Strategic planning facilitation that produces a plan your team executes

A management briefing resolves common planning problems before the retreat, including unclear definitions, an unrealistic timetable, and limited commitment. The team identifies the critical issues, agrees the planning process, and defines what information must be gathered about past plans, initiatives, customer perceptions, employee opinions, industry trends, and the competitive landscape.

The management briefing is a focused 90-minute interactive session that gives the planning team a common view of the issues, a shared set of strategy definitions, responsibilities for preparation, and buy-in to participate and follow through.

Management briefing agenda

• Getting started: review the purpose and outcomes for the briefing.
• Key issues: use brainstorming and grouping to identify the most important issues facing the organization.
• A standard strategic planning approach: explain the approach and the definitions of its components.
• Modifying the approach: link issues to the approach, surface concerns, and agree necessary adjustments.
• Situation assessment: determine what information will give every participant a common foundation.
• Logistics and next steps: define the when, where, who, and how of the retreat, then assign immediate next steps.

Understanding the current situation is vital to selecting the approaches needed to drive success. The situation assessment may examine customers and their future needs, employee perceptions, industry trends, competitors, performance by product or market, recent goals and initiatives, and the organization profile across structure, processes, technology, and culture.

Planning teams commonly consolidate this information into a SWOT, a summary of the organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That shared evidence base makes the strategy session more focused and more credible.

In the strategy sessions, the situation assessment and an understanding of future trends shape the vision statement and mission statement. A vision is the organization's preferred picture of the future. A mission is the organization's overall purpose, what it does, for whom it does it, and the benefit. The vision describes what the future will look like if the organization achieves its mission.

The team then defines goals and objectives. Goals are the broad, long-term aims that define accomplishment of the mission. Objectives are specific, quantifiable, realistic targets that measure accomplishment of a goal over a specified period. The objectives establish the bar for the rest of the planning effort, so strategies, action plans, and investments should support one or more objectives.

The work also establishes guiding principles, the general guidelines that set the foundation for how the organization will operate. Guiding principles describe the actions the organization will take based on its values, not only the values themselves.

To develop the road map, the group identifies barriers and critical success factors. Barriers are the challenges that stand in the way of achieving goals and objectives. Critical success factors are the conditions that must be met to achieve the goals. Strategies must control the critical success factors and overcome the barriers. The group then completes a prioritization of strategies to determine what to focus on first.

For each priority initiative, the team develops an action plan that details objectives, deliverables, steps, responsibilities, costs, and timetables. The action plans show when the initiative is complete, provide a road map for monitoring progress, and can be summarized into resource requirements and a resource plan.

Each action plan is tested for accountability. If all actions are completed, will the deliverables be created and the strategy completed? Does every action have a responsible person and due date? Is each step a clear activity with a definable endpoint? Clear ownership and dates keep the strategy from stalling after the session.