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Think about the planning that goes into a cross-country trip. While it's exciting to see where the road takes you, even the most spontaneous travelers have a destination and expected travel timetable in mind.
So it goes with strategic planning. Whether your horizon for strategic planning is next month, next quarter, or next year, it's essential to define the actions today, next month, and next quarter to impact your desired destination and outcomes.
"I find that many folks confuse strategic planning with tactical execution," says Mark Kelly, CEO of NewEdge Growth. "Too often, we get consumed with what we're going to do tomorrow, that we never raise our head above the trees to see if we're headed in the right direction.”
Let's take a look at some of the most common challenges and pitfalls of strategic planning — and how you can avoid and overcome them.
Common challenges of strategic planning
There are four main challenges when it comes to strategic planning: lack of ownership, poor communication, lack of alignment, and slow adoption. It’s important to understand what’s at the core of these challenges before we dive into solutions.
Lack of ownership
An effective strategy requires cross-departmental and cross-functional feedback from across the organization. However, to avoid creating a disjointed strategic plan, someone still needs to own the final compilation, documentation, and execution of the strategy.
Kathleen Booth, VP of Marketing at clean.io, notes that one of the biggest issues of strategic planning is lack of ownership and follow through, and that achieving the goals that are defined during the strategic planning process requires clear focus and a commitment to priorities. “In my experience, this is best achieved through an OKR (objectives and key results) framework where each objective and key results has an individual owner responsible for ensuring follow through,” says Booth.
Poor communication
Poor communication is at the crux of most problems—both business and personal. Effective collaboration is one of the most critical and challenging parts of the strategic planning process. Still, it can be tough to gather all the necessary inputs you need, especially as your organization scales. Business disruptions like COVID-19 can inevitably make strategic planning and communication more challenging, especially without digital collaboration or whiteboarding tools.
Lack of alignment
Even the most well-executed strategic plan won't be useful without strategic alignment. A lack of representation from across the organization is one of the primary causes of poor strategic alignment. As Charlotte Laing, Head of Marketing at Metrikus and AirRated, explains, "There must be input from all parts of the organization, at all levels, so that you can understand the landscape, the challenges, and the direction that makes the most sense.”
Slow adoption
Let's say you've avoided every pitfall to this point and achieved buy-in on a rock-solid strategic plan for your organization. What happens if no one puts it into motion?
Fast-growing companies often face near-constant changes to tasks, roles, teams, and strategies—with innovation at the forefront of it all. All too often, this translates into strategic plans that have taken weeks to finesse becoming obsolete soon after their inception. If your teams are slow to adopt the plan, it will quickly become outdated and irrelevant to everyday processes and priorities.
Ways avoid strategic planning problems
Don’t worry. While there are definitely challenges to strategic planning, there are also plenty of solutions to those issues. Here are a few for you to try at your own organization.
Build and simplify business strategies visually
There are many ways to build, visualize, and evangelize your business strategy. Some leaders swear by tools like GOST (Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Tactics) to create a structured strategic plan:
- Goals: What goals are you trying to achieve? A strategic plan without goals will only result in spinning wheels.
- Objectives: It's important to align clear objectives to your goals, and those objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timebound).
- Strategies: Set by the departments. For each objective, identify three methods to reach those objectives.
- Tactics: Set collaboratively by the department and individual groups and the strategy owner. For each strategy, set three tactics to execute during the timeframe. "This gives you a direct line of sight to how you impact the outcomes of the business and allows you to track your progress throughout the year," said Kelly.
With these strategies and tactics set, you can roll it all up into a comprehensive master strategy document that's easy to understand and aligned company-wide to the business's desired outcomes.
Create a living, breathing strategy document
Effective execution doesn't necessarily mean rigid execution. The "perfect" strategy document is a flexible one that can evolve.
As you execute your strategy, market conditions might change, or some new information might inform one part of your strategic approach, but this doesn't mean your strategy needs to be abandoned. "When something comes up that alters your strategy, alter your plan," says Laing. "Don't hang on to sunk costs because it was perfect before: recognize that the equation has changed and move forward."
Use resources with scaling in mind
Speaking of flexibility, a strategic plan that can scale with company growth should be the goal of every forward-thinking business leader. As you build your strategic plan, consider how you'll use resources as you scale. Hopefully, your strategic plan results in growth and scale, but without starting with the goal of scale in mind, it's tougher to move a strategic plan past the pilot phase.
Design and conduct training effectively
Strategy shifts can cause disruption and discord, or they can infuse new energy into your business. To ensure the latter happens, be sure to schedule education and training sessions to ensure your team and your new strategic direction are set up for success. Designing and conducting training sessions is a lot of work but will help avoid endless rounds of revisits to your company strategy.
Don't rush it—use data and analysis to build a solid plan
Strategic planning needs to incorporate data that instills confidence—a plan based on intuition alone can lead to wrong decisions. During times of uncertainty like COVID-19, data is harder to leverage as many older baselines are not relevant. The solution is to test data quickly and let the data guide the decisions you make regarding your target market and priorities.
"A common pitfall is relying on older data that's not adjusted for a new reality. Past intuition is great, but data needs to help lead the discussion and decision," said Alon Waks, CMO, Advisor, and Consultant of Flywheel Consulting. "We're all writing a new playbook."
