Does your organization’s strategic plan ever get implemented? Typically, the answer is a resounding “no.” It’s not because planners don’t strategically plan, but that the processes themselves are flawed and fail to produce outcomes that the organization can execute. Research tells us that 86% of managers spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy, and 95% of the workforce does not understand their organization’s strategy. And 70 to 90% of organizations fail to implement their strategies due to ineffective execution.

 

Despite these woeful findings, strategy development is the most critical function of leaders, whether at the enterprise, division, or unit-level. To be successful in strategy development and implementation, organizations need planning processes that work. Successful processes tend to have three things in common. 

 

First, they embody a holistic approach that brings a wide range of stakeholders into the process. Second, the processes focus initially on the challenges and opportunities to create new value for customers, clients, and constituencies. Once these challenges are considered, then internal challenges that impeded creating this new value are identified. Third, once key stakeholders agree on the challenges and opportunities, strategy formulation in which specific solutions approaches can be discovered, analyzed for return on investment, and chosen.

 

This program delivers processes to move an organization from routine planning, which manifests in making minor adjustments to the prior year’s budget, to determining strategic goals that provide the foundation for setting strategy.