Rethinking Strategy and Planning

What is Strategy?

Strategy is a business topic that is both widely discussed and misunderstood. This is due in part to the fact that there are many kinds of strategies including product strategies, marketing strategies, corporate strategies, communications strategies and development strategies.

It is the job of all types of strategy to choose the most effective course for achieving organizational objectives. The product of strategic planning is most often a business plan. and eventually an operational plan. And regardless of whether your organization is a start-up, non-profit, or Fortune 100, strategy development begins with understanding what your most important stakeholders need and value.

a Common misunderstanding

The most common misunderstanding is confusion between strategy creation with strategy execution. These are two interdependent and separate processes. Both are essential to realizing an organization's vision and achieving its mission. Both consider a variety structures, systems, processes and relationships, but each serves a different purpose.

Strategy creation usually results in a business plan and strategy execution results in an operational plan supported by action plans from functions and individualls. Effective strategies and plans rely on a solid processes that consider key factors that will enable or prohibit an organization from achieving its mission as well as short- and long-term goals.

Strategy Creation helps an organization to:

• Understand its stakeholders and the environment in which it must perform
• Clariy the problems it will solve and the value it will provide
• Define high-level organizational goals
• Consider opportunities and competencies
• Examine alternatives and contingencies
• Deliver a business plan

Strategy Execution helps an organization to:

• Communicate specific objectives
• Define functional goals and contributions
• Prioritize the use of human, financial and other resources
• Manage accountability
• Define milestones and measurements
• Provides a method for feedback and course refinement
• Deliver an operational plan

minimizing the impact of change

Strategies and operational plans are not permanent. Today's strategies become quickly outmoded due to rapid changes brought by a dizzying array of information, global world views, technology, economic and socio-political issues..

Organizations can do a number of things to minimize the impact of the rapid pace of change and the complexity of the environments in which they must perform. The core competency required is to think systemically.

Thinking systemically requires seeing your organization, its stakeholders and the context in which it operates as both interdependent, inter-related, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The entire system is required to create and deliver value. Organizations can minimize the impact of change by learning to:

1. Understand how each part of the organization contribute to and eliminates obstacles that block its ability to execute effectively.
2. Promote and support innovation by encouraging and rewarding risk-taking and experimentation.
3. Shift the focus from problem-solving to building capacity to design what is required to create value.
4. Expand what is possible by looking at dilemmas with an eye for both/and, instead or either/or.
5. Optimize the rate of growth by challenging the status quo without overwhelming your organization's structures, systems and relationships.
6. Balance investments in the organization’s capacity to overcome long-term issues and short-term needs.
7. Find opportunities for high leverage, rather than those that are most obvious by looking for underlying structures rather than events.
8. When you must problem-solve, ensure solutions to problems do not merely shift problems from one part of the system to another.
9. Recognize that cause and effect are rarely close in time and space and acknowledge that there may be discomfort in letting go of old ways of doing and being.
10. Reduce rigid internal divisions that inhibit inquiry up and down and across organizational boundaries by learning how to shift from team cooperation to true collaboration.