Strategic plans allow clubs to operate from a thoughtful, engaged disposition. Without these plans, clubs are more vulnerable to responding reactively to challenges without consideration of mid- and long-term consequences.
What Do Strategic Plans Do?
According to professional services company Accenture, a strategic plan serves as a framework to make long-term decisions. Regardless of the nature of the organization, strategic plans have several key objectives. Michael Gunther, founder of Collaboration business consulting, a management consulting firm, says these plans “determine how the organization wants to play in the marketplace based on what the target customers desire.” Gunther identifies key factors of strategic plans:
- Don’t solve problems – Plans should focus on increasing the organization’s chance of success, not mired in finding solutions to problems.
- Are outward-focused – Plans should address the concerns of the organization’s customers, clients and other outside constituents.
- Determine where your organization exists – Once the target market is identified, strategic plans should focus on retaining the organization’s market and how to evolve with the marketplace.
- Establish achievement goals – What is the value proposition for the audience? Create goals in which tactics can be later developed that will help achieve those targets.
- Are straightforward – Strategic plans should not be too many pages and should focus on important decisions that will lead to success.
- Use clear logic—Plans should identify what the organization must do to achieve its strategic goal. Understand the target audience, the industry’s trajectory and the competition.
When Strategy Fails
Effectively carrying out a strategic plan is difficult. A 2017 survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) gathered responses from 500 senior executives at companies with annual revenues of more than $1 billion and discovered that 90% of the companies failed to reach all of their strategic goals because of flawed implementation. Fifty-three percent said that ineffective implementation of strategies strongly impacted its performance.
These failures can be costly. A Project Management Institute survey even the most successful companies lose roughly up to 10% on investments due to poor implementation. While these organizations have access to numerous resources to accomplish their objectives, the EIU found that the average organization fails to meet at least 20% of its strategic goals.
The problem is common as 59% said their organizations “struggle to bridge the gap between strategy develop and its practice, day-to-day implementation.”
SIDEBAR 1: 10 Principles for Aligning Strategy and Implementation
- Acknowledge that strategy delivery is just as important as strategy design.
Devote time and resource into developing a strategy that can be delivered.
- Accept that you’re accountable for delivering the strategy you designed.
Oversee the progress of the plan’s implementation. Understand where change happens in your organization and who drives it.
- Dedicate and mobilize the right resources.
Inspire the right people to implement the plan. Leadership skills are valuable, ensure that the best leaders have the capacity to fulfill their roles.
- Leverage insight on customers and competitors.
Continue to gather data from constituents and the marketplace
- Be bold, stay focused and keep it as simple as possible.
Surround yourself with individuals who simplify matters, not complicate them. These people can efficiently respond to the underlying reason for an event or threat
- Promote team engagement and effective cross-business cooperation.
Treat managers as strategy champions instead of strictly supervisors. Cultivate trust and commitment.
- Demonstrate bias toward decision-making and own the decisions you make.
Commit to strategic planning. Reinforce accountability, ownership and proactivity.
- Check ongoing initiatives before committing to new ones.
Regularly evaluate strategic initiatives. Understand the existing plan and the organization’s capacity to add to it.
- Develop robust plans but allow for missteps—fail fast to learn fast.
Empower your leaders to experiment and learn where it is safe to fail.
- Celebrate success and recognize those who have done good work.
Engage with and excite the people most responsible for carrying out the strategy.
Source: Brightline Initiative, a coalition of leading global organizations
Long-term Planning in Today’s World
As time constraints increase for staff, board members and organizations, it is important to have a strategic plan and planning process that aligns with today’s world.
Real World Lessons
BoardSource, which supports nonprofit governance, learned several key insights from its strategic planning process. The first was determining when is a good time to plan. The organization had experienced planning fatigue, however, given the number of internal and external factors that had changed since the last planning process, such as the company’s finances, it was imperative to begin to think ahead.
The organization then created a task force to outline efforts that encourage participation from the board and staff, and to interpret the conversations to relay back to the board. The task force included five board members, the CEO, two senior team members and a program manager to help manage the entire process. This group was comprised of individuals who had meaningful personal connections within stakeholder groups, strong leadership experience and who had helped develop the most recent plan.
Deciding to have a short planning process, the task force laid out a planning framework that called for one retreat with the full board. The retreat needed to efficiently act upon insight from its board, staff and other audiences. To accomplish this, the retreat used information from interviews with key constituents, a previously held staff retreat, as well as a board and senior staff survey. The task force ensured the retreat lasted only seven-and-a-half hours, effectively using the board’s time.
The planning team also made adjustments to their process by scheduling additional meetings when they found themselves behind, and also built in extra time for planning and deliberation when necessary.
The BoardSource team found that the strategic planning process revealed and reflected the company’s culture. They saw the various components of the team trusted each other and communicated well.
Adapting for Tomorrow
The “Internet Trends” report from venture capitalist Mary Meeker offers key business-related trends based on internet data. Jeffrey Tobias, an innovation consultant and entrepreneurship strategist summarized the reports’ findings to help guide organizations through strategic planning using this year’s data. Here are some key findings from the study:
- Organizations must be digitally equipped to survive the next decade. Organizations must be accessible on mobile devices. Americans spent on average 6.3 hours on digital media each day in 2018—up from 0.3 hours in 2008 and 5.9 hours in 2018.
- Develop a strategy to deliver personalized experiences to your clients and customers. While clubs are already in this business, as more companies are able tailor their products and services, it will create more competition for clubs.
- Have a plan to leverage data from clients and customers. Effectively acting on user data will increase customer satisfaction.
- Develop an understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and how you can leverage it with customers. As major companies like Google, Amazon and others invest in AI, it is important to understand how it can be used at your organization.
- Create smooth and seamless ways for customers and clients to do business with you. More customers utilize mobile searches, recommendations, notifications and easy payment systems for a convenient experience.
Leading vs. Managing a Strategic Plan
Traditional strategic planning methodology involves meetings that result in a document that establishes goals and metrics for staff implementation and monitoring, says Jeff Arnold, President of Leading Associations, an association consultant. These cascading processes apply to management, but not leadership.
He explains that intuitive alignment throughout the organization should be the goal in strategic planning. This occurs when strategic action happens naturally without prerequisite objectives and consulting performance metrics. Cascading measures apply to operations and may overlap with strategic objectives, but they do not cultivate strategic mindsets. Without a strategic perspective, staff and the governing body may be limited in their range of actions.
Arnold recommends having strategic conversations. Different from communicating goals and objectives, this tactic creates an emotional connection to achieving the plan’s and organization’s goals. These conversations clarify and develop values and cultural norms by co-creating an image of the organization’s goals and requires active participation from all parties. The discussions should occur when obstacles to the plan arise, which may alter the course to achieve the goal. Arnold compares the cascading measures methodology to a home’s blueprints, while a strategic mindset helps others envision the feel of a new home.
Planning for Success
Strategic planning can keep clubs nimble in the years ahead while setting a clear course for success. Adhering to planning best practices while adapting to today’s trends and challenges provides clubs the environment they need to operate boldly and decisively.