New trends in strategic planning

by Legge and Company

Gone are the days of big binders with detailed projections, economic analyses, and all the other stuff that is old even before it is put in binders and distributed. Here are some of the ways strategic plans changing. 

• They're faster-paced, simpler, more fluid, and much more focused. Why? Because markets, technology, and customers are changing so fast, you can't afford to sit still or to be overly detailed. Think of it as changing the tires on a car while going 70 miles per hour down a highway.

• There's far less concern about today. If your planning is projecting sales, operations, and organization forward from today, you're not doing strategy. What you're doing is operations improvement.

• They lock in on a point in the future, then determine how to get there. That's the only way to escape the frame of today's thinking, today's markets, and today's products.

• They are strategic and scenario-based. In other words, they determine what the firm will look like, how it will be exceptional, and what value it will provide. Not just doing better what the firm already does.

• They identify the role of innovation and awareness of growth curves. And they make practical choices about how to enable innovation in their organizations.

• And they focus on successful implementation and execution -- they make strategy part of everyday work, not an added-on layer of tasks.

Shake-up your strategic planning. Throw out the old, plodding approaches. Use your planning to open up your team's thinking, get juices flowing, invent your future, and get everyone on the same page.