21 Do’s and Don’ts to Optimize the Annual Strategy Offsite

May 29, 2009 By 2 Comments

As predictable as the change of seasons and the swooning of the Cubs in the Chicago-area, I’m starting to hear whisperings about plans for upcoming strategic planning offsites.  

And while I spend a lot of time preaching to anyone that will listen that STRATEGY IS A PROCESS NOT AN EVENT, I’ve come to grips with the fact that many organizations and leaders relegate their strategic thinking time to these annual events.  

If your organization treats strategic planning this way, I’ll offer a few of my hard-learned lessons on how to optimize results and possibly even catalyze a more robust process that sustains beyond the once-a-year event.

The Annual Offsite:

For many organizations, the annual Strategy Offsite is the primary or only occasion during the year when key managers gather to talk about market and competitor issues and to discuss directions and opportunities for new investments and programs. 

And while a single event is not a substitute for an on-going strategy process, if designed and managed properly, the offsite can help to get people thinking and talking about the right issues.  

 After many years of sitting on both sides of these events—participant and leader -, I’ve compiled a list of Do’s and Don’ts that if followed will help you optimize this valuable use of time and avoid some morale and meeting killing mistakes.

 The Annual Strategy Offsite List of Do’s:

1.  Choose the attendee’s carefully: incorporate key managers, individual contributors and thought leaders in addition to executives.

2.  Start the planning for this event several months ahead of the actual date by developing a strategy team consisting of an executive sponsor (CEO is fine) and a representative from each of the functional teams.  I encourage clients to go one layer below VP for these team members to provide others with developmental opportunities and to infuse fresh ideas into the process.

3.  Carefully define the scope of the event along with key goals and outcomes for the session and then develop the agenda along with roles and responsibilities.  Also, identify advance work such as data gathering and dissemination that will educate and arm people on key facts and issues before the meeting. This is a great opportunity to identify advance work teams and begin building collaboration around strategy issues.

4.  Encourage the participants to educate their associates/teams on what the meeting is about and even to engage their help in advance data gathering or idea generation.

5.  The CEO needs to recognize that many people approach these events with different attitudes: concern, cynicism or plans for subtle defiance should the outcome require change.  It is the CEO’s job to get everyone on the same page. Build the vision!

6.  Consider the use of an outside facilitator to ensure that the meeting stays on track and on topic in pursuit of the established goals and outcomes.  It is extremely difficult for participants to objectively facilitate this process—especially if they are content/idea contributors.  It’s nearly impossible to do both effectively.

7.  Practice effective meeting management techniques, offer ample breaks, incorporate activities and movement (breakouts, mini-groups, report backs), ensure that there is a scribe and a timekeeper and recognize people’s limitations to be creative on command.

8.  Your goal is not necessarily consensus on any one key issue—so don’t focus on driving every topic down to the agreement level.  This event is a great opportunity to motivate lateral thinking.

9.  If managed properly, you will come away with a current view on the market, key market forces, competitor strategies and opportunities for your company to exploit, defend, adapt and improve.  Recognize that all of the “ideas” will require additional fleshing out and establish ownership and follow-up commitments (what, who, when).

10.  Realize that if you do a good job with 1-9 above, you are creating a strategy process not just conducting an event. 

The Annual Strategy Offsite List of Don’ts

1.  Don’t expect everyone to be excited about this event—you have to provide context and build interest.

2.  Don’t expect people to “innovate on command” around complex issues.  Starting the meeting by asking, “What business should we be in?” is a guaranteed disaster.

3  Don’t drive for consensus—you invite the tyranny of mediocrity to have a seat at your table as you force people to compromise around half-measures.

4.  Don’t take the group through a death march of composing mission or vision statements at these sessions.

5.  Don’t forget that everyone else in the company knows this meeting is going on and they think you are talking about them.

6.  Don’t over-invite: it’s not a company town hall.

7.  Don’t limit to just executive members—there are a lot of smart people that make executives look good.

8.  Don’t let the meeting end without planned follow-up. 

9.  Don’t make the offsite an operations update by burning a lot of time covering results and key metrics—that should be handled ahead of time.

