You made a great Strategic Plan! Now what?

A lot of us talk about strategic planning, an important activity for aligning your organization’s activities with a longer-term version. While I think everyone would agree that it’s important to plan, the phrase “strategic plan” is sometimes met with eye rolls 🙄

The reason this might be the response to a well-intentioned and hopefully well-crafted plan is that they’ve seen this show before: a consultant, many sticky notes, a beautiful PDF or slide deck, and then… back to business as usual. There are a lot of reasons this might happen, but to name a few:

• Somebody had “do strategic plan” on their checklist, but it was never truly connected to the organization’s strategy

• Not all of the right stakeholders were engaged in developing the plan, so they aren’t bought-in

• Nobody has the bandwidth to execute the strategic plan on top of their regular operations

To avoid this last pitfall, plan resources for implementation up front so you know exactly what will happen next when the planning process ends. What will you stop doing? Who will focus on this? What additional capability or capacity might you need? It’s very similar to Innovation in that an implementation roadmap is at least as important as effective Ideation.

Do you have a strategic plan that’s starting to collect digital dust in your cloud drive? I’d love to talk about how to turn your vision into reality. Hit me up!