Navigating strategy roads into '23/24

What do the most successful* strategic plans have in common??

We venture into the antipodean winter today, grey skies, darker alarm chimes, a time we’re encouraged by coin counters to drop hard-earned at Officeworks, and to spend the remains of any discretionary if you want it back as a line item you can leverage next year.

It’s also rounding out Strategy Silly Season in my southern corner, or at least a few particularly intense months when more Boards circle the mahogany plank, grill the CEO like cheese on toast, and spitball whats, ifs and buts (hopefully under a canopy of a big clear why).

Guesstimate, I’ve facilitated in the neighbourhood of 150 - 170 strat planning processes over the last 4-5 years, big and small, fresh and repeat, light touch and excavation deep. For organisations into stuff you can drive, drink, sprinkle and spray. About people, places, parts and parties. Associations, corporations, cooperations (even stuff for service stations). From one person bands to big name brands to networks the land over. Some smashing it, some copping it in the face, some scratching their noodles as the marathon jogs on. All different in parts, all the same in more.?

As you build speed towards the mid ’23 marker, and consider shaping that shape-shifting roadmap for your enterprise’s future again,??here are a few observations I’d offer. My takes, blinkered and biased, but five repeated so frequently I see them as a familiar face forming in all the best strategy clouds.

“I don’t know.”

What tomorrow holds. What the ironclad, rock-solid, money-back-guarantee right way is. What will work for certain.?I say I don’t know, because sure as eggs I don’t, but when I see a Board Chair or a CEO open themselves and their crew up to this truth (and you know it is, because no-one has actually invented the DeLorean that pierces the membrane at 88mph to visit tomorrow), it is generally followed by “… so let’s try piece together the best intelligence, evidence and insights from the best heads to guide a good decision here.”??No fait accompli thinking. No drinking yesterday’s soapy bathslop. No assuming the patterns of gone times that served us so mightily will automatically hold in the face of tomorrow’s new forces. I often see “I don’t know” as the acceptance starting point for “better” by the best.

“No-one else knows either.”

They too are punching questions into ChatGPT and hoping that the collection of pre-2021 bits and bytes accessed and collated by the new best friend of many will spit out some magical fortune cookie wisdom no-one’s cottoned on to yet. Clever collector tech application aside, they don’t have a crystal ball either. Until the infallible prediction machine lands on the shelves of JB HiFi, they’re as subject as you and I to the idea that “fully known” is an asymptote you can’t ever touch, and so are peeking over your back fence, and the capped galv of others, to see what they can garner in the race to outpace you. Confidently coiffuered consultants and the wormy book types, certainly, they can add to the decision pot with stuff you don’t know for sure. As long as you know that it’s all based on yesterday, and the best any can hope for is a best guess. So the organisations and leaders that don’t flagellate themselves over where the others are placing their fielders tend to free their thinking and decisions up without getting sucked into a paradigm designed by others with designs on besting you.

“Both.”

Stick to your knitting, or fold the paper in an innovative new way?

Design and develop, or partner and parcel?

Specialise in your people, or in next level customer happy making?

Train or hire ready?

Lead or learn?

DIY or DIFM?

Old school or high tech?

Double the range or consolidate?

React or proact?

System-driven or deeply human?

All in or spread?

100 other paradoxical questions like this, and the answer is invariably, indubitably, incessantly, “both”.

To varying degress? Balanced a little heavier on one side of the teeter totter? Absolutely. That’s the smart, insightful decision point – the right mix for us. But the idea of being fully binary, going all one and no zero on a key dimension of your strategic plan? For the most part, it’s simply not the way flexible leadership groups (mindful of the pace and dimensions of change curves) approach strategic decision making anymore. The appetite for iterative strategy, embedding and appreciative of the need for adaptability, evolution and ever-reshaping, is seemingly higher in those building smartly for the longer term. Tin tacks, because it’s just being shown over and over again that longest-term sustainable is indeed “organic “and ever-morphing. Fixed rigid architecture models simply don’t stand up to big wind shifts, seismic terrain motion and the critical mass of people that want changeable-for-tomorrow ahead of brittle-in-a-month.??Be ok with “both”. Ready to make grey decisions in the grey, par-way along spectrums bounded by impossible-to-best ends.?

“That’s what we’re doing.”

Smart strategic planning processes generally consult widely and inform deeply from well-considered and smartly diverse intelligence sources. For the cat herder, it makes the process messy and ungainly, and the more dots, the more speckly the scatterplot (good luck finding the line of best fit and outlier insights in THAT!) It is, though, the foil to boardroom-bound thinking or the hobby horses of the heads of hordes. And getting voices of team, customer, supplier, reseller, partner, funder or community beneficiaries into the mix as you make your biggest calls? Just bright. More connected fingerprints on it, more input into it, by more, and you have more vested interest and more ownership once the polished plan sees the sunlight.

