Take Control of your Destiny with Proper Strategic Planning
“Strategic planning is dead.”
That’s what we keep hearing all around, as the world keeps licking its wounds from the pandemic and the induced global crisis. Innovation is also booming all around us, making long-term planning even more difficult. Whole industries are being reshaped, supply chains are entirely disrupted, new business and operating models emerge.
If you’ve been leading a team or a business, chances are you’ve had to endure multi-day planning sessions as you get closer to your next fiscal year. You have set key goals for the upcoming year. But down the line, you’re not quite sure these goals were the right ones or whether you actually achieved them. This is not an isolated issue.
The majority of businesses fail to achieve their strategic goals during “normal” years. I can’t even imagine what’s it’s been like in 2020!
So, how can you plan differently for 2021 so you can feel the pride of accomplished goals that genuinely moved the needle for your business and understand how you achieved them?
Keep an open mind on your options
Planning for the next year is no small task. You need to consider the most likely scenarios. Your goals are complex and need to be divided into chewable chunks to come to a proper plan. You’ll have to make many decisions and assess your risks.
But in the end, planning really is about considering your options, alternatives, deciding on the most likely scenario, and organizing your efforts accordingly.
Now, we are (or should be!) wiser than one year ago. We all have experienced first-hand that bad stuff happens, and even the best-crafted plans can derail. So, stay open-minded, yet keep in mind that your vision is still likely correct. It’s how you’re going to reach it that has changed dramatically, and your planning needs to take this into account. It’s OK and actually encouraged to change your mind if you discover compelling alternate views.
One of the best ways I’ve seen you can nurture that open mind is to continually seek different stakeholders’ perspectives. If you wonder who your key stakeholders are, just ask yourself: If your business disappeared tomorrow, who would notice, who would care?
Chances are, these will include your key customers, your team members, your investors, your most strategic partners. Pick up the phone or Zoom and openly talk about the problems they see need to be solved. Seek new information, and don’t be afraid to challenge your own thinking. For more on how to do it, you can read my previous article on Customer Empathy, as it easily applies to all of them.
Analyze different scenarios
Successful planning comes with proper risk assessment. Don’t be afraid to surface the potential risks. It will increase your odds of success. You can use specific approaches to that end, like scenario building.
One of my preferred ways to go about it is to factor in a worst-case, best-case, and in-between most-likely scenario. Create a rough plan for each of these three scenarios, with specific emphasis on the consequences.
Such consequences should include the direct impacts, but also any collateral effect you can think of. Start by being very specific, then expand to a more macro-level.
Just keep in mind the tendency we all have to think irrationally. Bias is a significant detractor to proper planning. No one is immune, whether you’re just the fearful one or the expert
Take Calculated Risks
The decisions we make out of planning carry some risk, and sometimes we lose. That’s OK, just don’t let fear stop you from taking a calculated risk, or innovation will die. With properly calculated risks, you’ll be right way more often than not.
At the same time, recognize when the odds are really against you, and don’t let your emotions be the driver. Planning involves long-term success, so don’t let the pandemic details derail your own planning. Your desired destination is still likely valid. How you reach it must be adjusted in most cases. That’s where your 2021 planning should focus: what’s changed with our ability to deliver our promise?
Given the nature of the changes we experience, you need to build dynamic plans and accept taking risks. Your business should be able to pivot with as much agility as possible, ready for fast-changing market conditions.
Don't confuse goals and strategies
This is probably the easiest to fix:
- Goals are WHAT you intend to achieve.
- Milestones are the intermediary goals you need to monitor.
- Strategies are HOW you’re going to do it.
With practice, you’ll end up understanding why you hit or didn’t hit your goals. Let me give a personal non-business example:
I’m an avid marathon runner. I realize that goal setting without proper planning leaves you clueless about why you performed a certain way. Whenever I train for a marathon, I typically keep a goal in mind, like running a sub 3hr 45min race. My 16-week plan includes all the activities I need to undertake (tempo, hills, long runs), intensity, and frequency. It also takes into account nutrition, cross-training. These constitute my documented activities, or strategies, that will help me achieve my race day goal.
Each of these activities is measurable (heart rate, Vo2 max, perceived exertion). Progress on these metrics is forming some milestones that I can tune and optimize to reach my goal. And if I’m off on any of these, I typically look into why. Did I train too hard, did I rest well, did I party the night before?
WHAT you are after is your goal. HOW you get there is forming your strategy. So, even in 2021, it’s still worth having an adequately documented set of processes, milestones, and measurements to build confidence in your ability to reach your goals.
In Conclusion
2021 is likely going to be another challenging year, so let’s cool off our fantasies of unicorns flying over the rainbow! Planning may sound futile in these pandemic days, yet without a solid plan, chances are you’ll go with the flow and let the world control you instead of printing your mark.
So, don’t hit pause on planning despite all the uncertainties. Change is here to stay. Learn to plan in a world of continuous transformations. Now is the best time for you to consider pivots into new directions: the digital world, a robust understanding of your customers, and what’s changed in their own environment. All this leads to considering how to alter your own product offering and how you position and deliver them to the world.
At The Product Sherpa, we specialize in helping you define and reach business success. There’s no magic recipe for success, but our Base-to-Summit method covers the five strategy essentials that matter the most. If you want to learn more about The Sherpa story, just check on this quick video!