Sunday Story: Disruption-proof your Strategic Planning

The stock market is tanking by trillions, international alliances are strained, and the various big tech firms are busy either ushering in an egalitarian utopia or some warped version of Skynet that’s going to bring about the end of humanity (we’re pretty confident it’s the first one). This is, to put it mildly, a very disruptive time for every industry and professional on the planet, and during major disruptions, a lot of organizations decide that they need a strategy to help inform all the key stakeholders of the broad plan to navigate the tumultuous time ahead.

That’s a logical and good thing, but our experience is folks approach strategic planning with one of two reactions: Disdain, discomfort, and a desire to do anything other than strategic planning, or fulsome engagement and investment recognizing that strategic planning is the most important work an organization can do. We are in the second camp - Strat planning is essential, and what we see most often is that leader get so dragged down into the everyday tactics and firefighting of their position that they simply don’t have time to raise their heads above the waves and spend deep focused time on strategy.

We fed this blog into ChatGPT and asked it to create an image. It can spell really well now, but that's for another blog about the AI Disruption.

But we also empathize with folks in the first group, and that’s because we know the experiences they’ve likely had with past strategic planning efforts. Folks are brought together as stakeholders deserving of consultation, only to be told what the strategy is (shaped without their input). Often, these strategies are full of weasel words - expressions that sound good in the finalized glossy pages of the published strat plan, but that don’t really have any tangible meaning or definition of success. The end result is the organization can check off boxes of “We did it!” While not having done anything significant at all, and this is not only frustrating but also demoralizing to the team members who truly do care about maximizing their systems, processes, and approaches to the business. These weasel word-filled documents are not true strategic plans. They are performative publications that are meant to mimic strategic plans, but don’t actually have any real strategy baked into them.

The trouble is they are way easier to write and develop than a proper strategic plan, and they give leaders a very pragmatic sense of flexibility. Most leaders are in a position of not only serving those they lead, but also those they report to - be that a boss or a board of directors - and that flexibility allows them to claim a “win” even if the actual result isn’t that great. In other words, this flexibility allows the leader to focus on the story of the sizzle - hear how good it sounds? - even when there isn’t much steak to back it up. Additionally, a plan like this tends to leave those in execution roles - basically the teams of the organization - struggling to understand what success is actually supposed to look like, which leaves them struggling to know what they are supposed to do to be successful. Our “hot take” on this is pretty simple: Not having a plan and making stuff up as you go is preferable to an inauthentic plan that leaves your people confused and unsure. The first option is at least an honest admittance that nobody is quite sure what they’re doing - the second is deceitful, and leaders cannot be deceitful if they want to maintain credibility.

Thankfully, there’s an easy way to avoid doing a bad strategic plan that doesn’t require you to transform into a modern-day MacGyver in your attempts to “make stuff up as you go”. One of the services we provide at Authentik is values-based strategic planning, and connecting your key values to your strategic planning process can help ensure your plan is clear, understood by your key stakeholders, and aligned with the kind of organization you want to be.

When we are facilitating strategic planning for our clients, we focus on a few key areas:

1) Identify Core Values

This is a huge part of the values-based leadership cycle that we’ve written about before. Everyone has values - “that which we deem most important” - but not many people actively articulate what those values are in an intentional way. We treat values like the Supreme Court treated the concept of obscenity in their ruling in the 1960s - rather than proactively identifying what we will and won’t do, we tend to “know it when we see it” and make decisions about what is or is not in alignment with our values in the moment we run into the situation. Candidly, this approach works for most people most of the time, because most people are making decisions for themselves.

But leaders make decisions for organizations, and if you want other individuals in your organization to feel like they truly understand those decisions, you need clearly articulated core values. This has many benefits - it allows employees to identify whether or not they have an alignment of values to ensure they are a good fit. It can help you make decisions when you have many options ahead of you - you can pick the one that most aligns with your organizational values. And, as the above-linked article demonstrates, when a leader makes decisions according to stated values, it creates a positive feedback loop that results in psychological safety for those they lead. These are all very good things for your leadership, and you absolutely should put the time into identifying your core values for your role and revisiting this work often.

