Five ways to improve your strategic planning workshop

The annual strategic planning workshop plays a crucial role in an organisation’s direction and future success, and presents an opportunity for directors to potentially have their most significant impact.

When boards allocate time only once a year to settle on a strategic pathway, directors and CEOs must ensure the workshop or retreat yields the outcomes and results they are designed to do.

However, too often the annual strategic planning event results in a lot of talk and a lack of actionable decisions which fail to go on and be implemented because the agenda didn’t delve deeply enough or broadly enough outside a standard process.

Given the more volatile and fast-paced operating environment organisation’s now face, it’s imperative leadership teams do away with with cookie-cutter planning templates and repeating past agendas, and instead look for ways to expand their thinking and decision-making procedure.

For boards wanting to ensure their strategic planning process will meet challenges with greater confidence, there are some specific ways to improve their next strategic planning workshop.

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1. Engage the right facilitator

An external facilitator can be either a highly paid MC, or an asset that adds value to your strategic planning process.

Not only should a facilitator speak to both the CEO and board Chair well ahead of the workshop, a facilitator or facilitation team with comprehensive knowledge of governance and the challenges of directorship, can also provide a workshop agenda that addresses the required outcomes and allows discussions to flow in a logical progression.

Such a structure allows for proper thought development, links one idea or outcome to the next, and makes it easier for attendees to stay on-point and focused.

An excellent facilitator will bring a different perspective to discussions, be able to apply a directors’ lens to help steer discussions to useful conclusions, and ensure all attendees have the opportunity to participate.

Look for a facilitator who has a team of expert consultants they can bring in to assist the board and the process, including when setting the priorities and identifying relevant stakeholders.

2. Open the agenda to challenge

One of the most valuable thoughts a director can remember is: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Too often we find agendas have been pre-determined, repeating previous years’ structure and content, or following a template, without room or allowance for the workshop participants to be challenged with new ideas or questions.

As a result, we see lost opportunities where the Governance By Design team could have challenged the board to consider a number of ideas or issues they hadn’t thought of but which could have provided opportunities for innovation or mitigated risk.

The assumption that as a group you already know everything you need to know is a risk in and of itself, and may be a sign that the board is not performance-focused.

Opening up your agenda and allocating time for your facilitation team to include a challenge or suggest something not pre-determined by the CEO or board can be particularly important if an organisation is undergoing or about to experience significant change, or is facing new challenges. It is also equally valuable to inexperienced boards or those boards who may be very familiar with the business and want to be challenged on their insights.

3. Start with Why

Opening a strategic planning workshop with a discussion on the organisation’s ‘why’ may seem unusual to some directors but the impact can be powerful.

This precedes the usual reflection on Vision, Mission and Goals, and in fact, underpins every agenda item as it represents the North Star by which all strategic decision-making should be guided.

There are still many organisations where the board cannot properly articulate the organisation’s ‘why’, which ultimately can stand as the organisation’s point of difference in the marketplace. In an economy where there are many NFPs, many superannuation funds, many banks, many education institutions – many versions of everything – an organisation’s why can set it apart from the rest and is the mast by which decisions are set.

Starting your strategic planning process with a discussion around why the organisation exists can help set the mindset of attendees from the beginning, and is a platform from which the rest of the agenda can flow. It’s a powerful reminder for attendees of the purpose and reason they are meeting in the first place.

4. Include scenario planning

This kind of discussion is becoming more popular with boards who want to deepen and strengthen their strategic planning process, potentially uncovering biases and assumptions, overconfidence or knowledge gaps.

Scenario planning allows a board of directors to really challenge their thoughts and ideas, apply some real world context to them, and test themselves.

Setting a risk appetite and understanding an organisation’s future risks should form part of the strategic planning process and scenario planning can help strengthen that understanding beyond the theoretical.

It also presents boards with an opportunity to see what they might be missing, particularly if the facilitation team can bring a depth of expertise that encompasses risks outside typical governance risk frameworks, including reputation, stakeholder engagement, and culture.

Scenario planning can be included in a strategic planning workshop or conducted separately, and can be especially useful for a board to test their appetite for change when trying to decide between a number of strategic options.

5. Consider if once is enough

It’s time for directors to consider if they should be having strategy discussions more often than once a year.

Whilst mostly an annual tradition, a high-performance board would consider if the process they currently use is working as effectively as it could be or they would like, and if not, think about doing two workshops a year, or more if the business is even more fluid than that.

For example, quarterly deep dives into a particular area of the business can provide an invaluable opportunity for boards to become exceptionally clear on the opportunities, challenges and risks to a far more profound level than a single workshop once a year.

 

If nothing else, boards aiming to make the most of their strategic planning process should canvass a range of facilitators and seek input into what is possible before settling on their agenda.

 

 

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash