Long-Term Strategic Actions Today Gain Tomorrow's Sustainability

It's a paradox. We take action and make decisions for short-term solutions every single day. That's rather easy to do. Get the facts, decide, move. But the more we do that, the less we have an eye toward the future. Before you know it, no one in the organization is thinking about actions to take now that will increase long-term sustainability because everyone is out of the practice of doing so.

Drudgery, it seems to many, to think about the future.

I'm not talking 5 years down the road because in this fast-paced world, 5 years is like an eternity with too many unknowns and changes. Yet that can't be the excuse to only focus on the near-term, day-to-day decisions. Otherwise, a new problem arises. The very thing a company is trying to avoid such as being reactive is exactly what the environment and leadership trains the company to be. Not being able to see the forest through the trees is not a good scenario. At least one team needs to be working on longer-term initiatives and planning, led by a leader with a strong strategic mindset armed with research and data analytics necessary to plan forward.

I eventually got to a point in which I felt I could do both because I purposely allocated time to do both. I was intentional about spending time thinking about what's next, what's the next big thing - and what did we need to spend our time and resources on beyond the short-term, "must-have" commitments of today that always seemed to take precedence.

Doing this forced me to choose some projects that were long-term in nature. Projects that would take some time but would have big payoffs in the future. The "big rocks" as they say. Even though I felt I was right about these, the company overall didn't value them as much because they could not see immediate results. Yet, as I saw it, the potential of these projects were huge in terms of impact, the kind that will sustain over a much longer period of time. All it would take is a little more effort and perseverance.

Such a dilemma we face: how to bring long-term sustainability projects to be viewed as priority over others which may bring short-term, feel good, "we accomplished something" projects or results.

A dilemma now brought about while organizations strive for agility in every sense of the word and methodology.

What can organizations do?

1. Find the people in your organization that are futuristic in their thinking. You can do this by simply administering the Strengthsfinder assessment and ask those people who have "futuristic" in their top 5 strengths to pull a team together. They will naturally move fast because it will be easy for them.
2. Ensure that your leaders, those who are facilitating or leading teams, both understand and implement a way to carve out 20% of their time each week to focus on creating value for the organization with an eye toward long-term sustainability. A few examples could be tackling problems that save the company money over the long-haul, implementing software that unifies the company in some way making the teams more efficient and effective (eg. Workfront, Tableau, Slack) with the long-term strategy being building up a unified tech stack, or starting conversations about what the future of your business will look like a few years down the road giving way to a few different approaches of how to proceed in terms of sales and marketing strategies.
3. Be sure to set stretch goals that are longer-term in nature, that seem too big to accomplish. One of the learnings I had from leading teams is that every time we set goals that seemed right, we would blow those out of the water by mid-year, and it was difficult for us to reset goals all over again in mid-summer. So we focused more time earlier (October) on brainstorming for long-term sustainability in mind before we set goals for the following year due in January. That seemed to do the trick because it forced us to think bigger for the organization, to talk to other teams in our planning, to share drafts of our goals and get feedback, and to rewrite them to have bigger impact way beyond our team. The individual team members had a better understanding of their individual responsibilities, as well as where they fit within the team, and how they all had a role in the overall impact they were making within the organization which aligned with company goals. It was easier for each person to own their contribution to the team.

In our tech driven world, there's always the risk that companies don't spend enough time on long-term strategy. It is a risk! According to a recent DMNews article:

Tech is key, but don't leave strategy in the dust

"Though there seems to be a growing sector of tech-savvy CMOs, marketing strategy remains a coveted component of upper-level leaders. After all, it's not just about understanding how the tools work -- a strong leader will also be able to delegate and execute the right strategies to maximize potential."

There's also a recent article from Spencer Stuart about the anatomy of a disruptor in terms of CMOs being an agent of change: "Any marketing team that wants to respond effectively to changing consumer expectations will need to adopt new behaviours of its own. Encouraging new mindsets and behavioural change is likely to provoke resistance, but effective disruptors counter this by creating a sense of urgency --

If we don't act now, it will be too late."

And a recent HBR article by Graham Kenny of Strategic Factors talking about how strategic plans are probably not strategic or even plans: "An organization exists as part of a system composed of transactions between itself and its key stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers and shareholders. Organizations differ in the detail of these sets, of course, depending on the complexity of the industry in which they’re located. The task of a strategic planning team is to produce positions on these factors that deliver value to the organization’s key stakeholders and meet the objectives of the organization."

For a strategy to produce sustainable actions, we must take the time to plan our long-term strategies and ensure we make the time to work on them, not just at a two-day retreat. That's just the beginning. In Ben Davis's article on eConsultancy, he talks about the M3 framework (Modern Marketing Model) which was introduced in 2017. I'm not surprised whatsoever to see the huge emphasis on marketing strategy but many organizations do not prioritize it like the model suggests. To me, within the model, Strategy is all three - Strategy, Analysis and Planning - which is 3/4s of the Modern Marketing Model!

If we continue to go down the road making our daily decisions for short-term solutions, all we do is put a bandaid on everything. I'm all for being adaptable and agile to meeting or exceeding business needs but there still must be a detailed strategy in place that is generally followed. Otherwise, the marketing team ends up chasing their tail and never producing any tangible results or outcomes - always chasing the shiny object or producing busy work but never keeping their eye on the real prize of long-term sustainability and creating true competitive advantage. As they say in Pragmatic Marketing training, your company and its products and services must be market driven - driven by the market for which it serves which will require both strong leadership and collaboration to achieve long-term sustainability.