Strategic planning: a product of organizational strategic thinking

Strategic planning is a management process designed to guide the organization towards the successful achievement of future objectives. Strategic planning ensures that the organization’s human and operational resources, energy, and stakeholders are adequately focused on achieving goals and objectives, and are able to adapt to a changing business environment as required. It requires imagining a successful future. That’s difficult for some business leaders because they have a hard time thinking in new ways and with new perspectives. Developing the ability to imagine the future requires becoming a strategic thinker.

Organizations are always at risk of developing inertia, which means they are doing the same things in the same way to achieve current goals, rather than future ones. Going online without a vision for the future generally equates to a lack of innovation, myopic uninspired employees, and ultimately an organization unable to compete well in the marketplace. The business environment is now in a constant state of transformation due to globalization and technological advances, so organizations that do not do strategic planning risk failure. However, summoning executives, managers, and unit heads and directing them to prepare a strategic plan is unlikely to be successful because they may not know how to think strategically.

The first is the first

Successful strategic planning requires strategic thinking. People who are able to think strategically can bring new perspectives and bring a new point of view. This is one of the reasons that an organization with a diverse workforce tends to perform better financially. The company has access to new perspectives and new approaches through its employees. Diverse employees are not caught up in conventional thinking, so there is a great capacity to imagine new ideas and solutions for future market needs.

The characteristics of a strategic thinker are quite different from those of conventional thinkers. Blake Woolsey of Mitchell Communications Group, a public relations firm, did an excellent job outlining eight characteristics of strategic thinkers. A strategic thinker is future-based, curious, a good steward of resources, a risk taker, able to recognize projects that are urgent and important, able to adjust and modify approaches based on circumstances, a learner of for life and creative. The strategic thinker is proactive, rather than reactive. Being a proactive thinker means actively looking ahead to find new business opportunities and identifying unique solutions that enable the company to take advantage of those opportunities.

Let the ideas flow

Strategic thinking is an art form. Ordering someone to think strategically in preparation for strategic planning will not work. Assuming that key people want to overcome conventional thinking, there are several strategies for developing strategic thinking. One is to ask business leaders to ask themselves how work is currently being done and to find out if their employees understand how their effort connects to strategic priorities. Doing the same things the same way without question stifles imaginative thinking. Another strategy is to hold sessions in which business leaders are asked to suspend criticism and judgment as people envision the future. Unfortunately, everyone is consciously and unconsciously biased, so it may take a real effort to avoid being critical.

Other strategies include giving employees at all levels of the organization access to communication tools that allow them to present new ideas and solutions that others can comment on. For example, Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) may cross-communicate between groups or include diverse people in their groups (i.e., a female leadership ERG includes men or a Hispanic Employee ERG has representatives from the employee community African Americans). People who surround themselves, in the office or ERGs, with others who agree with them and have the same background, are probably stifling the imagination and creativity necessary for strategic thinking.

A strategic plan articulates where an organization is heading in the future and the activities necessary to achieve the goals. The only way to get to this point is by developing organizational strategic thinking. It takes a real effort, but it is an effort that can pay off in business sustainability.