I saw a video interview with Harry Dent this week, in which
he predicts an economic down-turn this summer.  He’s been accurate
thus far about the market.  You might want to consider his point of view.
But since you are here at my blog, keep reading and I’ll suggest a
method for managing Harry’s predicted down-turn, and the basic premise
is all contained in trees.

If there is a much larger economic slump waiting in the summer weeds,
Harry suggests that if you can survive, you’ll be able to buy up competitors,
increase market share, etc… but the answer is how to do you survive, how
do you remain standing when others are struggling or failing?

Think of a tree, a big tree for a moment.

Imagine your business is a big tree.  Imagine that a drought is coming,
but at present there is enough water.  How would prepare the tree
for the drought?  Two possible answers, which would you choose?

1. Would you grow the tree above ground (put on more leaves, grow more trunks)?… or
2. Would you grow your the tree underground, get a deeper, broader root structure?

I grew up in a plant and garden nursery -  hopefully this makes remotely as
much sense to you as it does to me.

The 2nd answer is the correct one.  All that extra extra leaves and branches
on the top just represent more overhead for the roots to support.  You don’t
want that in a drought.  Trees drop their leaves in a drought.  You want an
extensive, deep root system that can access every last bit of water and nutrients
(cash flow).

Translation:  If you had an extra $10,000, or $100,000 or $1,000,000 or…
to prepare for what Harry Dent is telling us will be coming,  you would:

1. Invest it in getting close to your customers,
2. Extend yourself more broadly into the niches you already compete in,
3. Make it easier and more satisfying for your existing customers to work
with you, you get the idea.

And because it could possibly mean your business life, you would carefully
manage and track the process using a technology like ManagePro.  This is not
create a new marketing brouchure time, its getting very focused on how to
improve the “underground” part of your business and then making it happen.

Bottom Line:
If Harry Dent’s projections of upcoming financial downturn this summer
resonate with you, get busy now building better connections with your
current and soon to be customers.  And while you’re thinking strategically,
put it into play systematically so that you can carefully monitor the follow-through.

Links:
Being Strategic about the Coming Upswing
Working Strategic and the Role of Comfort

Is your strategy outdated? Does it need to change? Has it needed
a change for some time, you just haven’t noticed? Robert Bradford
suggested that “old strategies almost always stop working, eventually.”
I laughed when I saw all those qualifiers (almost, always, eventually),
but the point is a good one – let’s look at it.

Robert’s comments made me think, “How would you know your
strategy needs a tune-up, or perhaps a replacement?”

Robert implies that some (I would say a majority) wait until
they are on the ropes to figure out they need a change.  If this
is you, I have two suggestions to help you avoid being late
and reactive… but first let’s summarize Robert’s blog.

He believes there are three reasons “Why your currently
successful strategy is likely to break.” 

1. Technology – can change the value proposition upon which
     your current strategy is based
2. Imitation – from competitors encroaches on your market
     share forcing you to adopt new strategies.
3. Replacement – there’s an entire paradigm change, your product,
     your buyers, your customer base discontinues, goes away.

OK, so let’s say your strategy needs to change based upon personnel
changes, market changes, etc.  It seems obvious that if you wait too long
to respond you run out of time, money and eventually people.

So how do you know when to change, e.g. when to change before
your losses begin piling up.  You know, be strategic about how long
you stick with a part of your strategic plan? 

Here’s two suggestions, see what you think.

1. Tie your strategy to measurable outcomes.   If you don’t have an
ongoing process for measuring your outcomes, measuring how
“that strategy is working for you”, by definition you will be late to
recognize and make a strategy change.  In fact you’ll probably spend
time ignoring or justifying why the strategy will (still) work, if you are
not tracking real data. 

2. Define the market and customer assumptions your strategy
is based upon and periodically review them to make sure they are
still valid.  Given how fast things change, if you haven’t validated the
assumptions holding up your selection of initiatives driving your
strategic plan, you can count on them being outdated.

Bottom Line:
If most strategies eventually no longer work, you’ll want to have
a process that recognizes the need for a strategy change early,
not late.  You probably have some initiatives in your strategy currently
that aren’t delivering the outcomes intended, and need a change.