It’s especially useful in strategic planning processes. Starting from a place of core values with you and your team allows your entire strategy to be centred on “the things which you deem are most important”, and doesn’t that make sense as a foundation? Plus, since strategic plans are rarely developed solo, a conversation about core values ensures everyone is holding those shared values in the centre of their thinking and reflection when building the strategy.

Skipping this step means people bring their own personal values to your strategic planning. If you are lucky, these values will align, and results will be good - but if you aren’t lucky, you’ll be trying to build a strategy with folks whose perspective on what matters is not aligned, and that means the entire discussion will be out of alignment and ripe for conflict. This conflict is often navigated in the planning processes by compromising the specificity or goals of the strategy, and that’s where weasel words are born. Avoid this risk entirely by starting your process with a discussion of shared values.

2) Begin with the End in Mind

A strategy is not meant to be a rigid, inflexible thing. It’s mean to be a guide on what the main efforts will be to navigate your current context. But the question is - what are you navigating to? It’s one thing to have a plan to handle the economic shock of the tariffs or supply chain disruptions, but it’s another thing entirely to understand why you are doing that and what goal you are trying to achieve. Survival? That may be totally appropriate for your current business, and there are a lot of organizations that need a strategy to get them off the ropes they find themselves on. Some organizations however will be able to lean into this disruption and turn it into a transformation instead, so that begs the question - what are they transforming into?

That’s why we always start with the end in mind, and we don’t mean the end of your strategic plan in 3 to 5 years time. When we mean the end, we mean the END end - when you’re dead.

“Woah, what?” You say. “I’m supposed to be thinking about my death when I do strategic planning?”

Yes.

Listen, we get it, it’s uncomfortable. Most of our society doesn’t really talk about death; it’s a strangely taboo topic given it’s going to happen to all of us eventually. The fact of the matter is each of us only gets about 80-90 years on this planet, give or take a decade or two based on lifestyle and genetics. The most important thing we can do as humans is decide what we want to do with that time. If you are involved in a strategic planning process, you’ve just been handed one of the biggest gifts a human can get: You have the chance to put in place a plan that will make a difference for an organization, and that creates the opportunity for that organization to make a difference in the world around us. That’s pretty neat, and isn’t something to be squandered - and because of the gravity of the opportunity (Remember, it’s not just a 3 to 5 year plan - it’s about how that plan impacts the world around you!) it makes sense to think about it from the perspective of your overall impact.

For our strategic planning sessions, we always do an end-of-life storytelling exercise. Imagine you are 85 years old, and the end is near for you. Someone - maybe a nurse, maybe a grandkid - asks you about your life and what you did with it. What kind of story do you want to tell? How did your actions make a difference in the world around you?

If you are sitting at a table engaged in strategic planning, you have one of the most powerful opportunities known to write that story in the way you want to tell it. By understanding what kind of story you want to tell, you are setting yourself a goal or destination. Imagine that your life is a map of the world - you know where you are with your organization (your current state) and that’s a dot on the map. And, with this simple but powerful question, you know your goal or destination - that’s another dot on the map. Now you just need to connect those two dots, and that’s your strategic plan.

It’s simple, but not easy - that’s why we can help facilitate this for you! - but the overall point here is the incredible power you unlock when you connect your own life’s purpose to your role in a strategic planning process, and the best way to do that is to begin with the end in mind.

3) Identify Success AND failure

When we engage in a bold strategy, the weasel-word documents tend to have a pretty flexible or unspecific statement of what success will be. They’ll say things like “Improve customer retention” or “be a leading consulting firm in our designated market”. The trouble with these types of statements is that there’s no clear idea of what they mean - what does it look like to improve customer retention? By how much? At what cost? And how does one determine if they are the “leading” firm - what metrics determine such a thing?

