https://www.cbi.org/news/strategic-planning-what-is-it

By Ryan Golten

Let’s say an organization wants to convene a meeting of seasoned leaders and staff to identify priorities for the next year. The context is complex: times are changing, and challenging, delicate strategy decisions are needed. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. The organization recognizes that they must draw from the wisdom of their leaders while empowering staff to take part. And now the question is: what exactly should they do?

That, at least, is what ought to be the question, the strategic question—and how they answer it shapes whether a planning effort delivers real insight and shared direction or simply reiterates a laundry list of everyone’s favorite tasks without choice-making or strategy.  At CBI we’re often asked if we help facilitate such strategic planning efforts, and my answer is: it depends. If the goal is a process that surfaces hard questions, clarifies direction, and enables people to navigate choices together, I’m all in. If what they need is more of a glossy product, pre-set metrics, or quick, superficial fix, I politely decline.

CBI’s Approach: Strategy as a Collaborative Process

“Strategic planning” means helping people think, speak, and listen together about complicated, multi-dimensional topics in ways that require thoughtful framing, ambitious thinking, and a well-structured and safe space. Strategic planning, in this frame, is a deliberative process. Often this involves sensitive or challenging dynamics among group members—whether that’s among staff, board members, and/or external partners. And it frequently requires sense-making across messy terrain: identifying shared priorities, any areas of greatest potential opportunity, impact, and/or need. This, in turn, requires understanding the landscape, the players involved, their respective goals, and the various, often conflicting interests involved. 

In short, the most powerful strategic planning processes look a lot like CBI’s work in other domains: inclusive, adaptive, grounded in relationships, and focused on the decisions that really matter. Strategic planning means a group of people understanding the collective needs, interests, opportunities, and risks involved in an issue, then making decisions and setting priorities together based on that shared understanding and information. Done well, it will also mean building mutual trust, relationships, and collective capacity. 

Some key components can make these efforts successful:

Individual Conversations Beforehand 

Before we ever walk into a strategic planning meeting, we begin with listening. Through one-to-one conversations, we surface the full range of goals for the process; key issues and priorities to address; relevant perspectives and interests regarding those issues; and needs or ideas to promote meaningful, inclusive discussions. We also may uncover simmering conflict and personnel issues that must be acknowledged but not necessarily addressed in the strategy development.

Joint Planning

We do not have a pre-made template with “fill in the blanks” that we use for strategic planning processes. Instead, we co-create the agenda, meeting structure, and guiding questions in partnership with the people who will be part of the process—the people who will ultimately be implementing the plan. Strategic planning efforts cannot come off a shelf, though we do come with options for templates and structures for plans. Thoughtful planning can help to sequence and frame issues well, promote thoughtful deliberation and decision-making, and make sure participants have the information and preparation they need to engage effectively. Ultimately, we work with the organization to identify the kind of framework, format, and product that will really be useful to them.

Facilitation

Our approaches are designed to build trust and push groups toward strategic clarity, not just agreement for agreement’s sake. We help people speak across silos, navigate uncertainty, and face hard choices. We help organizations and groups:   
●    clarify focus areas and strategic priorities;
●    surface and assess competing interests or visions;
●    identify organizational strengths, gaps, and alignment opportunities;
●    think systematically about structure, capacity, and governance; and
●    push beyond tactical conversations into deeper questions of purpose and impact.
Sometimes that means working through some tough organizational dynamics; sometimes it means helping teams integrate a theory of change or redefine their impact areas. And always, it means creating the space for them to listen and think strategically, together.

User-Friendly Results

We aim for outputs that are used, not shelved. That might be clear priorities, a roadmap for actions, a framework for decision-making, a specific metric and milestone-based workplan, and/or a set of principles to guide growth. Results from a strategic planning effort should be flexible, adaptive, and—if possible—treated as a living document, particularly given the uncertainty in many of our worlds right now. We try to help our clients align on what they need before the process begins, so that results are scaled appropriately. 

The CBI Difference

At its core, our approach is all about engaging the organization or entity to explore, identify, and refine strategy. We don’t tell our clients what to do. Instead, we help them to do the hard thinking together. Strategic planning is never one-size-fits-all. But when it’s done well, it can help organizations build alignment, increase clarity, tackle tough issues, and move forward with confidence.