Use the methods of 1. Outcome measurement and 2. Assumption
validation to avoid being late changing out flagging strategies.  I
use the scorecards and progress updates in ManagePro to help me
stay on top of both processes and manage more strategically.

Links:
Start on the Right Foot
Assessing Your Market’s Appetite for Innovation

I have 3 favorite ways to assess a market and make sure strategically
resources are being assigned to the right priorities. Let me walk
you briefly through one of them in this blog.  I know it’s almost
the end of the first quarter, but it’s never to late to review your
strategy.

1. The first strategic question I try and answer is simply this:
“Is the market mostly responding to new features,
standards or ease of use?”

Usually there’s not enough resources to optimize each of those
positions for any one product.  If you assess the market wrong
(e.g. you add new features, when the market is buying  ease of use),
you actually hurt your sales, not just get a poor ROI on your
strategic investment.

So how do I go about assessing the market to answer that question?

I use the Innovation curve (see previous blog) and confirm
what’s the market doing (which competitors are succeeding) using
the question, “What stage of development is the market in -
 for that product/service from the perspective of it’s
innovation life cycle?”

That assessment helps me strategically determine where to invest,
versus my comfort or personal preference.  Without this market
analysis, I find that customers invest resources based upon
their own level of interest in innovation, not based upon their
market’s current appetite for innovation.

Identifying where the market is located on the innovation curve,
will provide clarity about the emotional drivers for purchasing
any product or service, and help you prioritize strategically
what you should invest in to best match up to current purchase themes.

The closer the market is to the early adopter stage, the more
your product will need to have and add, new, exciting features. 
The closer it is to the early majority sector of the life cycle,
the more you will need to emphasize stability and productivity,
and to match up to and preferably be one of the standards. 
Finally, the closer it is to the late majority phase, the more
you will need to emphasize ease-of-use and entertainment feature sets.

Bottom Line:

Assessing your market’s appetitie for innovation, when it comes
to responding to your product/service group, is one of my
favorite means of getting my arms around the market and
making accurate strategic decisions.  Here’s a link to a
Powerpoint diagram of the Innovation Life Cycle in the market process.

Let me know what you think.

What if most of what’s up on the web, most of what you have
learned about creating a strategic plan, is… well misguided? I could say most strategic planning for businesses STARTS OUT
ALL WRONG…. but I was trying to find a word that communicates
without stepping on toes. Did ‘misguided’ work for you?

If you and I were to do a quick search on the topic of strategic
planning through the web, through text books, through Amazon, 
we would repeatedly find the standard instruction on strategic
planning to include something like the following:

1. Start by defining your Vision or your primary goal,
2. Next frame your Mission and Purpose
3. Then do a SWOT analysis (assess your strengths, weaknesses,
     opportunities and threats)
4. And finish up by building out a set of strategic initiatives.

If you are non-profit organization this makes a fair amount of sense.

If you work in, or own, a for-profit business, this approach
starts you off on the wrong foot, looking at and prioritizing the
wrong issues.

Before I go on, I need to share a chuckle with you.  If you look
up strategic planning in Wikipedia, the recommendation starts
with a first step of identifying “What do you do?”  I’m always hoping,
hence the chuckle, that most people I’m working with know what
they and the organization do… but maybe that’s a big oversite on
my part.  But my point here is the “You” word.

Back to the topic.  You see, if you need to make money, your
vision, your values, your mission and purpose aren’t where you
start.    They aren’t that important initially. 

I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but when it comes to
making a profit, YOU’RE not that important… compared
to the market. 

You see, it’s what happening in the market that’s important. 
It’s what the market is doing, the kinds of products and services
getting traction, etc, that are critically relevant to making
money… not your mission statement, or your latest product or
service feature.

So where should you start, when creating a strategic plan?

Glad you asked that question, at least I was hoping you were
asking it while reading this blog. 

I need a drum roll clip right here.

Strategic planning, again speaking about for-profit businesses,
needs to start with an analysis of the market. 

