They are used as doorstops in the CEO’s office.  They adorn the teakwood bookshelf of the COO.  Or, they become a fantastic paperweight on that first day in spring when all the windows are opened to air-out a musty, winter-worn office.
            I am talking about your strategic plan.
            After 20 years of consulting, I still confounded by the time, energy and money that organizations pour into this tome about tomorrow.
            Strategic planning meetings go on for hours.  Ad-hoc committees meet until midnight.  Four or five trees are killed to put a copy of the final product on every desk.  And…no one knows, or cares, about what these pages portend.
            It is my opinion that spending a year to research, write and publish a strategic plan is the biggest waste of time since we talked to our Pet Rocks.
             

Before You Begin

            There are three assumptions that support a 90 day strategic planning process.
First, your present plan for your organization’s future is not working. 
Second, you are willing for staff, at all levels, to have a voice in where your organization goes. 
Finally, you are not a perfectionist.  If there is one psychological component to eternal strategic planning, it is perfectionism.

Day 1

There are three important tasks on the first day.
First, you have to decide who will lead the strategic planning process.  I believe you have two choices.
Your organizations can choose an internal staff person who must have demonstrated skills in facilitation, systemic thinking and negotiation.
If this person is your CEO, you are in trouble.  Your chief executive officer drags political carry-on baggage to every part of your strategic future.  He/she will always be the 800 pound guerilla in the room, but the guerilla should not be leading the process.
The second choice is an external consultant.  This person will have a blend of professional expertise as a facilitator and, most important, no political agenda.  
Next, who will be on the “Strategic Planning Team” (SPT)? I recommend a combination of several top management personnel, middle management and frontline staff.  If there is diversity on the SPT acceptance of the final product is significantly enhanced.
I also suggest this team of not be more than 10 people.  If your organizations wants “ownership” by placing 30 people on the Strategic Planning Team plan on spending most of your time “herding.”
Third, what is the timeframe for the strategic plan?  Because we live with just-in-time realities, I recommend a three year strategic plan. 

Day 2-15

The facilitator will individually interview selected members of the senior management team and lead at least two focus groups and/or administer an organizational development assessment inventory.
Senior management is important because if these decision-makers are not consulted, the entire strategic planning process will expire from lack of sponsorship oxygen.
The focus groups should be made up of mid-level management and the other of front-office staff.  Questions to be included in these focus groups include, “Does our organization have a clear set of goals for its future?” or “If you were in the senior management boardroom, what would you recommend to your colleagues to grow this organization and/or make it a better place to work?”
The assessment instrument is usually a set of 40 items administered at a safe (totally anonymous) on-line site.  The responses are then quantified.  Instead of “I feel” decisions, the SPT will have hard data to hone choices about the future.

 Day 16-30

            Schedule the first strategic planning team meeting.  The participants will accomplish two specific tasks.
First, the SPT will craft a “focusing goal.” 
The goal should not be more than 13 words.  This goal should (1) “raise the bar” (offer a challenge) to the entire organization, (2) be consistent with the organizational mission or vision statement and (3) be easily memorized by all staff.
To begin ask, “Three years from now, what are the adjectives you would like to use to describe our organization to someone who has never heard of our workplace?” 
Second, after the focusing goal has been penned, create no more than five “business initiatives” to accomplish the focusing goal.  A business initiative simply answers this question, “What will we have to do better or change around here in order for us to accomplish our focusing goal?”
So how long does this initial meeting take?  It is my experience that within three to five hours the SPT can write and agree on the focusing goal and five business initiatives. 

Day 30-60

The SPT will reconvene after individually reviewing the focusing goal and business initiatives and then come to consensus.
The rest of this second session will be spent training its members how to lead a team of staff (who have not been involved in the strategic planning process) to develop the specific “action plans” for each business initiative.
Give people who will be responsible for doing the work of the strategic plan a voice in the process. 
The action plans are a series of sequential steps that answer this question, “What are the specific actions we will have to take in order to accomplish this business initiative?” 
Collecting the specific actions, prioritizing them and then scheduling a beginning and ending date for each action planwill be the task of these ad hoc teams.

Day 60-89

            The Strategic Planning Team will review, revise and assign an “accountability sponsor” for each action plan. 
If the SPT does not designate someone to be accountable to accomplish each action plan, the wheels will come off the entire strategic planning process.
Here is where the traditional strategic planning usually fails.  The notebooks are filled with wonderful, and strategic, plans.  But, the plans die because no one sponsors them.  Page after page of award-winning ideas crumble with age. 
Therefore, by day 75 the Strategic Planning Team will have completed the verbiage and linkage for the focusing goal, business initiatives and accompanying action plans.
The Strategic Planning Team will spend the next two weeks individually examining and studying this final document. 

Day 90

The Strategic Planning Team will give final approval, after any last-minute alterations, to the Strategic Plan.
The STP will then decide the following: (1) When and where will the Strategic Plan be communicated to the entire organization? (2) What will be the branding techniques? (3) How will the SPT hold itself accountable for whether or not the Strategic Plan is being implemented?

After the Party….

            You need to throw a party!  In just 90 days you have created a hands-on strategic future for your organization.  I think you need to hire a band, crank up a “strategic sock-hop” and kick back.  Your organization has direction for the next three years and not created doorstops in the process.