4 Tips to get the best out of your Annual Strategic Planning Sessions

The annual strategic planning retreat plays a crucial role in an organization’s direction and future success, and presents an opportunity for leaders to have their most significant impact.

However, strategic planning often under delivers. According to Harvard Business Review, companies, on average, only deliver sixty-three percent of the financial performance that they promised.??Most executives ascribed this failure to meet strategic expectations on a lot of talk and a lack of actionable decisions.?

As the annual planning season wraps up, many organisations are about to run their annual strategic planning workshops so I would like to share some tips to get the best out of your planning session:?

1. Identify Who Should Participate: Break down the walls and find ways to co-create your strategy to expand your perspectives. The more you actively involve those who will be responsible for making decisions, leading and executing the strategy and ideally even those who can represent your customers, the better your chances of defining a strategic plan that responds to the challenges and realities of your organization and context. This will also ensure that your plan has buy-in from key stakeholders from day one. That being said, your session invite list should not reflect a "the more the merrier" approach, really consider who needs to be in the room because if you add too many additional participants, you reduce everyone's opportunity and airtime to speak up and participate during the session.

2. Design a Structured Process and Agenda: Define your desired outcomes for the session and then ensure each block of time is defined in terms of topics and dynamics that contribute to those outcomes. On the other hand, as eager as you may be to drive toward outcomes, keep in mind that the quality of the discussion matters; you should strive for genuine participation and engagement from everyone present. You must find a balance between being flexible when important conversations extend but also ensuring that the established agenda is followed so that you get to your outcomes by the end of the session. You will have to protect the agenda from content and timings that are not aligned with outcomes as many leaders and participants have a tendency to want to take time to do long data-heavy past work focused presentations that can derail the planning session. Strive to create an agenda that gives a voice and space to different participants, not just top leadership who everyone always hears from.

3. Engage the right facilitator: A facilitator will work with you to design the above-mentioned workshop agenda so that it achieves the required outcomes and allows discussions to flow in a logical progression. Such a structure allows for proper thought development, links one idea or outcome to the next, and makes it easier for attendees to stay on-point and focused.?

Consider working with an external facilitator who can bring a different perspective to your discussions, be able to apply an outsider lens, can help steer discussions in a neutral way, and can ensure all attendees have the opportunity to participate. External facilitators are especially useful to manage potentially detrimental group dynamics (i.e workplace politics).?

4. Follow up: Each participant should emerge from the planning session with a clear action plan that assigns objectives, roles, responsibilities, timelines and success metrics. The next steps should include follow-up mechanisms to measure and communicate progress, create accountability, and make the necessary adjustments. Many strategic planning exercises don't lead to results merely because of lack of follow-up on execution post-planning so ensure that the planning session includes this step.

Atrevidea's strategic planning process is innovative and designed to produce breakthrough results in strategic thinking and to create an action plan that allows the team to move forward and realize their goals.