The Strategic Planning Process Who, Why, Why Not Daniel Omara

Hello, my name is Daniel Omara. I work with the Central Bank of Uganda. I'll share my thoughts with you today on the strategic planning process. Who needs to be invited to participate in the strategic planning process, or specifically, who needs to be invited in the strategic planning retreat? The agenda will be as follows. I'll speak about the strategic planning process, the strategic planning team, the stakeholder mapping, and then we draw into the conclusion. According to this International Association for Strategy Professionals Body of Knowledge, what you know as the BOK 3.0, the IASP Body of Knowledge 3.0 provides 5 steps in the strategic planning process. Step 1 is to formulate the strategy. Under this step, we devise the strategy, we come up with the strategy or the plan. The assumption here is that you have done your environmental assessment already, and some people call this the environmental scanning. So you've done all this using different models such as the SWOT analysis, the PESTEL analysis, and many of these other scenario planning and all that you have in stock. But the point is that you must come up with a strategic plan at the end of the day. In step 2, you now transform the organization. And so this strategy was put in place to cause change. It should create value in the organization. So transforming the organization should bring about change to the organization in order to align its operating model to the new strategy. So the organization has got to change to align its operating model to the new strategy. There was a purpose for the new strategy. There was a purpose to have change in the organization, to improve business, to improve all that you have set out in your strategy. So there must be transformation. So how do you bring transformation? Transformation then comes through execution of the strategy, step 3. So, for you to execute the strategy, you need to deliver value to the organization stakeholders as defined in your strategy. So, the execution of the strategy is a very important, uh, step in the strategic planning process. In most cases, many institutions have a very well-designed strategy, but it's kept on the shelves and it's not implemented. So execution is very, very important. So execution is where you need to ensure that you have full buy-in, you deploy all the resources that you need to ensure that you achieve your strategy. But how do we bring this buy-in? So we bring this buy-in through engagement in step 4, where we engage our stakeholders. So engagement is to do all that is necessary to get the participants to commit themselves to make the new strategy work. In our case, in the central bank, we design our strategy and then run a very comprehensive stakeholder engagement program. We mainly engage our stakeholders such as the employees, the staff. So we need them to understand the strategy. They need to know what is in this strategy and what is in it for them, because each one of us requires something that is in it for us. That way, then we feel a part of the strategy so that we do not leave it as a document for senior management only or top management only. And so stakeholder engagement is important. So we run different programs for the stakeholders and we categorize them into different clusters. So because we have staff in different ranks, we meet them according to their ranks where they feel free to have discussions about the strategy during our engagement sessions. But we also organize our sessions with the external stakeholders through what we call our town hall meetings. So our town hall meetings We arrange to meet different opinion leaders in our communities wherever we are present. The central bank has 9 branches across the country. So we go to all these 9 branches within the country and meet the stakeholders within there and tell them more about the central bank. So there is a close relationship then that we bring ourselves to, with the stakeholders in these areas that we're present in. But all that is to ensure that we drive and cause a relationship with our stakeholders so that they understand our business. One of our key strategic objectives is to increase, is to enhance stakeholder confidence. In enhancing stakeholder confidence in what we do in the bank, requires us to engage them. They need to understand what we do. What is it the business of the central bank? Once we have engaged our stakeholders, in step 5, as listed by the PoK 3.0, is to govern the strategy. So you need to set up a governance structure for your strategy. And this is simply saying that at each of these 5 steps— each of the 4 steps, I'm sorry, You have to provide leadership during formulation of the strategy. Have you set the right structure to govern the formulation process? Who is responsible for what? So that needs to come out very clearly because then you provide responsibility, accountability, but you ensure that you achieve what you want at the end of the day, which is to have the strategy in place. You also must provide the governance structure in the transformation stage of the planning process. So the transformation stage is where you're causing change, where you're trying to see that you deliver the value in your strategy. So there needs to be a governance structure here, and using our example in the strategy in, in the central bank, we use what we call strategic objective team leads. These are members of staff at the executive level. They are at C-level, if you, if you like. So these lead teams across the organization based on the business that supports the particular initiative in the strategy that is within their control. So there should be a governance structure here. And their role would be clearly defined. Same thing as we move to step 3, in the execution of the strategy, you've got to have a structure that governs the execution stage. And in step 4, engaging stakeholders, again, you need to have a structure that governs, uh, this step. So All in all, there should be a governance structure of your strategy, and the governance structure should clearly define the different roles of the different stakeholders, or the different managers, if you like, of the strategy within the organization. So governance is very important because this is how you then draw accountability. This is how you then draw responsibility. Responsibility. This is how then you provide feedback to the different stakeholders. And now we look at the strategic planning team. So who needs to be in the strategic planning retreat? So using the model that LBL Strategies has prepared, it provides two layers of stakeholders that need to be in this strategy retreat. In the outer layer, which they term the extended strategic planning team, this provides for an ideal size of 10 to 50 stakeholders, 10 to 50 participants. So this depends again on the size of your organization. It may not be just 50, You could have more than 50, depending on what kind of business you run and the size of your business. So the 50, the 10 to 50 stakeholders consist of key staff in the organization, the customer representatives. You also have industry experts and other stakeholders that are within your business environment. And you also have those who are responsible for providing input to the environmental scan, because remember we talked about the environmental scan during the formulation process in step 1. So all these will be, uh, participants in your strategic planning retreat. You may also include interviewees, uh, during your formulation stage. You're conducting environmental assessment, and so you are interviewing a number of stakeholders, so you may include interviewees, uh, in this extended planning team. This could also include your survey respondents or focus group participants. So the list can be long, but we provide an ideal structure that would provide value in the planning process. Then we move to the second cluster of who needs to be in the strategy planning retreat, and this is the inner circle called the core strategic planning team. In the core strategic planning team, the ideal size is 8 to 15 participants, and the 8 to 15 participants again depends on on the size of the organization. But