Strategic Planning Is Worse than Dead: It’s Relevant
This was one of the epiphanies I came to in preparing for the session Maddie Grant and I did in California last week. For years I had been trying to make the argument that strategic planning was dead. The process, while well intended, wasn't producing consistently good results. Planning is all well and good, and strategy is crucial, but it seemed when the association community puts those two things together, they produce consistently bad results. Proponents argue fervently for the theory of strategic planning, yet I still here people talk frequently about 39-page plans gathering dust on the shelf as "credenzaware." Sorry strategic planning people, I'm just not convinced.
But fans of strategic planning did (and will always) push back. They have altered their processes to make them more nimble, and they now advocate regularly for "living documents" that can be changed frequently. The basic structure of scan, plan, implement, and evaluate is too logically sound to attack, really. Even if the way we do it doesn't work well, you can blame that on particulars. The theory is sound.
It may be sound, but it has one big problem that didn't occur to me until recently.
Strategic planning is skewed towards relevance.
Strategic planning is about meeting needs. It focuses on what Ken Wolff called a "culture of fulfillment" in the beyond relevance webcasts. We scan the environment to stay on top of our stakeholder needs and then come up with plans to make sure we fulfill those needs. Strategic planning is perfect for the you-talk-I-listen-I-make-you-buy crowd. And while meeting needs is a good thing, it skews us towards merely staying relevant. If we can meet the immediate need, we will, and that takes us away from paying attention to the things that will truly advance our members to the next level. In short, strategic planning is hyper focused on not dying.
That was always my joke about relevance. Having relevance as an organizational goal is like living your life with the goal of being "not dead." People laugh when I say that, but that seems to be exactly what many associations do. They have a lot of stakeholders, constantly rotating leadership, and a legislative (rather than executive) model of power and decision making, so they use strategic planning so make sure they don't die. They force the model of scan-plan-implement-evaluate into a year-long process that naturally points to solutions that are in the realm of "last year plus two percent" (and that's in a good year). Year after year, associations use strategic planning and continue to stay alive. They might even add to their reserves from time to time. No, strategic planning is not dead. It's just relevant.
But this is a problem, for all the reasons we discussed during the beyond relevance webcasts. The social internet has made it easier for me to get my relevance either on my own or from a variety of decentralized sources, making you, my dear association, not so special if that's all you're offering. And from what I see, that strategic planning process you use will only serve to sharpen your focus on relevance. You'll parse the data some more as you engage in your SWOT analysis, but your incremental improvements will become less and less impressive every year.
Strategic planning theory will argue that it can jump to the next curve–that if we use the right process we can do the thinking and planning needed to get us to the next level. Based on what I see in the association community, I'm just not convinced that it will. The linear and top-down model of scan-plan-implement-evaluate just too easily settles into a relevance state of mind.
Later this week I'll share some thoughts about what we can do differently to change the pattern.
7 Comments
Maggielmcg
I could not agree with this more. “last year plus two percent”–if there ever were a mantra for stagnancy, this would have to be it.
MaryAnne Bobrow
Right on, Jamie. This goes along with ‘best’ practices being replaced by ‘next’ practices. ‘Best’ is for something that occurred in the past under different circumstances and in a different environment. It is all about relevancy to those being served and for associations, that is its members. It’s also about having those right people on the bus and often times, those in leadership who create the ‘strategic’ plan are neither strategic or right. Sadly, many only rise to the level of tactical and then ‘high five’ each other when they succeed at a minimal task.
Peggy Hoffman
Good connection. What drives me crazy even more than national assn doing strategic planning is when these groups tell their chapters to do strategic planning and even send “facilitators” out to lead the process. And the goal in each case is to come up with a plan that earns the chapter the coveted “chpt of the yr” award for doing what is “expected.”
Brian Birch
This is an interesting post Jamie…but I’m not hearing that the process of Strategic Planning is irrelevant, but that the type, method, implementation, or actual plans themselves are perhaps not working…strategic planning can be done in many ways, the problem is associations are limited in resources, and end up hiring or finding cookie-cutter strat plan processes that aren’t a good fit…and relevance is important, not just in goals, but in keeping a community engaged and on the same page—in order to make people think outside the box and get uncomfortable, you have to have them in the box first…strategic planning as a thought/framing process can yield some results in that category, if done well, and provide a stable source of shared information and planning to help manage over time. I think our desire to be innovative needs to be balanced with realistic goals; many association boards would be extremely confused if we came to them and said ‘strategic planning is dead’, and that instead we were going to embrace social media and online communities as our primary way to drive the association forward. I agree that many of the goals are a bit silly, they always seem to focus on growing things for the sake of growth (membership plus 2%)…whose to say that a good plan, strategic, ad hoc, whatever, couldn’t focus on engaging key members, or creating new community interactions…
I liken this to many small and medium associations on the web…we suck at websites as a whole in associations, because we have little money, little knowledge etc, so we end up investing in poor template versions of sites with limited vision and flexibility. That doesn’t mean that creating a great website isn’t possible, or that all websites are bad, but that we aren’t empowered or engaged to find the solutions that are the best fit for us. Just some thoughts!
Jamie
Thanks for the comments everyone! Brian, particular thanks to you for pushing back–those are my favorite comments! I do want to clarify something, though. I am not advocating social media as a replacement for strategic planning, nor am I suggesting that social media is THE path for getting beyond relevance. In my next post I will talk more about social media and how it can inform our strategy processes.
But I wonder if I’m misinterpreting some of your other comments, Brian, because it sounds to me like you are arguing in favor of mediocrity. “We don’t have the resources to do the web well, so we do it poorly, but that’s just the way it is.” I’m all FOR one step at a time, but if our best practice is to settle for mediocrity and hope we can ride out the storm, I’m not optimistic about our future. If we’re doing crappy web sites, and web interaction is deemed to be strategically critical, then we need to divert resources from other areas and build a web presence that does what we need it to.
Brian Birch
Jamie,
I appreciate your response, you raise some great points! I don’t think we should aim for mediocrity, and I think social media and innovation will be key drivers for associations moving forward. However, I think that sometimes on blogs and in articles, we all tend to become so theoretical that we may lose the realistic…I do this in my thinking all of the time, and I think the best kind of leadership we can provide is dreaming big dreams but being prepared for small steps, missteps, and yes, crappy websites…the good news is it is all relative…a crappy website to an association that never had a website before is a huge step forward, even if some would consider it mediocre…8 years ago our association launched a website that is laughable in today’s standards, even for a small assoc with a small budget, but that website was probably the key driver in growing our membership in those early years, and I bet they were so proud of it!
I hear you definitely, and I think its always important to challenge us to think above and beyond, and aim for the best. I think strategic planning, or any type of long-term planning process, can over time really help associations improve…at our association we are much better now at evaluating and implementing new web technologies than we were 5 years ago, because A) We made mistakes that forced us to learn B) We have a strategic plans/outcomes that we tie all of our major decision-making processes to—we qualify all major initiatives with our strat plan and board outcomes…I hope that clarifies a bit, overall I love your thoughts on pushing beyond the generic term strategic planning and ‘relevance’, and moving toward a new paradigm that evolves the process a bit further, I think that is a right and natural progression.
Rudi Roux
Very interesting line of thought in this discussion. I believe that the quality of one’s strategic planning depends largely on the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that an association has in place, because this helps to inform forward planning and improve the quality of the plan. Secondly that the process in facilitated by an independent strategic planning specialist because often organizational staff find it difficult to ask the really challenging stategic questions.