Here’s the tripwire though, that the deft deliverers generally clear faster and more nimbly than the also-rans. Armed with that input information, with enough information? They make the call. It’s a “both” call. It’s a call that reflects “I don’t know for sure, no-one else does either, but we think, for all these reasons (chief among them an honest appraisal of our why, of who we are and of where we want to get to), this is our best shot. So – that’s what we’re doing.” They make a decision. Sounds so easy? Staggeringly, commonly, it stalls, or gets shunted to next meeting, or when we see the next wave of data, or when someone’s drafted version 6.12.??The best though? The strategic way do-ers (versus the perched placeholder way do-ers)? They make more calls. They pick, they choose, they say no and yes and pay the opportunity cost collector with its hand out, and it sparks aligned actions.

“It’s people.”

This all kinda boils down to just one or two key choices most orgs* need to make. Pick your CEO / GM / MD / Big Kahuna / Boss Cocky well. And, if you have one, pick your Board Chief well. Get those two right, and by my eye, all the above works itself out more often than not. On one, sometimes two sets of shoulders, I’m confident more strategies succeed and more fail than for any other reason. The liquourice allsorts of skills, talents, approaches these trusted humans need to possess and employ and ever-better themselves in, is too big a bag to cover here, and I’m not sure I understand all of what goes into that magic mix, or if it’s even common across spaces and scenarios.??If their thinking, their chessboarding, their minds-and-emotions-of-others engaging and their sorting wheat from chaff for important regular choices is in the A bracket, then chances are you’re going to do ok.??

If you’re big enough to have that tag team, the dynamic between the two also matters. The balance of depth of care and support, the ability to navigate constructive and testing tensions, the respect for roles and the teamwork to use the bodies in a contructively aligned way… that matters. How they deal with the curve balls, the terrain shifts, their patience in executing for longer-term ups and their smart rapid motion when the hill proves to be a cliff.??And if that’s tickety-boo? Then it turns to how they bring in, arrange, interface, support and deploy?other?great people in the service of what the strategic painting on the wall depicts.??

Every organisation is just a bunch of bods electing to come together under a banner, tie some strings together and get busy in some sort of directional, semi-cohesive way.??All the bods matter. And right now, in pretty much every sector and in every strat plan, “people” holds court longer than other topics (where are you, amazing humans?!). But I consistenty see long-term strategy starting with, fundamentally working or ultimately floundering, as a result of the bod(s) at the top. No pressure.

(* I say that’s a smart choice organisations need to make. It’s also the smartest choice anyone wanting to take a paycheck might consider making too. Pick your bosses and lever-handlers wisely and deliberately. They really do matter more than most of the other stuff).

The final observation I’d make is that how organisations (through their leaders) treat the product of a strategic planning process is often reflected in where they’ve gotten to years down the track. The learning I've taken from supporting numerous organisations for over a decade through multiple reworks of their strat plan is in seeing who did what with it, and where that got them.??While impossible to fully sort correlation and causation, here’s the pattern.

• Get it clean, clear, understandable by the most junior in the house, thematic ahead of granular? You get understanding, then buy-in faster, and it moves you further.
• Talk about it, employ it in meetings, embed its key aspects in your unique organisational dialect, at every opportunity? It lives and breathes and guides.
• Treat it as a passport, a series of signposts and lane assist vibrations through the steering wheels in the organisation (“go, you have permission to do this, follow the paths and try avoiding the rough!”), and it takes on a life of its own through the crew.
• Do none of that? Keep it around the mahogany, for the GAICDs only, nunya business for the Minions, reserved as a sub-section of the quarterly agenda, thinking that the process of its creation was “the work” (rather than seeing it as the precursor to “the right long-term work by all”)? Treat it as “part of what we’re doing as an organisation”, rather than “it’s the whole box and dice, and everything rolls up into it”???Then I’ll put it on record, or even Spotify. You’re stuffed.

It's a real privilege to get to watch deeply committed, diversely smart crews stop pushing the wheel a moment to consider and debate and inform the biggest road choice decisions for the future of their enterprise. My daily work is the once-every-so-often aberration in the diaries of most.??It’s a great school I get to attend at least once a week, and I hope these patterns (high and incomplete as they are) help you reconcile how you might approach your company’s cartography for the fascinating roads ahead.?

I don’t know. No-one else does either. Both. That’s what we’re doing. It’s people.

(And if that doesn’t work for you? Try ChatGPT.?Your competitors are.)

Sing out if you want a hand herding the cats and reworking the map for your enterprise. [email protected]

(* “successful strategic plan”???You get to set what that means. In your strat plan.)