Your current strategic plan is up for review. A date is set, the board, or a designated sub-committee and the Executive Director (or equivalent staff person) get together for the purpose of setting the future direction for the organization. So, this “planning group” gets together and with the help of a facilitator, reviews your mission and vision, sets a series of objectives, puts it all together into a nice report and it’s done. Great, it wasn’t too painful and didn’t take up too much time from your real job.

Does this scenario sound familiar? If it does you might have a problem. The problem is two fold ð first is information, or more accurately the lack of information, and the second is efficiency.

For many organizations, the only information being discussed during the strategy development process is that which resides in the heads of the board members and senior staff person that attend the actual planning session. As such, the process consists not of testing your limits, pushing your boundaries or inventing a greater and better future, but of having a group of people all agree on the interpretation of a limited amount of information from within their own paradigm.

Strategy development has been described as a creative process built on analytical data (Mintzberg). The scenario outlined at the being of this article includes the creative process but misses the test of having the analytical data. This is not to say that there is no information; however, the information being used has already been framed by the planning group’s own paradigm. The concern is that the organization never really steps “out-of-the-box” and as such you never really know if your organization has any blind-spots. Organizational blind-spots are those pieces of information that are known to other organizations and not known to your organization. The purpose of seeking outside information is to take the planning group out-of-the-box and reduce the possibility of organizational blind-spots.

I once read that of the current Fortune 500 companies, only about 40% of them still exist in substantially the same form today as they did 25 years ago, if they exist at all. Admittedly, this example is from the “for-profit” sector, however, the degree of change and increased level of competition that has driven these effects in the “for-profit” world is now a reality in the not-for-profit sector as well. So if change is so uncertain and the environment increasingly turbulent and unpredictable, can we really rely only on the information that resides in the heads of our planning group?

The second problem is efficiency, the efficiency of getting the planning process done. We all acknowledge the time constraints on our board members and staff and can appreciate the desire not to consume large amounts of resources on the planning process. After all, once you’ve finished planning you still have to implement it before you see any sort of tangible benefit. So what’s the problem with efficiency?

There is the old question of, “do you want a poor strategy well implemented or a good strategy poorly implemented?” Most people answer that they want a good strategy well implemented. And therein lies the problem with efficiency. In our desire to be efficient and to streamline the process and/or minimize the resources used on it, there is the temptation to avoid collecting information that would have a meaningful benefit on the organization’s strategy development process. You can see that the efficiency problem is often tied into the information problem.

So what’s the solution?

The solution is partly in the process and partly in the tools used during the process. To avoid the lack of information and efficiency problem you may want to consider adopting a few of the following ideas.

1. Use an outside facilitator ð someone that is not connected with your board or organization and has formal training (e.g. a degree in strategic management) and experience in the strategy development process. This ensures that your basic assumptions are challenged, and it allows the facilitator to bring examples of how other organizations have addressed similar issues and to guide you as needed in the use of the many management tools (there are hundreds of them) that you can use in your strategy development process.
2. Collect information from your stakeholders. This can be done by a third party or by the board and/or staff. Using a third party often, but not always, results in less biased information being collected, but using your board and/or staff is cheaper.
3. Provide pre-reading to the planning committee members. The pre-reading should be from third party sources that talk about the trends, issues, challenges and anticipated regulatory changes within your sector, etc. If possible you should look for multiple opinions so that the planning group gets a balanced perspective.

While implementing these 3 suggestions won’t eliminate organizational blind-spots, it will certainly reduce them and provide a more meaningful and robust strategy at the end of the process.

Ron Robinson is the president of ABARIS Consulting Inc. He can be reached at (519) 472-9788 or rrobinson@abarisconsulting.com. This article is provided free of charge, for information purposes only and is not intended, represented or to be inferred as providing advice. ABARIS Consulting Inc. makes no warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability for accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information provided in whole or in part within this article.