10.  Don’t use an internal facilitator that has an agenda—it will be visible to everyone and destroy meeting morale and credibility.

11.  Don’t expect one meeting to yield market dominating strategy plans—it’s a process not an event.

–

Take the opportunity to catalyze a great process by running an outstanding event.  Happy planning.  

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

From Strategic Planning to Strategic Conversations

April 16, 2009 By 3 Comments

The McKinsey Quarterly (subscription required) just released the results of its latest survey on corporate strategic planning activities in an article entitled: Strategic Planning: Three tips for 2009. 

Key results include:

  • 47% of executives surveyed indicated that their strategic planning practices will be different this year than in prior years.  34% indicated that the activities would be “extremely different.”
  • The differences tend to focus on increased emphasis on scenario planning, conducting a broader range of analyses, and as you might expect, focusing on more of a short time horizon.
  • In what is likely good news for the malady that I described in my recent post, “Too many projects chasing too few resources,” one of the more widely reported changes for this period is an increase in the rigor of evaluating and approving capital projects.
  • As for monitoring execution, 50% of respondents plan on scrutinizing their firm’s/unit’s performance against the plan somewhere between weekly and monthly. 

The survey’s conclusion offers a cautionary tale on the potential for too much short-term focus, with the following:

“Important as these adjustments may be, their nature also raise a major question in the minds of many strategists: is the crisis atmosphere undermining focus on all but the immediate future? More than 50 percent of executives, in fact, express worry about not striking the right balance between near-term challenges and long-term strategic priorities. The perennial challenge of striking this balance has become particularly acute this year.”

–

From Planning to Conversations

You can set your watch by the fact that just as opening day in baseball rolls around, the articles on strategic planning start appearing.  I continue to rail at the notion that this is a seasonal activity, and am actually encouraged by the large number of firms that are planning on evaluating performance against plan monthly.  Hopefully, this evaluation is more than a distribution of reports, and involves opportunities to truly gauge progress, capture lessons-learned and make real-time adjustments.

While there is no doubt that strategic planning done right is a valuable management process and tool, in my opinion, we need to change both the vernacular and the approaches to move from strategic planning to conducting strategic conversations.  Frankly, I want everyone in my firm thinking, talking and relating their work activities to the firm’s strategies for creating customer value and thumping competitors. 

There are many potential pitfalls and poor practices that can derail even the best of intentions for strategic planning, and one of the most fatal is restricting the involvement in this process to a select few. 

And while I am neither naïve enough or idealistic enough to think that it is practical to have everyone actively involved in all planning sessions, I do believe that good leadership practices open up multi-directional dialogue about strategy and performance.

The best run companies that I’ve worked around ensure that employees pass the “Walk In the Door” test…they can connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities every day that they walk in the door.  They also ensure that there are ample opportunities for employees to share ideas, capture lessons-learned, reflect on Voice of Customer and suggest adjustments to execution or even to strategy. 

The people in these environments engage in strategic conversations that ensure that the emperor knows if he has no clothes on and that challenge potentially bone-headed ideas or the poor execution practices that derail good ideas. 

Charan and Bossidy call this Robust Dialogue.  I describe it as a healthy feedback culture, filled with leaders at all levels that get the fact that their chances of success are enhanced if they park their egos at the door and promote and encourage widespread involvement.

Realizing a culture where strategic conversations are prevalent and effective takes hard work on the part of those that lead.  Of course, no one said that being a good leader was easy. 

How healthy and frequent are the strategic conversations in your firm?

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices

November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.

In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project.

Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:

  • The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.
  • Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.
  • Tools are misapplied.
  • The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.
  • Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings.
  • Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.
  • Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned
  • A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.
  • The Voice of the Customer is never heard.

And so on…

Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success. I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.

Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:

  • Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.
  • Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.
  • Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.
  • Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.
  • Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.
  • On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.
  • Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.
  • Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.

The Bottom-line for Now

The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs.

While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives.  Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,