happened most recently is the MOST IMPORTANT thing to plan around, when it very well may not be the case. 

• Reality Distortion: That is, detached-from-reality thinking; this leads to overly optimistic plans. If you don’t start your strategic planning process leading from a place of reality, you might as well not start at all. It sounds dramatic, but it’s really not. 

When leaders succumb to these two ways of thinking, they are defaulting to reactionary ways of running their business, the exact opposite of strategic thinking.

And that’s what makes strategic planning so important. Done correctly, it acts as a forcing function to promote better thinking about your business.

No good leader wants to be surrounded by a team of non-thinkers — mere responders. So the process you use, the intentionality you put toward it, and the way you arrive at outcomes conditions how your team will think about the business. 

The more importance you put to thinking rightly, the more they will, too.

That’s why I’m not particularly fond of annual strategy meetings. Too often, the habit of reactive problem-solving spills over into half-day or full-day sessions and little of value is produced, save a “strategic plan,” which either sits on a shelf, or perhaps even worse, gets codified into operational plans without getting the necessary consideration of disciplined thinking.

Instead, strategic planning should, in my view, be a persistent process, regularly visited throughout the year. I share some ways to do that below.

But you don’t have to take my suggestions below to rethink your strategic development process. Start seeing strategic planning as a team development exercise to sharpen their cognitive skills and find what works for your business.

Because, as they say, the mind is a terrible thing to waste — and so is your business.

“Strategic planning is worthless — unless there is first a strategic vision.” — John Naisbitt 

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