When You Should Not Create a Strategic Plan
Our last blog post talked about the reasons you want to create a strategic plan – or more accurately, embark on a well-designed strategic planning process. A well-designed and executed process can create board cohesion and create an environment that encourages strategic thinking, acting, and learning.
But not every organization should embark on a strategic planning process and expect to succeed. When should you NOT start to develop a strategic plan?
1. When in crisis. Strategic planning takes a lot of time and energy from organizational leaders and board members. It also requires that you look to the future. An organization embroiled in a crisis that uses all its energy or resources or prevents it from looking beyond the next few months does not have the mental energy to effectively plan. Solve the crisis first, then plan in order to avoid the next one.
2. No organizational buy-in. Your board needs to fully support the strategic planning process. I have worked with organizations where the executive director pushes the strategic planning process on an unenthusiastic board. It does not go well. If board members show up for the planning meetings at all, they often come ill prepared and hardly participate. It feels like pulling teeth! Others fight the process. On the other hand, when the board comes full of enthusiasm, they ask good questions, make good comments, and make good progress in moving the organization forward. The process has all the positive results noted in the previous post.
3. Executive staff transition. I have heard both sides of this argument. Some organizations create a new plan just before a new executive takes over, so they have a script from which to operate. Others wait until the new leader assumes the role and gets acclimated. I come down on the latter. Recall from the last post that the benefits of a well-designed strategic planning process come much more from the process of creating the plan than the plan itself that can quickly become outdated – like with the introduction of a new executive!
Furthermore, people will more likely buy-into an idea or a plan when they help develop it. When you hand a new executive a plan that they did not help create, they may not work as hard to implement it or even understand the rationales behind it. Likewise, you hired that person for his or her experience, energy, and ideas, yet you handed him or her a plan that does not leverage any of those talents? Finally, a well-designed process helps create synergy and shared understanding between the new executive and the board, a critical factor for effectively moving the organization forward.
On balance, I would rather wait until the new person takes the helm and has a chance to learn the organization before starting a strategic planning process.
What other factors have you found distract from a good strategic planning process?