in this ideal situation, we provide that these 8 to 5— 8 to 15, sorry— should consist of the board of directors. So you have the board members in the 8 to 15. You also have the executive leadership. You also have the senior managers responsible for leading and guiding the strategic planning process. So the board's role is well known to all of us, that they are in charge of coming up with the high-level strategy, providing the strategic direction of the institution. The executive leaders are the managers, the top managers that run the day-to-day business of the organization, and so they need to have full control of the strategy process. They need to have full control of the strategy. They are the owners of the strategy, this cluster of stakeholders in the 8 to 15 participants. So this is a very important, uh, members or participants in the strategic planning process. So if you need to have a strong strategic planning team, then you've got to ensure that you have the board of directors in that room. You've got to ensure that you have the executive, uh, team of the organization in that room, and you've got to ensure that you have all your senior managers, uh, in that room, because these are the people that are responsible for leading and guiding the strategic planning process. Of course, you're not going to have all of them in one room discuss at the same time, You cannot have the board of directors in the same room discussing your strategy with your senior management. No. So each of them would be clustered in their different categories and you hold the sessions with them separately. So that again is, you know, it's a flexible provision that you design how you want to have these engagements done. With the different, um, categories of these stakeholders. But the point is that you've got to ensure that you have engagements and input provided by the board members, provided by the senior executives of the organization, and all those that are core to the strategic planning process. So they become your core strategic planning team. These must be in the room during the strategic planning process. Now, our next slide, I talk about the power or influence diagram where I provide a, a four-quadrant which lists interest of stakeholders on the y-axis and the influence or power of these stakeholders. The first group in the first quadrant is the least important. Who are those that you need to inform? For example, the Central Bank of Uganda. Who are those that we need to simply inform about our business or formulating monetary policy? So here we can take an example of the general public. The general public simply needs to be informed of our business. They need to understand our business, but we do not have to have a direct engagement with them in this quadrant, the least important quadrant, as you said. So using the example of the general public, If we need to engage the general public, we can choose to simply inform them through a general communication, perhaps through the newspapers or the general media, or we post our information on the website or send out email to particular people amongst the general public if we have their contacts with us. But this is to aim that to aim at having them within our nets, within our basket, within our reach, because we want to achieve their buy-in. Yes, we are a central bank, but we need to have the confidence level of the stakeholders, generally the general public. What is their level of confidence with the central bank? So one of our strategic objectives is to enhance stakeholder confidence, and this is how we cause the engagement of the general public for them to understand the business that you do of monetary policy formulation. The goal here is to ensure that you move the least important stakeholders in this quadrant towards the right-hand side where we have the show consideration quadrant. Under the show consideration quadrant, you want to make use of the interest through involvement in low-risk areas. You want to have them keep— you want to keep them informed and consult on specific areas of interest. Because these are your potential supporters. These are your goodwill ambassadors. So again, using our case of the Central Bank, these could be opinion leaders. When we have engagements in the different regions where we're present, we engage opinion leaders. And these opinion leaders, once they understand our business, once they have the relationship with us, then they can be our goodwill ambassadors in the different areas that they have control in. The other example could be the business community, because what we do in monetary policy formulation has an impact on the business community. So you want the business community to understand your business, to understand the work of the Central Bank so that they can have confidence in the Central Bank, and that way they become our goodwill ambassadors. The third quadrant is along the y-axis, is the meet their needs. The meet their needs are stakeholders. These, these are the people that we engage and consult on interest areas specific to their needs. We try to increase their level of interest and we aim to move them again to the right-hand box that I'll be talking about very shortly. But what's the example of this cluster of stakeholders who we need to meet their needs? So I'll point out an example of the media houses. Whenever we release our monetary policy statements, we engage the media. We engage the media to ensure that they disseminate the information that we have released and make it more simpler for the general public to understand. The consumers of this policy statement need to understand it, so the media then dissect this policy statement to the language that is understood by the common person. But in terms of influence, in terms of interest, we see that it's important to have the needs of the media houses met. And therefore, we have constant engagements with them to understand our business first and to meet their needs. So we— it's a two-way discussion. It's a two-way benefit. The next quadrant is the key players. These are the people that you need to have within your reach at any time because they are key players. They focus on efforts. They involve— they are involved in governance, perhaps, or they make legislation. And so I use an example of, say, the Senate or the members of parliament. Because they're involved in legislative process, they have a high level of influence and high interest in what the central bank does. So in deciding your cluster of stakeholders, this power and interest you know, a diagram or quadrant provides you a clear way of mapping out your stakeholders that you need to engage during the strategic planning process. In conclusion, there is no one-size-fits-all process. It depends on the size of your organization. You need to understand the expectations of the leadership team. So you have to engage the leadership team way before you start your planning process. What are their needs? What is it in for them? What are their expectations? So these must be clearly understood from the word go. Identify a strategy development champion. So you need to identify a champion within the organization Could that be the head of strategy, the chief strategy officer? This again depends on your organization structure, but the point is that you need to identify a strategy champion within the organization so that your strategic planning process is enhanced. Secure commitment from the top. We said that the board, the senior executive are the owners of the strategy. So you need to have them on your side. You need to secure their commitment to the strategy. And last but not least, design a process that fits, a process that fits the organization, that fits your environment, because we're all in different environments. Once you do this and many others, I've just listed 5 of these points here, But once you do this, we believe that then you should have a clear strategic planning process and the right participants in the strategy retreat. And so as I end, I'd like to have this quote by Morris Chang, the founder and chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. In his words, quote unquote, Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless. Thank you.