Whether you already have one or more products and services, or
are looking to the market to identify the right product or service
to push or consolidate, you want to start your strategic planning
with a strong look at what’s driving the market.

Specifically you can help yourself by looking at three areas:

1. The current place on the innovation life cycle your business’
products and services currently exist, as it will drive customer response.
2. Whether your market is narrow or wide, unformed or tightly
consolidated, as it will directly impact your marketing strategy.
3. What is driving buying behavior; e.g. innovation, brand, cost or
user experience, as you want direct your investment efforts to
put you in front of that buyer behavior.

Bottom Line:

Strategic planning needs to start with an analysis of the market
if being constructed for a for-profit business.  Everything else,
your vision, values, mission, etc, is of secondary relevance
to understanding the market and using that knowledge to
construct a strategic plan.

I’m going to put together a power point to demonstrate how I walk
organizations through that sequence, and will post a link in my
next blog… so stay tuned.

Link:

Strategic Planning Software

Strategic planning is an oxymoron as practiced by many
organizations, maybe even the one you work at.  Why? 
It’s an oxymoron because planning without follow-up,
without results and metrics to check assumptions… is not strategic.

Strategic Planning isn’t typically strategic.  That’s a good one, isn’t it?

But think about it.  You see it wouldn’t be very strategic if in
our strategic planning we:
1. Didn’t identify and put in place a process to verify the assumptions
about market drivers, capacity and personnel that are embedded
in every strategic plan, or
2. Didn’t include a way to measure progress and/or wrote the
plan in such a way that it wasn’t possible to easily measure, or
3. Didn’t actually assess whether or not we had the capability
or will or focus to fulfill the strategic plan, or
4. Didn’t actually link the strategic plan to projects and actions
that directly effect the strategic outcomes.

Yet this is exactly what makes up most strategic plans I see.

Make sense?  I think many of us fall into the traps above, and as
a result strategic plans generate little value after that “off-site”. 
I can think of a number of descriptions for such plans, but
strategic wouldn’t be in the top 10.

Here’s a different way to think about strategic planning that you
can use to immediately make it more strategic and effective at the
organization you work at.

1. Strategic planning is much more about learning
than knowing.
When you get your private pilot’s license, they tell you it is a
license to learn… not that you are there yet.  The same holds
true for strategic plans.  Think of the plan as your license to learn,
and it will immediately become less stuffy, more interactive and
of more value. 

Instead of the plan being a set of high level 30,000 foot goals,
think of it, and structure it, as a set of initiatives to invoke
highly visible and critical learning.  And remember, learning is
impossible without comparing performance and the causal drivers
to plan… so you have to have a regular review process.

2. Check your assumptions at the door.
Thinking, planning, working and managing strategically all require
that you bring  a set of assumptions to your world of work.  You
make choices about what you focus on, how you spend time and
money and who’s responsible, as well as what you expect in return
… all based on assumptions.

Think of all strategic plans as essentially a mixture of well-informed
and poorly-informed assumptions.  Without recognizing them as
assumptions, instead of facts (checking them at the door), you’ll
never be in the position to test and verify which is which.  That
puts you and the organization in peril, and/or makes the plan
obsolete before it comes off the printer.

Bottom Line:
Strategic plans, as typically constructed, represent something
significantly short of strategic.  In fact they are an oxymoron.
Breath life into your strategic plan and planning process by
approaching your strategic plan as an exercise to learn, not a
statement of facts, and actively, regularly verify your assumptions.

Links:
Strategic Planning as Action Learning by Peter Smith & Abby Day
Why is Strategic associated with Planning, not Action? 
Strategic Execution Software

Charles Roxburgh, from McKensey, wrote a great article on using
scenario development to enhance your strategic planning.  Just in
case you don’t have time to read it, I’ve outlined his major points. 
Then I want to talk briefly about what he didn’t cover… that you
need to.

Charles writes that “Scenarios are a powerful tool in the strategist’s
armory… enabling the strategist to steer a course between the false
certainty of a single forecast and the confused paralysis that often
strike in troubled times.”  Scenarios are a powerful tool for under-
standing uncertainty and developing strategy accordingly. 
Scenario planning should emphasize the following considerations:

1. Relook at your business strategy – perhaps next year
won’t be the trend established in 2009.

“Scenarios expand your thinking (perhaps the past won’t repeat
itself)… The exercise is particularly valuable because of a human
quirk that leads us to expect that the future will resemble the
past and that change will occur only gradually.”

