How can you effectively use a strategic planning facilitator?

Incorporating a strategic planning facilitator can profoundly impact management and decision-making processes. - Objective Insight: Offers unbiased perspectives essential for effective planning. - Structured Methodology: Ensures comprehensive and systematic strategy development. - Enhanced Team Involvement: Encourages active participation from all team members. - Clear Goal Setting: Aids in defining and prioritizing realistic and achievable objectives. - Actionable Strategies: Helps translate broad plans into concrete, manageable steps. A facilitator transforms strategic planning into a more focused, inclusive and effective process. They are instrumental in aligning a team's efforts with the company's long-term vision.

Engaging a strategic planning facilitator offers crucial benefits. Their impartiality ensures an unbiased evaluation of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. With proven methodologies, they provide structure, guiding efficient idea generation, prioritization, and action planning. Interpersonally skilled, facilitators foster constructive dialogue, manage conflicts, and create a positive atmosphere. Crucially, they document, communicate, and follow up, ensuring the strategic plan becomes a living, actionable guide for organizational success.

The role of a strategic planning facilitator is to create the framework for your strategic planning sessions, facilitate your organization’s onsite or virtual planning retreats, and help build your organization’s strategic plan.

The benefits of a facilitaor include challenger current wisdom and practices, challenging perspectives and asking insightful question. Also, a facilitator can hold people to account during the session - if for nothing else other than timekeeping, i.e., making sure enough time is given to all aspects of planning. How many times have we all been in these sessions, without a facilitator, and have had to rush at the end because we have spent too much time chatting about the early stuff in the agenda..?

To effectively use a strategic planning facilitator, it is important to collaborate with them during the planning process. By doing so, you can tap into their expertise and benefit from their guidance in developing a comprehensive plan. Engaging in open and constructive communication with the facilitator will help ensure that all stakeholders are involved, ideas are shared, and consensus is reached. The facilitator can provide a structured framework for the planning process, facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions, and help capture and synthesize ideas into a coherent plan. Regular check-ins and progress updates with the facilitator will keep the planning on track and ensure that all necessary components are addressed.

You don't need an outside facilitator. Others inside can perform the task. But how can you be sure they have what you need? 1- find someone who can be independent. If their manager is attending, they need to be mature enough to stand by principles, even if it might cost them. 2 - negotiate final outcomes and a process to get there. Work back from the end-result to this moment, and fill in all the gaps. 3 - make sure the individual is not politically important. Their opinions must not matter after the retreat is over. They also don't get to vote. Or to pretend they are an attendee just like anyone else. They are not. 4 - if you decide to use professional, outside help, ask for a range of options which vary by price.

Don't arrange things so that your facilitator walks in cold. You want to help them do their best job, but even in the performing arts, talent tried to scope the venue / environment before the event. Don't just dump data. Instead, encourage the facilitator to create new data in the form of surveys, focus groups and interviews. They need to get the lay of the land and have some kind of relationship with participants beforehand. Ask them to analyze the data and present it in a way that offers fresh insights. Part of their unique contribution is their perspective. Point them in the direction of potential pitfalls e.g. difficult attendees. Share constraints and unusual elements rather than have them pop up in the middle of the workshop.

Your job as a sponsor is to guide the entire activity towards an effective outcome. But there are moments when a facilitator just won't see what's happening. It's your job to share new happenings as they occur in the moment, and become a valuable pair of inside eyes. As you feed this data to the facilitator, allow them to decide how to use it. A client who tries to control a facilitator makes things worse.

Have debrief session with the facilitator about the way forward. You each may have different ideas, but go the extra mile to make sure you both share them. As you do so, determine what future pitfalls might be and overcome them together.