Why is review of strategy necessary

Team members will often trust leadership and the quieter members may be reluctant to share their ideas with a leadership team in a group strategy setting. However, when working with a facilitator, this flattens hierarchies allowing all team members to actively participate in the session.

The facilitator is skilled in knowing which questions to ask, and how to encourage even the most reluctant employee to participate. By increasing inclusion and flattening hierarchies, new ideas can emerge, management can participate rather than lead and all levels of staff can engage equally.

Additionally, having an outside facilitator can help address issues that the management team or employees may not have thought about.

An educated facilitator coming from outside of the organization will have an objective lens, and can guide conversations through tough subjects that often need to be tackled. Working with a facilitator on a quarterly basis is the best way to maximize your sessions by making the most of your strategic planning budget by keeping meetings well run and efficient, helping to make sure your team stays on track, and guiding the path towards effective strategy implementation.

Our readers' favourite posts. It may be an excellent way to cope with fear of the unknown, but fear and discomfort are an essential part of strategy making. You need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success. In this worldview, managers accept that good strategy is not the product of hours of careful research and modeling that lead to an inevitable and almost perfect conclusion.

If executives adopt this definition, then maybe, just maybe, they can keep strategy where it should be: outside the comfort zone. Strategic plans all tend to look pretty much the same. They usually have three major parts. The first is a vision or mission statement that sets out a relatively lofty and aspirational goal.

The second is a list of initiatives—such as product launches, geographic expansions, and construction projects—that the organization will carry out in pursuit of the goal. This part of the strategic plan tends to be very organized but also very long. The length of the list is generally constrained only by affordability. The third element is the conversion of the initiatives into financials.

In this way, the plan dovetails nicely with the annual budget. This exercise arguably makes for more thoughtful and thorough budgets. However, it must not be confused with strategy. It does not question assumptions. Mistaking planning for strategy is a common trap. Even board members, who are supposed to be keeping managers honest about strategy, fall into it. They are, after all, primarily current or former managers, who find it safer to supervise planning than to encourage strategic choice.

Moreover, Wall Street is more interested in the short-term goals described in plans than in the long-term goals that are the focus of strategy. Analysts pore over plans in order to assess whether companies can meet their quarterly goals. The focus on planning leads seamlessly to cost-based thinking. Costs lend themselves wonderfully to planning, because by and large they are under the control of the company. For the vast majority of costs, the company plays the role of customer.

It decides how many employees to hire, how many square feet of real estate to lease, how many machines to procure, how much advertising to air, and so on. In some cases a company can, like any customer, decide to stop buying a particular good or service, and so even severance or shutdown costs can be under its control. Of course there are exceptions. Government agencies tell companies that they need to remit payroll taxes for each employee and buy a certain amount of compliance services.

But the proverbial exceptions prove the rule: Costs imposed on the company by others make up a relatively small fraction of the overall cost picture, and most are derivative of company-controlled costs. Payroll taxes, for instance, are incurred only when the company decides to hire an employee. Costs are comfortable because they can be planned for with relative precision. If you do not participate in the review or come to a review unprepared, then the result is that your voice and viewpoint will not be counted and the direction of the company could go very wrong.

We can all think of companies that had interesting and viable strategies yet failed to execute on them or worse were going well to a point and then failed to adapt to the change in course demanded by the markets. It is painful to watch companies head off in bad directions and disastorous when they collapse as a result. The point to remember here is that competitors, markets, suppliers, and all your stakeholders do not work on your Strategic Planning Calendar nor agenda- this is why you need to meet- regularly and be informed and prepared- so that your contribution helps the organization head in the right direction.

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