I was having coffee earlier this week with my good friend John Kirby and we spent a lot of time talking about strategic planning. John is one of the most strategically oriented HR leaders I have the pleasure to work with. He and I like to get together and solve the problems of the world from time to time. These sessions are powerful for me because they provide an opportunity to reflect on what we have learned and turn our mutual experiences into lessons for the future.
Both John and I have led and participated in many strategic planning sessions and we have seen a plenty of good and bad examples. We were trying boil down our experience into a couple of ideas about what the best ones have in common. After an hour and too much coffee, we identified two critical lessons from our best strategic planning experiences.
Lesson #1: Strategic planning is about making decisions about how to allocate resources to accomplish your goals. In the best planning sessions, the planners spend focused time making real decisions about how they will use the resources they have under their control. They talk specifically about how much capital, people, space, and calendar time they are willing to dedicate to the strategic initiatives. While discussions about values, mission, and specific goals are important, nothing starts to be real until we decide what investments we are willing to make.
Lesson #2: Strategic planning is about what you are NOT going to do. The best planners know that to create the capacity needed to work on strategic initiatives, most organizations have to stop doing some things. Deciding what NOT to do is exactly the right kind of discussion for a strategic session. It is also sometimes the most difficult. When pruning programs, people will feel like winners and losers. So the conversation has to be framed carefully to minimize turf-defending behavior and maximize enterprise-wide thinking.
John and I agreed that all of the best planning sessions we have experienced have these two things in common. These two decisions – what investments to make and what not to do – bring the conversations out of the clouds and make them concrete. These are critical steps in making your strategic plan a reality.