Good strategic plans will have some sense of what success looks like, and no doubt many readers are familiar with the concept of a SMART goal - basically, whenever you set a strategic objective, you want it to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Put another way, when you’ve fully achieved part 1) and 2), and identified what your deathbed story will be in a way that aligns with your core values, you need do distill the path down into the major steps or milestones that need to be achieved to write that story successfully. These need to be specific and clear enough that everyone reading them will have a reasonable idea of the objective at each milestone. This articulation should be measurable - how many customers are you retaining? How are you defining “leading consulting firm” - sales? Clients booked? Projects featured in your industry’s quarterly publication? The goal here is to have an objective metric that will let you know if you’ve actually achieved what you set out to achieve. Relevant means simply that your goal matters to your overall organizational objectives, and if you’ve successfully done steps 1) and 2) above, it will. Finally, time-bound means the goal isn’t open ended; you expect the goal to take X weeks, months or years, and success is defined by having that goal achieved by that timeline.

Great strategic plans go a bit further and start imaging what the opposite of success looks like - what would failure be in these scenarios? This matters a great deal because often, especially during highly disruptive times (like…right now!), our strategies are changed by external factors that are beyond our anticipation or control; as we’ve shared previously, the current state of the Polycrisis means predicting disruption is incredibly difficult. To borrow a common example of Chaos Theory, right now a great deal of butterflies are flapping wings in Central Park and we do not yet know the typhoons they may cause in an ocean a world away.

This is why it’s so essential to define what failure of a particular goal will look like. If a particular butterfly forces you to rethink your strategic goal, having explicitly stated failure conditions allow you to pivot your strategy while still avoiding the major pitfall that the strategy is designed to mitigate. Here’s a simple example:

Let’s say your smart goal in your strategy is to increase customers by 10% by the end of the next fiscal year on your customer acquisition budget of $100 per person. That’s a pretty specific, measurable, and probably realistic goal for most organizations. But, tariffs and uncertain economic realities mean that suddenly, folks are being a lot more careful with their cash, and suddenly recruiting and securing that 10% increase costs you $175 per customer. You may have already committed that extra $75 per customer resource to a different strategic goal, and this is forcing you to reevaluate your strategy. Sticking with your original strategic goal isn’t really an option - the opportunity cost may derail another part of your strategy. You could simply adjust your targets downward, but how far down?

This is where your failure condition comes from - in the above example, maybe you absolutely have to have 3% customer growth in order to secure enough profitability to weather the inflation caused by our current economic climate, and less than 3% customer growth means you won’t balance your books. Therefore, your failure condition is “if we don’t achieve at least 3% growth we will have failed”. Now your plan has some real accountability guardrails - 10% was what success looked like, but you can adjust that goal to 7%, 5%, or 3% - you are still avoiding your failure condition.

As a leader, clearly identifying your failure condition also allows you to lead with authenticity and honesty. The fact is no plan is ever perfect, and there will always be some adjustment and even some failure in any strategic plan. As a leader, being able to honestly articulate when you’ve hit a failure condition, and more importantly, what you plan to do to avoid that failure condition in the future helps build leadership legitimacy. To err is to human, and people follow humans, not titles.

Conclusion

Strategic Planning is essential - especially when dealing with disruptive times. But, if you don’t spend the right amount of energy and time doing a strategic plan well, you end up with a poorly written document that feels good, but is functionally not useful to guide your organization in the future, and it misses a huge opportunity to enhance your leadership credibility. Instead, if you focus on your values, begin with the end in mind, and take the time to describe success and failure, the odds are good you’ll end up with a strategic plan that helps you and your organization succeed. And if you need help, know that your friends at Authentik are standing by to facilitate your strategic planning process. Give us a shout and let’s work together.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.