Faster strategic planning can lead to a better plan at a lower cost of resources.
This is the second in a series of three articles about ways you can do your strategic planning faster.
The first article discussed limiting the number of market segments you analyze to reduce the time needed for planning. Today, we will examine limiting the size of your team.
The basic idea in these approaches is to limit the time you spend on things that will have limited value. The time it takes to do strategic planning is one of the biggest reasons why some companies don’t do it at all. While strategy itself has incredible value, not every part of the process is equally valuable. An experienced facilitator can help with this a lot, but here are the three easiest changes to make with Simplified Strategic Planning:
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- Limit your market segments
- Limit the size of your team
- Cut out low-impact exercises (at least temporarily)
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Understanding how limiting the size of your team will speed up strategic planning you need to consider two things: first, the important benefits of creating and managing your plan with a team, and second, the cost of adding more people to the team.
There are two things that one person simply cannot do as well alone as a team in strategic planning:
- Assure all important perspectives are addressed
- Bring the necessary commitment to implementation
As any organization grows, the ability of one person to cover both of these important inputs to the planning process diminishes, because one person can only do so much. As I’ve worked with many companies of various sizes over the years, I’ve noticed that the insistence of the founder or CEO on covering too many of the roles in planning results in a serious impediment to growth. This effect is so pronounced that I’ve seen many new companies rapidly grow to the limit of one person’s ability and then stagnate for years, achieving little appreciable growth after the first surge.
In strategic planning, we want to bring in people whose input and commitment are vital to the creation and implementation of a great plan. This requires three key perspectives in any organization: market understanding, operations understanding and financial understanding. In any organization with more than two or three people, you will want someone to adopt these perspectives in your strategic planning. There are other roles that may be vital in certain industries, such as IT in finance or HR in construction, but the three mentioned are the minimum when you expand beyond just one or two people doing your planning.
When you add more people and perspectives to your team, you should be adding perspective from a strategically critical area as well as implementation horsepower. The implementation element is key because execution is best when key executives feel they had a role in creating the strategy. As a rule, each person you add can bring in more perspective and better commitment to your implementation.
If more people means better perspective and implementation, why would you want to limit the size of your team? The reasons lie in team and meeting dynamics. First, you want your team to trust each other and the team process. This only happens when team members feel they have enough time to contribute to the conversation. When the team gets too large, the time each member gets to contribute shrinks, unless you make your meetings longer. In larger meetings, it is also harder for a team to feel confident they can have an honest discussion. In my experience, people in larger meetings treat the discussion as a series of speeches delivered to an audience, which limits the feeling of trust in the process and creation of a holistic plan.
Meeting dynamics are another key part of this issue. Every person you add to a meeting will feel entitled to voice their opinion and discuss disagreements that arise. This takes time, and the management of the team can come to dominate the process if the team size is too large. A professional facilitator can manage a larger team, but the sense of ownership and commitment you want from the meetings will decline when team size gets larger than about 10 people. This effect increases exponentially with team size, so a team of 20 people is less than half as productive as a team of 10 people.
In my practice, I can get a team of ten people through the entire Simplified Strategic Planning agenda in the schedules we present in the book and seminar. If you are not a practiced facilitator, you may find a smaller team is necessary to follow these schedules. The meetings will definitely go faster if you have five or six team members instead of seven, so I will often recommend this when a client is concerned about getting through the entire agenda quickly.
In my next article, I’ll discuss the third way to speed up your planning: cutting out low-impact experiences. It’s the most difficult of the three, since each step in the Simplified Strategic Planning is designed to deliver a well-rounded strategic plan, but we’ll examine some of the steps that can be safely bypassed in certain situations to get your planning done faster.
If you’re interested in getting the power of strategic planning with a smaller investment of time, I’d highly recommend our monthly strategic planning process. This takes the time out of an annual retreat and spreads it out over 12 months, with additional steps added to track and improve your implementation. For smaller companies, this is an ideal way to do your planning with a smaller commitment of resources while assuring a great plan and better execution. If you sign up at the link below, you’ll get an additional free one-day meeting added to the monthly schedule, to enable you to pay more in-depth attention to your strategic issues. At only $1,200 a month, this schedule is designed to be far more affordable than the regular Simplified Strategic Planning process and will be especially useful for smaller organizations.
Click here to set up your super-efficient monthly strategic planning process for the coming year!