David Booth explains strategic planning as sense-making, not just analysis. The core is four questions: where are we now, where do we want to go, how will we get there, and how do we make it happen. Success means integrating diverse perspectives and building shared understanding across the organization.
biological term, but it's about people. So how do you coalesce people around that direction?
You—
they need clarity, they need to understand where the organization's going. So a strategic planning process is the process of how people in the organization make sense of where it's going and how it's going to get there.
That's the planning part, the organizing bit.
So it's people orientated. And I would say that actually, yes, you're right, you know, the traditional view of strategic planning is about sophisticated analysis, it's by 2x2 matrices or different models, different frameworks to be used.
And of course those techniques are, they're valid, they help people to see things, they help people to picture things, but it's not the ultimate and not the be-all and end-all. What is is the process by which you come as an organization to decide on where you're going and the strategy and the understanding.
So I would say that strategy and strategic planning is about 3 things.
It's about perspectives, the ability to have perspectives from other people, from different if you like, stakeholders externally, but also perspectives from the past where the organization's come from. The ability to think about what other people—
how other people see it objectively.
It's also about the ability to pose questions.
So if you think about it, where the 4 questions in the strategic planning process are: where are we now?
Where do we want to get to? How will we get there?
And how can we make it happen? And that takes you through the strategizing and then the organizing and the planning.
And those questions—
where are we now?
Well, understanding that, there are—
you break that down into questions, you know, what do our customers think? What do our market think? Where are we in terms of the profitability?
Where do we sit? All sorts of questions.
The ability to define those questions is part of— are the relevant ones, the key ones.
And the ability to organize how you answer those is key in that discovery aspect of strategic planning.
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