Any avid cricket fan knows cricket is not “bat and ball”.
Techniques, tactics and strategies are among the notable weapons used in a cricketer’s armoury. Similarly, high-performing and successful leaders understand that strategic planning is more than a bunch of goals on paper. Strategic planning offers a bird’s eye view of the organisation’s ecosystem: carefully observing how everything from one department flows to another.
More importantly, it forces organisations to examine what happens when facing uncertain market or economic changes. The success or failure of every part depends on how the other parts perform, which makes strategic planning indispensable for any organisation (regardless of size).
As we traverse the evolving and dynamic socio-economic shifts within the market and industry, we will succinctly explore the concept of strategic planning, its importance, and its complete execution in organisational contexts in ways that can assist leaders with their overall strategic planning experience.
• What is strategic planning?
Practically speaking, strategic planning is “the effort made by an organisation to develop its vision, mission, culture, policies and business strategies needed to be implemented to achieve the organisation’s targets.
(Haines, 2010). At its core, strategic planning is knowing the opportunities and threats in the future, considering its internal and external environment to maximise competitive advantage.
It is critical to appreciate that strategic planning is key to all types of organisations – private and public sectors.
• Importance of strategic planning
Flowing from its definition, strategic planning is significantly vital to organisations in several ways. Most notably, it is an ongoing process – not a one-time meeting – that allows leaders to prioritise efforts, effectively allocate resources, and align shareholders and team members on the organisation’s goals, ensuring they are supported by empirical evidence and sound reasoning.
The increased dialogue and communication across all stages of the process strengthens team members’ sense of effectiveness and importance in the organisation’s overall success.
It is critical that leaders decentralise the strategic planning process by involving lower-level management and team members throughout the organisation.
Whether it is steering educational reform to build a competent future workforce or guiding a financial institution through economic turbulence, strategic planning provides a structured framework to anticipate changes, allocate resources efficiently, and achieve long-term objectives. This proactive approach is crucial in navigating the complexities of today’s dynamic global landscape, ensuring that organisations not only survive but thrive.
• Fully engaging strategic planning in the workplace To ensure your organisations stay agile and relevant, we will now explore three stages in the crafting, reframing and pivoting of your strategic planning process: 1. Strategy formulation
Formulating strategies requires a clear understanding of an organisation’s intended direction.
Start by first assessing your organisation’s current situation by performing an internal and external audit. Fundamentally, this aims to identify the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (also commonly known as SWOT Analysis). As a result of the analysis, leaders can decide which plans or markets they should focus on or abandon, how to allocate resources best, expand locations, or hire more talent. For example, imagine a new Caribbean business specialising in vegan foods can engage in SWOT analysis by identifying strengths such as a unique product offering in a market with growing health consciousness, weaknesses like limited supply chain options, opportunities presented by an increasing number of tourists seeking vegan options, and threats including competition from established restaurants with similar offerings.
This analysis helps in strategic formulation by allowing the business to leverage its distinctive offerings and market trends, address supply chain challenges, strategicallyposition itself against competitors, and tap into emerging consumer segments, thus crafting a robust business strategy tailored to its specific context and goals.
2. Strategy implementation
Once a strategy is formulated, an organisation should establish smart, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound goals that can be put into action.
More pointedly, an effective implementation plan provides a solid structure/ground for implementing the strategy, thereby maximising the utilisation of relevant resources and redirecting marketing efforts in line with the strategy’s goals and objectives.
For example, suppose you are within the skin care industry. In that case, strategy implementation can rely on specific activities to support retaining clients by a certain percentage by the third quarter or releasing a new skin care product.
Communication with all stakeholders, including your team, is paramount to the “buy-in” throughout this stage.
Communicating your strategic plan effectively involves two primary steps: ensuring team members understand those goals and how their roles fit together as part of an overall strategy (and not just individual tasks) and reviewing existing plans so that new strategies can be integrated into older ones without creating redundancy or confusion among team members, who may not understand where one set of instructions ends and another begins.
3. Strategy evaluation
Strategy evaluation is a crucial aspect of strategic planning as it allows organisations to track what is working and what changes are needed. Monitoring your strategic plans consistently and within agreed timelines enables organisations to use key information to identify opportunities for improvement or highlight areas where there has been success. This way, if something doesn’t go according to plan, there will be time for making adjustments before any major setbacks occur.
For example, a quality assurance department might define customer satisfaction as its primary metric. This would require that the department create a way of measuring customer satisfaction (for example, surveys) and use this information to decide how best to improve their services or products.
In conclusion, every organisation needs a clear strategic plan of objectives, actions and metrics to navigate the terrain of life’s unpredictable events seriously. This is not just the responsibility of senior management; it is the responsibility of all team members (from bottom to top).
By developing a solid plan that reflects your unique goals, you can ensure everyone stays on track during each step of the process and ultimately yield success.