2. What are the trends in place that you should be doing
something about today?  Pay attention to consequences vs.
assuming we’ll just work it out/find a way/figure it out when we
get there.

“Scenarios uncover inevitable or near-inevitable futures….
Companies should search for predetermined outcomes —
particularly unexpected ones, based upon the consequence of
events that have already happened, and the trends that are
already in place.”

Charles identifies four kinds of actions and trends that you would
be well advised to attend to and think through the outcome
impact on your business.

1. Demographic trends – changes in population size and structure
of your buyers.

2. Economic action and reaction – supply and demand affects
everyone, including you.

3. Everything is a cycle; ask yourself how long any trend you
are counting on can be sustainable.

4. Force yourself to look beyond the typical 12-18 month
planning horizon.

He goes on to caution against avoiding several common traps in using scenarios, suggesting that you:

1. Manage against the pull to agree or think like the senior person in the group.

2. Avoid becoming paralyzed with the amount of data to consider

3. Don’t confuse setting clear, limited goals with the consideration
and planning for multiple scenarios.

4. Don’t rely on an excessively narrow set of outcomes.  We are
typically too optimistic going into a downturn and too pessimistic
on the way out. You must include “stretch” scenarios while
acknowledging their low probability; otherwise you tend to
disregard thinking “It won’t happen.”

5.  Treat scenarios as something that needs revisiting, re-
evaluating, sometimes discarding, sometimes replacing.

6. Always develop at least four scenarios, with each having 4
alternatives.  If you only develop or show three, people always
pick the middle one. Four forces them to discover which way
they truly lean.

The Missing Piece in Scanario Planning:

Here’s the big one, especially when it comes to scenario planning
that Charles left out.  It’s people. 

People within your organization.  People in your competitor’s organizations.   Do scenario planning around people.

Strategic planning isn’t complete without including a review of the possible scenarios of the key people in your organization and key external organizations.  Let me give you some examples and you
can fill in the rest:

1. Who’s going to embrace working strategically, who’s going to
resist or ignore it?

2. Who’s going to support change, who’s going to feel threatened
and attempt to sink the effort?

3. What’s important to the people in power and how will that
impact process and objectives?

4. Based upon the marketing effort and press releases of your competitors, what are they targeting as a competitive value add
for which demographic groups?

I think strategic planning around people, their trends and patterns
of behavior, is just as important of a trend to look at as any
economic, demographic or environmental trend.  It certainly is
one of the largest impact agents we deal with.

Summary:

Strengthen your strategic planning by developing scenarios to
aid your anticipation and response to the future.  Roxburg,
suggests you “Look for events that are certain or nearly certain
to happen; make sure scenarios cover a broad range of outcomes;
don’t ignore extremes; don’t discard scenarios too quickly just
because short-term reality appears to refute them and never be embarrassed by a seemingly too pessimistic or optimistic
scenario; understand when not enough is known to sketch out
a scenario…”

I suggest you add people of influence to your scenario planning. 
They actually have a much broader influence on scenario out-
comes, and executing a plan to deal with them, then most people recognize.

Links:
Is Working Strategically Really that Important?
Strategic planning and scenario building software

You might think that question is a setup.  Of course strategy is important… 
well maybe.

Think of that as a national question for a moment.  Since I live in the US,
the question might sound like,

“Is strategic planning, strategic management and associated concepts 
reflected in our thinking as demonstrated by web search activity…
say more than other countries”?

It turns out not. 

Would it surprise you to know the US doesn’t even make it to the
top 10 list of countries busy researching strategic planning on the
web?  It’s true, at least according to Google, check out the research below.

So if the US isn’t focused on strategy, what are we focused on?
Maybe the US is busy struggling on both a corporate and personal level
with the next task, managing more debt, trying to cope with ever
increasing amounts of information and looking for that upturn coming
around the bend.

