Let's Face It: Planning Stinks

As of today, 2023 is halfway over (!) and many organizations now find themselves in the thick of planning season to finish out the year and look ahead for 2024.?

And let’s name it: leaders hate it. Not a single client we work with relishes their strategic planning process. Perhaps that would be OK if they felt like the process produced clear, effective plans that actually guided their efforts for the year to come. But it doesn’t. In fact, we have yet to meet a leader who diligently referred back to any of the planning work they spent countless sessions agonizing over with their colleagues and superiors.?Strategic planning today is like the long life story you have to read before every recipe on the internet: it’s something you’re forced to suffer through before you can actually get started.

Your “strategic planning” process might be broken if:

• It’s called “strategic planning,” but it’s really just budgeting. No substantive look outside or at customers, instead it’s first and foremost a process of apportioning dollars and approving headcount … one that ultimately just asks teams to do more with less.
• There’s some attempt to base decisions on data, but no one actually knows if the data is accurate and everyone has data that conveniently tells the story they want to hear.
• There’s a labyrinth of difficult-to-navigate templates, forms, and rules you have to abide by … that savvy or privileged leaders outright ignore and still get what they want.
• When asked to review current teams and projects, somehow everything is doing OK and nothing gets cut … in fact, everything should be invested in.
• After plans are cobbled together, teams are misaligned and the overall picture is incoherent and impossible … but leaders are either ill-equipped or just unwilling to make hard decisions and therefore leave teams to fight it out over and over throughout the year.
• And finally, just when the sting and exhaustion of the last round dissipates, everything starts over again without a lick of learning from the previous rounds … or worse, it’s the end of the year and no plan was ever even landed despite meeting after meeting after meeting.

Obviously, it shouldn’t be this way.?Strategic planning should be a mix of collectively learning from the past, imagining futures, eyeing possible threats, soberly assessing what’s possible, and rallying one another in a shared mission.?It should be the best internal demonstration of who you are and why you come together, not a forced trudge through frustrating templates and faux-rigorous activities.

Where to start in fixing this broken process? We’ve seen three immediately helpful areas for focus:

1. Begin the process with an external perspective. Don’t let it leapfrog directly to budgets, seek a deeper understanding of your customers. And no, that doesn’t mean hiring a big consulting firm to give you the same “landscape” audit they have before that only serves to scare you. Actually spend time with your customers as well as your front-line staff and try to answer some basic questions, like “What are we truly good at?” “What is changing that we’re not paying enough attention to?” “Why do people choose us specifically?” and “Where do we suck?” Start with those answers and build a strategy from there.
2. Prepare your decision-making body to make decisions.?First, define meaningful trade offs based on your strategy (speed vs quality, price vs margin) so people know where to draw the line and why. Second, build a leadership culture of owning hard decisions, starting with psychological safety and trust, then focusing on the how of decision-making (process, norms, accountability systems, communication,?etc.).?
3. Kill useless steps and administration.?Do everyone a favor and remove the steps and forms that have never produced meaningful outcomes or discussion. This not only saves time, but it signals something is different and hopefully engenders a little faith when those hard decisions do need to be made.?

“Ok, sure”?you’re thinking,?“but this isn’t my responsibility.”?Sadly, that response is the reason why shared processes so often stink in the first place. And moreover, this year is different. Strategic planning has been broken for quite some time—but organizations have never been quite this paralyzed by doubt and uncertainty. Even in the beginning of a global pandemic, most organizations leapt into action. Today, though, what’s happening at the macro-scale is either truly crushing firms or they are too obsessed with each new headline and are ignoring what matters most under their noses.?

Organizations desperately need strategic leaders right now. People who can connect ambition with action, who can inspire and influence others, who can adapt and learn from change, and who can signal when change is needed urgently. If you’ve read this and nodded along, then you’re?that?person. It will likely require a coalition, but a coalition can only form after the first person calls others together.

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