It’s that time of year again: baseball teams are starting back up, school kids are turning their sights towards summer, and companies are firing up their strategic planning processes.
It’s no secret that we’re all very busy these days – a fact that is magnified by the enormous amounts of data, much smaller amounts of real information and the innumerable amount of interruptions we’re faced with every day. Inevitably, this environment leads to stress, overwhelm and confusion.
Unfortunately, any confusion at the strategy level is magnified throughout the organization.
The strategy process should be a tool of clarification and prioritization, yet it frequently descends into a simple reiteration of last year’s directions, slightly warmed over. Remember that the best strategy meetings produce clarity, and are marked by great facilitation that brings out each participant’s viewpoints in a way that forges new insights. These insights are remarkable because they represent a new and fresh view that was not present prior to the meeting.
The seven pathways below are a composite of issues I have seen in real life situations. I’m hoping you’ll be able to use these to make sure your session is focused and vibrant to allow for true breakthroughs – and real commitments – to move forward.
1. Hostage Scenario – Allowing the issue of the moment to drive the strategy. This scenario goes like this: the sales VP, who really doesn’t want to be at the meeting in the first place, shows up with a very juicy insight that “just came up” and drops it into the dialogue of the session. Soon your entire meeting is focused on this issue, which takes everyone’s eyes off the true strategic work that the team should be doing.
How to fix it: A great planning session is based on great data – that is shared prior to the session – via a pre-read or online wiki tool. The ground rules need to be this: if it isn’t in the pre-read, it doesn’t exist.
2. We’ll Show Them – Basing the majority of your efforts on a competitive response. I have seen this one over and over again: a new benchmarking report comes out, or some competitive intelligence comes forward, and it consumes the team. This kicks off an arms race to one up the competitor, and in many cases, adds needless costs into the product or platform.
How to fix it: As a senior leader, you need to point the team ruthlessly at the customer and the customer’s requirements. Many of Clayton Christensen’s biggest examples of disruption were formed by the runaway train that ignored what the customer really wanted.
3. The Big Bet – Building a “Hail Mary” strategy of launching the next billion dollar business. When a management team reaches a certain point in its career, the focus turns to legacies – and under pressure from shareholders and their board – the team can be induced to do some pretty strange things. This one takes the form of the senior executive asking everyone for their “best” idea or strategy, and “betting the farm” by putting “more wood behind less arrows.”
How to fix it: It takes managerial courage to remind the team that they got where they are by carefully balancing risk and reward – the business is not a lottery ticket. This issue is best done in the privacy of an office, late in the day when egos are lower.
4. Yesteryear – There is an old adage in hockey of needing to skate to where the puck will be, not where it was. The same things applies in business. When a firm is small, a large fraction of the firm has first-hand knowledge of the market and clients. As the firm grows, however, and people are promoted, it takes real effort to stay up to date with the customers’ current needs. Without this effort, the team will continue to make decisions based on their last impression of the customer.
How to fix it: This issue only goes away with a dedicated effort to make sure the “voice of the customer” is driven deep into the business team horizontally. One best practice here is to rotate customer visits around key leaders to make sure their customer avatar doesn’t get out of date.
5. All Show No Go – Leaving the implementers out of the process. This seems easy, but happens much more frequently than you might guess. The true implementers are loath to come to any meeting titled “strategy,” so the visionaries go ahead and have the sessions without them – and the results never amount to much more than a PowerPoint deck.
How to fix it: Insist on having senior operations leaders present and engaged in the session. One great step is to hold the session off site – which will keep the crisis at bay for the day.
6. The Peanut Butter Approach– Allowing the financial goals to lead to bad planning. This one is usually initiated by the CFO, who assigns a “hurdle” rate of growth for all the business units. For example: we committed to an overall growth rate of 6 percent to our shareholders, so every one of the business units gets a (you guessed it) 7 percent goal. Then the games begin, with those products and services units that can exceed the goal sandbagging and pulling back from what they should be doing, while lower growth units stretch up and put together unreachable numbers.
How to fix it: Do a core market and product roll up in the pre-planning stage and make sure that all portions of your business are assigned targets based on the growth of their underlying markets. Engaging a practical economist who can review these targets is a good idea.
7. Nibbling our way to growth – Incrementalism, or allowing the deliberation to be more of an operations review. Robust strategy sessions are built on broad scans of information and forcing the group to work outside its comfort zone. Left untended, a group will tend to focus on areas where they’re the most comfortable, and the meeting will collapse to a current issues session.
How to fix it: If you are going to invest a full day of serious executive talent in a session, do take the time to make sure you have a skilled facilitator to make sure you’re getting out of your comfort zone. Les McKeown has a great post on how to escape this trap here.
If you want to have a vibrant session, make sure you stay off these side roads and follow a process that leads to real insights. Let me get you started with my post about minimum viable innovation systems.
In addition to my speaking and consulting work, I do reserve time to work with C-level leaders and subject matter experts through private, executive coaching relationships. If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you guide your organization to clarity, action and growth, please email me to schedule a 20-minute introductory session.
