Strategic Framing

It is difficult to put resources into strategic planning when faced with a difficult business environment.  When everyone is running faster just to meet their end of year goals, it is hard to justify pulling senior decision-makers out of the game to spend time on long-term planning. 

The strategic checkup with implementation follow through is a great option.  This is the two minute drill of strategic planning.  Find a single day (perhaps on a weekend) and gather your key decision makers together for a disciplined look at the next 1, 3, or 5 years.  The trick is to keep it short but commit to the follow through.  Too many off-site planning sessions become wasted time after the fact when nothing ever comes of the ideas.  At DSI, we offer a process to keep the off-site meeting on task and interesting but we also have the expertise to help you design the implementation once the decision makers go back to their jobs putting out fires.

In the following video, John Austin describes how a strategic check-up can be an ideal approach to corporate planning during economic downturns.

Scenario planning has a number of outcomes. As a strategic planning process, it generates a level of creativity that can help a senior team get beyond the obvious, predictable, tired strategies being pursued by all their competitors.

Like any strategic planning process, scenario planning is only as good as the follow through. What is done with the strategy plannng outcome? How is the resultant strategy implemented?

We’ve found value in using an options-based implementation strategy as a path forward from the planning process. In addition, the options approach creates excellent opportunities for leadership development when combined with a change leadership cohort of key executives or high potential employees. I’ve always found my work coaching such cohorts immensely satisfying.

Scenario planning also creates rich insight that can be used as the basis for ‘conversation starter’ articles. Scenarios can spark new thinking by creating vivid stories of possible futures.

One example of such an output is the Scenarios for Credit Unions report DSI completed. This report is a great example of the kind of output our consultants can generate at the end of a scenario planning process.