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.

Roch Paryre, Ph.D., a Senior Partner at DSI, describes the tyranny of small steps and avoiding business failure. Excerpt from a talk on strategic thinking and decision making.

Contact us for more information about Dr. Paryre and other DSI speakers.

Roch Paryre, Ph.D. describes the challenge of rewarding decision process instead of decision outcome. Excerpt from a talk on strategic thinking and decision making.

Contact us for more information about Dr. Paryre and other DSI speakers.

Companies designed to do things faster and better can be blindsided by innovations. When a system is build on predictability, environmental change wreaks havoc. With the proper resources and mindset, executives can create vigilent companies capable of thriving in the midst of industry innovation, change, and upheaval.

Roch Parayre, Ph.D. uses his experience working at McDonalds to illustrate the challenges facing performance organizations.

Overconfidence can derail a strategic planning process. It can cause smart people to assume they know more than they do. It can lead groups of people to confidently predict a future when the future is uncertain. It can make a strategy a narrowly focused agenda instead of a map of strategic options for thriving in an uncertain environment.

Roch Parayre, Ph.D. gives some famous examples of overconfidence.

A good decision process can greatly improve the quality of decision outcomes. By developing a common decision approach, an organization’s leaders can begin to build a culture of decision quality. When executives adopt a common decision making framework, they begin to use a shared decision process language and are better able to challenge decision processes in use. In the following video, Dr. Paul Schoemaker describes the steps in an effective decision process.

Strategic planning has the potential to help an organization anticipate and thrive in uncertain environments. However, this potential can only be realized if the planning is done in a way that counteracts the cognitive biases of participants. Such tendencies as overconfidence, over-reliance on trends, a desire for certainty, and groupthink can cause a strategic planning session to end with less than optimal results.

Any successful strategic planning process ought to prompt participants to see differently. If it does not do this, the strategic planning does little but reinforce current beliefs and is a waste of time.

Dr. Roch Parayre illustrates this point using the example of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Strategic planning is only useful to the extent it drives behavior and helps an organization better prepare for the future. Dr. Paul Schoemaker discusses how companies put to use the results of scenario planning processes.

Scenario planning offers a disciplined way to generate valuable, creative new paths for your company. Dr. Paul Schoemaker describes the scenario planning process in the following video.