Refresh Strategy Quarterly and Annually
Jon Strickler
Vistage Chair | Exec Team Coach | Humble Adventurer | National Champion Mtn Biker
Some think of strategic planning as a one time or every 3 years exercise. In my experience, it is most beneficial to think about it as an ongoing process that has a key focus on a quarterly cycle.
These reviews are your chance to work on the business model as a leadership team. People are programmed in a way that makes it difficult for them to stay on plan much past 3 months without a need to refocus on priorities. Quarterly Reviews create the checkup, resetting and refresh that ensures efforts stay aligned and making progress toward your annual plan and overall business model.
At your first meeting and annually, create your cheat sheet and keep it up to date. Reserve one or two full days to work on the Business Model elements with your team. Pay special attention to Positioning elements.
Other strategy review meetings (at least quarterly) should be more focused day long sessions where the timeframe is narrowed to 3 months to create quarterly Goals and Rocks that support annual Initiatives your Themes. Define key results for the near-term that ensure progress on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis is contributing to deliver longer-term Objectives. It should have a standing agenda similar to:
Agenda item 5 suggests giving a specific focus area for each quarterly meeting that ensures attention on an important theme or other destinations outside of more routine operations by the team.
Your annual planning meeting is one of these key focus areas where you renew strategy and adjust for changes in environmental context.
Evaluating People and ensuring you have “the right people in the right seats” (Traction, pg 4) should be another focus area.
You can choose to use other quarterly meetings to focus on sales, product, and other major portions of your business model on a quarterly rhythm.
Q3 is when many organizations refresh strategic objectives and tune longer term plans. Finishing strategic planning efforts by around October allows for those deliverables to feed into the annual planning cycle and prevents conflict between the two efforts.
Other quarters may have another focus area around a specific Theme. A typical cycle is:
Q1 – Detail Department Plans (focus on Product Road-map and Sales Enablement)
Q2 – Talent Management (People Practices, Talent evaluations, Comp review, Key resource needs)
Q4 – Annual Operations Budget and Staffing
Businesses should think of strategic planning as an on-going process that is evaluated and refined every quarter, with some rotating focus.?Using a quarterly planning cycle (or even more frequently if your transitioning fast) ensures the strategy stays relevant and gets translated into execution more effectively.
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