Strategic Planning: Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon
As a small business, we are constantly dancing along the connecting threads of strategic planning. This includes the obvious tasks such as business development, project delivery, and corporate culture. Each has a persistent tug that sometimes draws our attention away from the others. We always have to look toward our next job to ensure we still have a job. Project delivery is what people hire us for, and we have to regularly work to improve management, execution, and quality. Lastly, and possibly most critical, is our corporate culture. Our culture ties into our hiring practices, employee engagement, learning and development, burnout, and turnover, and is ultimately the face we present to our clients. Our culture is what makes Milligan, Milligan. If we lose that, then we are toast. The process of being in the moment with strategic planning ensures we persist.
We frequently revisit and adjust our business strategy, from business continuity considerations to which region we need to focus on. If you have ever spoken to me on this topic, you’ll probably recall I say the word “process” a lot. Of course actions have to show results, but if you don’t consistently hone your processes, you won’t be very successful. You have to build out an approach and talk it through with your team. You have to will it into existence.
For years, we’ve supported clients through organizational planning, strategic roadmap development, budget planning, change management, and succession planning. However, three areas we are recently focusing on are improving mission performance, resilience, and organizational capacity. Below explains why you need to include them in your strategic planning.
Mission performance
Any effective organization has a mission and hopefully a vision.
You have to regularly stop and deliberately check whether your business aligns with your mission. This action of periodically looking at your mission statement is like checking a map on a road trip. You set a plan, and you need to put forth positive effort to deliver that plan. Don’t get distracted by the map analogy, though. With strategic planning, the horizon is always in front of you. Each time you revisit your strategy and mission, the inputs and outputs change and move forward with you. Change is inevitable, so stay flexible, but always keep your goal in mind.
To convert this into work speak, you are looking for positive results in the services, programs, operations, and customer experiences you exist to deliver. Just ask yourself, “Am I doing what I set out to do? Are my teams aligned with this? Does this move us closer to accomplishing our mission?” When you think about your mission performance, consider:
The customers, partners, or internal users served;
The service, operational, financial, reputational, and compliance risks that cannot be accepted; and
The external forces most likely to change demand, funding, regulation, technology, or workforce availability.
Strategic planning keeps the mission clearly in view, helping you measure whether today’s work is moving the organization toward its mission while preparing for what may change tomorrow.
Resilience
The term “resilience” didn’t really come into my mind’s eye until the last decade or so. If you know me, I can be “matter-of-fact”…to a fault. Sometimes things exist just to exist. For example, say you built a bridge. Is it old? You rebuild it. You have hurricanes? You build to hurricane-resistant specifications. Are hurricanes getting worse? You update your specifications and fix your bridges. I didn’t spend time thinking about what resilience really means. It seemed too obvious.
What I didn’t consider were all the rapidly changing factors that affect our operational decision-making. Resilience is the ability to continue operating, respond effectively, and recover quickly when technology, vendors, facilities, people, funding, or external conditions change or fail. When was the last time you spent real time planning for things like:
Scalable data and technology foundations;
Failure and loss tolerance;
Protection of information, records, and institutional data; and
Vendor and supply-chain disruption?
Resilience isn’t about predicting everything that could go wrong. It’s about building an organization that can keep moving when something inevitably does.
Organizational capacity
Last but not least are the people. Ah, the people. The best and worst part about being a boss is the people. It’s what I lose sleep over, and what I get energy from. Oh... and try working with your older brother, too! I digress.
Let’s consider an organization called Tom’s Textiles. Tom owns his building, the development it sits in, the machines that do the work, and five delivery trucks. Tom knows he needs to hire more people to support his backlog, but he gets caught up in the salary cost number. He delays setting time aside to post a job and conduct interviews. Tom knows his three best drivers are looking to retire. Tom’s got a capacity issue and is focused on the wrong problems. Remember the part about the backlog? He’s got the work! Tom’s got employees who have been around long enough to retire! He owns the assets, so he controls his costs! It’s easy to focus on the wrong aspect of your organizational capacity. It’s almost like we are born to be reactive and not proactive.
Organizational capacity is tied to your ability to execute strategy around the people, processes, funding, governance, technology foundations, and institutional knowledge needed to deliver results. Building capacity is difficult because it requires you to guess when you'll grow and accept that good people will leave. Consider some simple steps that we find shore up these unknowns:
Establish a practical operating model
Develop key capabilities
Make succession planning operational
Create and manage change capacity
Capacity problems rarely appear overnight, even if they feel that way when they finally become urgent. Strategic planning helps you see them coming and start building what you’ll need before you need it.
Strategic planning is not for the faint of heart. You have to regularly reflect on your mistakes and successes and challenge where to go next. Three things to focus on to get you started are mission performance, resilience, and organizational capacity. Look toward your horizon, decide who will walk with you, and make a plan to get there.
Tyler Milligan is a Managing Partner at Milligan. Reach out to Tyler to learn more about Milligan’s strategic planning experience and how it can help you focus on mission performance, build resilience, and improve organizational capacity.