Why be focused on the outcome, when you’re swamped with what’s
in front of you today? I have a thought about that – hold that thought.

I’ve been working with organizations and strategy in the Middle East
and Africa this week, as well as the US. There’s some commonalities.

In fact I notice, regardless of where you reside, that it’s easy
to slip into the (bad) habit of tending to think of being strategic
as something to do if you can take time away to do it.

It’s voiced as critical, yet scheduled as something of a luxury.

It’s also easy to lose the freedom that comes with being strategic,
with being outcome focused, and get it locked into what turns
out to be a rear-view report format. 

I can almost here the group think going on, something like,
“Ok, so working strategically is important… but I don’t have
time today.”  Think of it this way.

Bottom Line:
If you have to take time away from your daily schedule to be strategic,
working strategically probably won’t fit into your daily schedule.

If you’re like me, you’ll never get caught up enough to be more
strategic on a regular basis. The secret is in what you focus on
as demonstrated by what’s in your schedule today and tomorrow.
What’s on your schedule tomorrow?

Links:
The 30 Minute Appeal
Working Strategically – The 3 legged stool of Outcome, Game Clock & Value
Strategic Planning Software

In this series we’ve looked briefly at two strategic plan presentation fundamentals to adopt when working with your strategic plan to avoid having it “lost in translation.”

In this third blog on the subject, I want to focus on the third
reason why strategic plans get lost in translation.  It’s sounds
simplistic when I write it, but essentially it’s this…

Most strategic plans aren’t lost in translation,
they just haven’t been translated. 

That’s it.  Most strategic plans address high level initiatives,
over-arching goals, but don’t get articulated (translated) into
day-to-day projects and tasks that will be required to achieve the plan.

From my perspective, even if you break a strategic plan into
strategies or sub-initiatives, as long as it doesn’t translate
into a worker’s daily work scan, it really hasn’t been translated.

By the way, the “container” format or technology used to
capture the strategic plan, also becomes a self-limiting
obstacle in the strategic plan translation process.

Think about what kind of “container,” if I can use that word,
your strategic plan is in.  I bet it’s in a Powerpoint document,
maybe a Word doc or a spreadsheet.  It’s a container that
is best suited for presentation of findings at a meeting…
not for translating into daily activities when everyone goes
back to their desk.

You see if you don’t use a strategic planning technology
that links to the ongoing projects and todos that everyone
is addressing, then the plan inevitably gets filed in it’s
container, and in effect is never translated. 

That kind of strategic plan will be there for the next review
meeting.  It may even have some accumlation of metrics
and a summary statement.  But it isn’t driving daily decisions
and priorities.  In fact, most strategic plan review is
dominated by rear view mirror activity and thinking.

Strategic plans needs to be so practical that they interface
with people’s todo list for the day, integrating with email,
and othe collaboration technology.  They need to be
translated in a way that connects in a common sense
with staff’s daily work and the tools they use to get the
daily work done.  Does yours?

Bottom Line:
Most strategic plans don’t get lost in translation, they
suffer from never being translated out of their 30,000
foot language into the kind of project and task language
everyone understands and works with on a daily basis.

Links:
Does Strategic Planning Get Lost in Translation? (1 of 3)
Avoid Having Your Strategic Plan Lost in Translation (2 of 3)
Strategic Planning Definition

I’m on a series about how strategic planning “can get lost in translation”.
More importantly, what you can do to avoid this outcome, and instead
find all the hard work put into strategic planning paying off in terms of
follow through and results.

In the first blog I wrote about the need to think sales when presenting a
strategic plan to others.  Instead of thinking of it as information, approach
the presentation of your strategic plan with a sales approach,
emphasizing pain points, needs, outcomes and benefits, and recognize
that different personalities key off of different questions when in the
sales process.

The second way strategy get’s lost in translation, is that the plan is
presented in format or style that typically makes sense to the creators,
but less so (sometimes much less so) to the audience… because
they function with a different cognitive orientation to the world.