Collaborate and communicate
Throughout the strategic planning process, make sure everyone's on the same page. Your team should be included in every strategic decision, no matter how small—and that doesn't mean just communicating the change, either. Set up a 30-minute call or meeting to discuss the proposed change and develop a new plan together. Hold it in a breakout room, assign a moderator, and record the session for those who can't attend in-person. "Not only will you end up with a team which is more on board with the strategy, but usually you'll make a better decision, too," says Laing.
Effective collaboration and communication during the strategic planning process also ensure greater buy-in once the strategic plan is finalized and published. "Folks will feel they had a voice in where the company is headed," says Kelly.
Follow up and review after executing a strategy
No strategic plan is ever final. As you execute against your plan, it's important to review the results, iterate, and optimize. But don't jump the gun: Establish clear KPIs aligned to your company goals, and then set a realistic expectation of when you expect to see results. And make sure to budget time for reactive tasks. This way, you can act on new ideas and also clearly see when priorities need reshuffling.
Strategic planning is no easy task, and that's why it's so easy to fall into a few common pitfalls. However, with the right tools and a bit of forethought and strategic planning, you can beat the odds and execute strategic plans and shape your organization's future.
When a company has ambition, vision, objective, and goals it is the Director of Strategic Initiatives who bring these aspirations of an organization into reality.
They create the plan and develop programs to guide the organization in the right direction. Every company has a strategic plan to focus on their weakness and on key areas which will impact the business outcomes.
But unfortunately, 68% of the formulated strategies are never realized due to poor execution. In another study conducted by PMI, 61% of the employees think that their firm often struggles to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation.
Due to this, the Job of Director of Strategic Initiatives is crucial since they have to bring ideas, plans, and strategies to fruition by overcoming the challenges that are associated with strategic implementation.
In this article, we discuss some of the most important challenges that Director of Strategic Initiatives typically face and how to overcome them.
- Goal Setting
- Small Milestones
- Shortage of Resources
- Ineffective Training
Goal Setting
Formulating a strategic goal could be difficult as there are multiple factors like location, culture, organizational objectives, resources, and skillset that have to be considered.
To achieve this, you have to opt for a particular goal-achieving methodology that sits well with the DNA of your organization and not the one you are comfortable with.
You have to do a SWOT analysis, Benchmarking, and analyze last year's goals before selecting a particular goal planning method or framework.
There are numerous goal-planning frameworks like SMART Goals, OKRs, BHAG, Backward Goals, One Word Goal, Goal Pyramid, etc.
But you may ask which framework is efficient to ensure success?
Well, there is no particular framework that can help you achieve your goals unless you stick with it till the very end. It depends entirely on your organization’s needs and is context-specific. Selecting a particular framework and religiously following it will help you achieve your goals.
Small Milestones
By now we understand that for a successful implementation, day-to-day execution of tasks is essential. It is ideal to set the right expectation across all the departments and set small milestones on the way that will help you and your employees to stay on track. It also gives a sense of success and acts as a source of motivation.
You can use project management tools that will not only help you to set the micro tasks and milestones but will also help you to track how you're approaching the ultimate goal.
This way your implementation will head in the right direction with minimum hiccups.
Shortage of Resources
This is a common problem in organizations. It is important to understand what kind of dependencies can arise and what kind of role is required to fulfill those dependencies.
The challenge is not limited to Human Resource, but it is also associated with a digital resource which helps the employees and management to achieve their goals.
The organization must plan what kind of software and infrastructure is required to begin the strategic initiatives.
86% of stakeholders say that prioritizing and funding the right initiatives is important to stay competitive and it is also necessary to manage resources efficiently rather than holding it because of poor allocation of budget.
It is always better to start within a focus group and scale it as you start seeing results, this way you won’t exhaust your resources in one go and could save it from getting wasted on initiatives that might not provide expected results.
Ineffective Training
Strategic initiatives run on a tight timeline and to make it a success it is necessary that your employees are trained properly and know their way through the new process.
Unfortunately, because of the forgetting curve employees tend to forget 70% of what they learn in a matter of 24 hours and this could reach up to 90% in a span of one month.
The key is to reinforce the training but using traditional training methods only delays the process of adopting the new process.
No doubt traditional training method is effective, but it is not scalable. Further, traditional training is not feasible in the new normal since most of the employees are working remotely.
The modern training method is the answer to overcome the forgetting curve. You can use training tools like Apty which is a Digital Adoption Platform that guides your employees from one step to another and helps them accomplish their tasks in no time.
It helps you to train your employees within any web-based application and they get familiarized with the new application and process from day 1.
It is not just another walkthrough solution - rather a training method that helps you to identify and fix how your employees from different departments and locations are using the application. Based on that, you can create not only the contextual walkthroughs but also other supporting content like Video, PPTs, PDFs, and SCORM.
Strategic Implementation is no easy task... it could be challenging. Formulating a strategy is one thing and implementing it is an entirely different thing. It is important to segment the goal into micro-milestones and to manage the resources judiciously.
At last, the success of the strategic implementation lies in the hands of your employees. You have to train them with a training tool like Apty which not only helps you meet your deadline but also ensures that the new process is adopted in an intended manner.