5 Provocations to Improve Your Strategic Planning

Strategy has been a key area of my work over the last 12 months. Planning and developing it, reviewing and critiquing it. I know this year will be the same. I stumbled upon the work of Freek Vermeulen on strategy and I want to share a few key provocations with you that resonated with me.

Your organisation’s strategy might be called something different – in education, these are typically

• School Improvement Plans
• Annual Improvement Plans
• Strategic Improvement Plans

You get the idea. Anything that is laying out goals, actions and strategies for the future of your school or organisation is ripe for this critique.

If you are one of my school partners, watch out! We will be using these provocations and ideas to explore your plans for 2018 and beyond.

Freek Vermeulen has 5 provocations for critiquing strategy documents, or as he puts it:

Let me present you with five such common excuses for a strategy or, put differently, five examples of why the things on the PowerPoint are not strategy.

Are you really making choices?

Straight of the bat, this is my favourite of the five. It forces us to carefully consider what it is we are choosing as a result of the strategy. Or do your plans just include everything? “We are focusing on everything”, means you are focusing on nothing.

I enjoy the fact that strategy is seen by Vermeulen as a choice about what to do, and what not to do. Of course, this reminds me of the Pareto Principle and how we should know what has the highest impact. I am looking forward to having conversations with teams about what they have chosen not to do!

Or do you just stick to what you were doing anyway…?

An extension of not making choices is that you write a strategic plan that just describes what you are already doing. The mental model of Path Dependency is a good one to learn about here because it refers to a bias towards past events.

We have issues about letting go of past programmes and we tend to collect and compress new ideas. When previous commitments have been made we err on the side of historical preference. This means that strategy documents, like the ones you have where you work, just describe what is already happening.

more often than not, strategies adapted to what you were doing anyway results in some vague, amorphous statement that would have been better off in a beginners’ class on esoteric poetry, because it is meaningless and does not imply any real choice.

Your choices have no relationship with value creation (you’re in “The Matrix”)

Again the emphasis here on high value or high impact strategies. Everything you are choosing to implement needs to be closely related to the change you desire.

In schools this is all about improving the learning experience for students, ultimately improving learning. If an idea or programme does not relate to creating value why are we doing it?

Without a proper rationalisation of why your choices are going to help you create value, I cannot call it a strategy.

You mistake objectives for strategy

This is a really common issue that makes reading organisation-wide plans and documentation quite a challenge. Put simply an objective or goal describes a future state you are aiming for. A strategy is how you will get there.

Objectives typically have something that you can measure. You might use SMART goals to help craft them effectively. Objectives should be

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

An example objective from my business this year is:

3 new long term partnerships in Melbourne / VIC by the end of 2018.

You can see it is quite specific and time-bound, despite it being a long period of time it is realistic and achievable (I hope!)

One of my strategies for how I might achieve this is to:

Speak at local events

Pretty straight forward. But surprisingly we often get all these things muddled.

You need an idea and a rationale – a strategy – of how you are going to achieve all this. Without it, they [objectives] are an aspiration, but certainly not a strategy.

Nobody knows about it

Who normally writes your strategic improvement plan? Who checks and critiques it? Normally this group can be quite small – typically the leadership team, plus outside consultants, might craft the plan.

But what good is a great strategic plan if nobody in the organisation knows about it!? What goes hand in hand with the imperative to make a strategic plan accessible is the language used. Too verbose or nuanced and it becomes a barrier for others to access.

This is a nice example from Oakleigh State School who have created an infographic for their plan – and I can imagine that this makes it much more accessible to a wider audience.

I always remember strategic plans just being a box to tick when I first started experiencing them as a subject coordinator. If they are accessible and written in an open jargon free way they should be actively used throughout your work. They shouldn’t just be a box to tick or to fill a folder.

Ultimately this is about changing something and how your strategy impacts on the day to day behaviour of those in your organisation. I will leave you with this final provocation from Freek Vermeulen about this:

A strategy is only really a strategy if people in the organisation alter their behaviour as a result of it.

There you go five great provocations to help you improve your strategic planning

#28daysofwriting

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