I often see plans that are filled with conceptual terms which don’t tie
into day-to-day realities for most of the staff expected to carry out the
plan. Terminology or word choice, as well as the level a plan is
written, are both examples of easy ways to fail at translating
your strategic plan in a way that makes sense and is executable to others.

But let’s dig deeper. Imagine that different personality types
pay attention to very different things, and that in order to get
their attention, you need to speak to what’s of interest to them.�
If that doesn’t make sense, just think of it as needing to speak
a different language for different personalities. 

One of my favorite ways to make sure I speak the language of my
audience is to make sure I address the issues relevant to a quadrant
of personality types I’ve developed over the years.  Partly it’s based
on the Myers-Briggs type, partly on brain research, and partly on
years of consulting.

Click the image to expand for easier reading and you’ll see that
there’s four orientations.  Each represents a cognitive structure for
looking at the world. Notice that each are emphasizing
different data points when dealing with their world.

If you can speak to each, you immediately translate your
strategic plan into language and even better, an action plan,
that they resonate with and best understand.  Some people
get going when they understand the opportunity, some the
overall logic and efficiency, some the specific steps, what
to do and not, and others when they understand how it
takes care of them and others.

Bottom Line:

To avoid losing your strategic plan in translation, make sure
you communicate your plan in a manner that addresses
the questions and orientation common to four personality
types.

Links:
Does Strategic Planning Get Lost in Translation (1 of 3)
Strategic Planning Software

I was reading a blog from Mike Koenigs this week, entitled “How to Get
Your Point Across to Any Personality Type by Anwering 4 Simple Questions.”
It rang a bell in my head about strategic planning and the gap between
strategic planning and follow-through or execution that sometimes seems
to dwarf the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

I started thinking about the fact that Strategic Plans seem to commonly
“get lost in translation.”  This and the following two blogs are about that topic
and what you can do to avoid it.

Mike references David Kolb’s work, but it could just as easily be a
Myers-Briggs quadrant or some other personality construct.  The point is
that you have to voice or frame things differently for different types of
people if you want to be heard and responded too.   In effect, different
personality types have different frames of reference and tend to focus
on different questions around which to organize their world of activity.

In Mike’s case he’s trying to help people sell a product better. 

At first glance, I tend to think of strategic planning as not related to selling…
but maybe it is.  In fact, NOT selling strategic planning is one of three
ways a strategic plan gets lost in translation and becomes ineffectual. 

Let’s look at the sales process Mike suggests first.  He breaks personality
down into the following 4 types as characterized by a defining question:
1. Sales - ask WHY?
2. Scholastics – ask WHAT FOR?
3. Technicals – ask HOW?
4. Advocates – ask WHAT IF?

Mike goes on to suggest you approach a selling process to all 4 types
by addressing their questions, more specifically by asking:
1. Why you should buy.
2. How it will benefit you.
3. What this product will do.
4. What it will accomplish.
5. How it does what it does.
6. Creative things you can do with it (beyond the original purpose).

Each questions makes an interesting reframe if you think of it in terms of
selling a strategic plan to the people who are going to live with it.  Now stop
and ask yourself, “When have you ever sat in front of a really good sales
presentation of a strategic plan that answered these questions?”

I don’t think I can remember once having someone approach the unveiling
of a strategic plan in a sales sensitive manner, and I’ve been through lots of
strategic plan developments and presentations.

Strategic plans are typically developed without an orientation towards selling it.
Most of the time they get built in a presentation format that emphasizes the
link between goals and actions, not customer needs and solutions

I find that strategic plan presenters may think they are selling, but they
were primarily informing, sometimes trying to convince, and in the process
they were breaking all sorts of selling rules in the process.

I don’t think many strategic plans get approached as even needing to be sold.
To me, that’s the first slippery slide in which strategy gets lost in translation.

Bottom Line:

If you are in charge of strategic planning, plan on selling it.�
Not presenting it, not publishing it, not even implementing it.  The
Strategic Plan needs to be sold.  If you don’t do a good job of selling the plan,
and that means approaching the rest of the people in your organization as
prospects, the strategic plan will get lost in translation and likely
whither away and die somewhere in the subsequent following 12 months.

Link:
Why is Strategic Associated with Planning, not Action?