How do you evaluate your practice's strategic goals?

One thing I have found very helpful is asking two questions 1. What does the future look like? 2, What would you do if you are not afraid? I ask these questions at the beginning of an envisioning session. These questions lead to other probing questions about the desired future. With the answers in the bag, we can crystallize the goals and then bring it to the present day.

I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian to generally accepted advice. But in my experience, goals have been met by setting a strategy based on agreed future state through a process of extrapolating trends and predicting responses. With that in mind, I’d suggest setting the SMART goals at the end of the planning process and updating those goals using feedback that’s learned over time. In brief, following the scientific method. From the SWOT, formulate a strategy, decide initiatives, experiment with tactics, and resolve measurements to test - prove or disprove your hypotheses.

I believe the general consensus about the tool is on point. For SMART goals to be genuinely effective, it's crucial to consider WHO IS SETTING THEM. It's key to have representation from every department impacted by the goal, rather than a select few making decisions and then relaying them. This latter approach often results in taking three steps forward only to take one step back. It's essential for everyone to take part in understanding the issue and taking part in crafting the solution.

First: It’s very important to believe in yourself and your goals Second: plan your strategy be very clear and very ambition Third: don’t think too much and go with your dreams That what I usually do with my dreams and ideas

Begin by looking at what the end ideally looks like. M&A, global domination, lifestyle business etc. There are no right or wrong answer but helps in setting out plans (including Intellectual Property). Develop a matching business plan and ensure that enough cash flow and time is built into the process. Do not work things backwards eg I have ￡100k to invest in my business and need to be trading in 3 months. Realistically include budgets and if that equals ￡150k then know before you start. Also any timeline is usually at best optimistic or often way off. So if you think a year it will more likely be 2 years. Finally, supply chains are really hard to access.

I use to ask my people to not only do a SWOT analysis but also a PEST analysis. That stood for political, economic sociological and technological. I found it complimented SWOT to give a better picture.

Before constructing a SWOT analysis it would be helpful to perform a full competitive analysis. The analysis should have both a breath and depth approach. Example: 1) what business problem does your competitive claim to address 2) financial performance 3) methodology used to realize success 4) technology feature and function 5) how successful are competitors in achieve said goals. Understanding this information coupled with an honest assessment of your organization will maximize the quality of the SWOT analysis.

And then there’s the SOAR analysis that maintains two of the four areas from SWOT — strengths and opportunities but replaces weaknesses and threats with aspirations and results.

"PEST" is a catchy and great acronym! Also, I'd like to modify SWOT to O'SWOT: where O means Objectives. Often times, SWOT is done without doing the hard thinking and clarifying what the true objectives should be. Only when the Os are clarified would we be able to truly assess the SWOT. An S for O1 migh be a W for O2, so on so forth.

Again, for me, WHO is assessing the situation. - Is the voice of the customer and their feedback being factors in? If so, how much? - How about the internal customer? How much feedback is gathered daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly? - How long does it take for the feedback to travel through the system until leadership gains awareness and reacts to it? - Does it get diluted and distorted in the process? If this information carries only a small weight in the overall assessment, then the strategies developed will be built on a shaky foundation with a significant human gap. This could undermine the effectiveness of any plans put into place, as they may not fully account for the diverse needs and perspectives of all departments involved. -

Conducting monthly / Quarterly / Annual performance reviews against Plan are critical to measure, assess and adjust your firm's activities to assure the effort being put out is being appropriately directed to meet your SMART / OKR Goals. Understanding the Why and How of variances to defined planning will allow a constructive and learning opportunity to work together with your team to realign actions and reinvigorate Purpose.

I'd suggest an implied step before this be made explicit. Namely, develop an Action Plan that breaks strategic goals down into tactical steps that are assigned to teams or individuals with due dates for completion. This then becomes the implementation program against which results can be measured and improvements moved to the action plan's next phase. I found this built accountability directly into the planning process for my own and my clients' businesses and reduced the likelihood of it joining all those other plans and studies sitting unheeded on bookshelves and disk drives.

Reviewing actions and monitoring results usually stem from metrics that mainly focus on end results, which do not offer much insight into the underlying causes. This approach places the customer as the final inspector; by that stage, it's already too late. Instead, actions should be reviewed through constructive criticism (internally) and empathetic customer feedback (externally). Without discarding traditional KPIs, evaluating the internal and external communication channels is a must. - Are we effectively translating people's perceptions into data? - Are the change agents in the organization gaining awareness of it? - How effectively are we reacting? - How well, if at all, are communicating our response back to our customers?

Evaluation of strategic goals is an ongoing process. Check to alignment between objectives and Vision and seek ways to improve your practice's performance and alignment with the objectives.