Sir Winston Churchill said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” While this quote is a little tongue-in-cheek, the unfortunate reality is that companies and non-profit entities alike invest significant capital in strategic plans that ultimately end up abandoned before they’re completed. There are logical reasons for this: business needs change, or the market demands a pivot. Unfortunately, all too often, the real reason that strategic plans are abandoned is that the entity has failed to put it all together in a way that drives future value and ensures alignment along the way.
For a strategic plan to be actionable, meaningful, and transformative, you must encompass those famous interrogatives from grade school – What, Why, Who, Where, When, and How – at the onset of planning.
WHAT: Vision, Goals & Action Plan
Your strategic plan outlines the future of your entity, illustrated mainly in your vision. Importantly, the goals outlined in your strategic plan can be broken down into objectives, strategies, and tactics and further assigned to departments or individuals for execution. This assignment of duties creates the initial action plan. Understanding where you want to go and what it may take to get you there is an essential first step, but you’ve only just begun.
WHY: Alignment & Execution
Jim Collins & Jerry Porras wrote in their book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” Strategic plans are created to map the course for reaching goals. Still, more importantly, the plan creates alignment amongst the people responsible for carrying out the tasks necessary to get there. In addition to alignment, it creates accountability and ownership to ensure execution. When everyone is rowing in the same direction, the boat tends to move forward.
WHO: Team, Culture & Core Values
The most critical component of executing a strategic plan is alignment within the team. This means those responsible for strategic planning must look hard at their team and culture and what will be necessary to achieve the vision, mission, and goals. This can be the most challenging component of the plan, as the organization’s future may require a different workforce than you have today. Aside from reviewing and updating what may be necessary in the organizational chart, strategic plan developers must consider the kind of company they want to be. This means that the plan should incorporate a review and/or creation of the organization’s core values and objectives around the desired culture, and, frankly, be necessary to be successful.
WHERE: Everywhere
The strategic plan should always be present. To highlight this idea, I like this quote by Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Once the plan is complete, it should be visible and shared throughout the entire entity to remain a priority for everyone. The plan should guide every decision made within the company. Ask the team to consider the following: What goal will this new activity help us reach? If the answer is “none”, it’s likely not a valuable use of time.
WHEN: KPIs & SMART goals
A strategic plan is not a “forever” document that ignores business realities. Instead, it outlines the next several years of operation. To know if you’re achieving the goals outlined in the plan, it’s necessary to implement measures directly related to success, but, more importantly, time-bound.
HOW: Budget & Operating System
Last, but certainly not least, for a strategic plan to be truly actionable, it must have a budget that provides the wherewithal for execution. This budget should be created in conjunction with the plan development. In addition to the budget, it is necessary to incorporate an operating system into your business. The operating system will ensure alignment by organizing how the company functions (just like a computer’s operating system). This gives the company a playbook that makes the action plan actionable.