Strategic Planning, Done Backwards
In past years, we've done our annual strategic planning by first doing a SWOT analysis. We've assessed our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then we determined how to leverage our strengths, especially with the opportunities we believed could be our biggest wins, and either minimized or mitigated our weaknesses and threats. This is a classic approach and it has worked extremely well for us.
But this year, we took a different approach, and we took a bunch of heat from outside consultants who had advised us otherwise. I decided that beginning with the known establishes an anchor in one's thinking, and may ultimately limit creative and expansive thinking. Once you agree on the way things currently are, you're more likely to work from that starting point to "fix things," rather than establish a destination first. Whereas, if you first establish where you want to go and THEN determine where you are, you can more properly determine what needs to be done to get there -- based upon your SWOT.
It remains to be seen whether this will work better, but it makes sense to me. Stephen Covey writes in "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" to focus with the end in mind (Habit 2). He wants you to start with your destination. As an outcome, it gives you a sense of where you are presently.
Our approach was to begin our first full-day session by upgrading our core values and mission statement to reflect where we want to be. To our existing two values, we added two more: Make people better than they think possible, and encourage individual expression. We also tweaked our mission statement to be more customer-centric rather than inwardly focused. It went from being "The best in the world at SELLING customizable, complex products" to "The best in the world at creating a customer experience of BUYING customizable, complex products that is surprisingly simple and exciting." (We also watched Simon Sivek's inspiring TED video about beginning with "why" rather than "what.")
If you're truly honest, being introspective allows you to set a path that not only makes sense, but that you viscerally and emotionally can believe in. That's important because people work better if they're passionate about achieving something. That can only happen with emotion. Note how in our new mission statement we added the words "surprisingly" and "exciting". Only now are we ready to determine what we should do over the coming years. I wonder how limited we would have been had we not started with the end in mind, despite the fact that it had worked so well in the past. I'm excited, but admit changing people's thought patterns is hard to do.
What approaches have you used to get your folks to be less restrictive in their thinking about the future?
Photo courtesy of Flickr.com by CJ Sorg