It has many times been said that failing to plan is planning to fail. While that may often be true, we prefer a more positive spin: Being strategic about planning is planning to thrive.

Strategic planning involves long-term thinking for organizations, determining the primary goals for the business over the next year or several years. If your enterprise is embarking upon a strategic planning process — or even just beginning to think about one — here are five quick tips to help frame that long-term thinking so you can plan to thrive.

1.   Leave No Stakeholder Behind

Our #1 tip for a successful strategic planning process is to engage every stakeholder you can think of as meaningfully as possible. Doing so helps ensure that stakeholders’ current and future needs are met by your plan. But this approach might also help you source ideas and expertise from unexpected quarters to help improve that plan.

The first order of business, then, is to get the right folks on your planning team. This is obviously fairly specific to your organization and your goals. The team for a municipal strategic plan, for instance, might include city planners, transit and transportation authorities, citizen representatives, local legislators, and business owners, developers, conservationists, and preservationists. Meanwhile, a strategic planning team for a university might include administration, faculty, student, parent, and alumni representatives, facilities, athletics, accounting, marketing, community relations, and other administrative staff.

The key is to build a team with the necessary scope of interest and expertise to understand your organization’s current needs, challenges, and opportunities to lay out a broad vision for its future. In some instances, it often makes sense to engage a third party to help with planning –  a strategic planning consultant or an expert in city, financial, fundraising, or other types of planning. Once you have your planning team together, you can use various tools to access the opinions and ideas of your full range of stakeholders. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, job shadowing, and perception testing can all help in this task.

2.   Envision a North Star

With all those stakeholders in play, it’s critical to have a shared sense of purpose — a North Star the planning team can use to navigate the strategic planning process. Often, this sense of purpose is summarized in a brief vision statement.

When we work with a client to develop a strategic plan, we develop an assessment plan and template that guides a collaborative evaluation process. Using that assessment, the planning team articulates a vision statement — a simple declaration of the overarching goal and underlying values that will inform the plan. Having this vision statement to refer to throughout the process helps keep the team on a straight road to a successful plan whenever questions or challenges arise. And by clearly and concisely defining the organization’s purpose, a business can more easily set goals and objectives to fulfill that purpose via a strategic plan.

3.   Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

The best-laid plans can’t lead to great things if they’re not purposefully shared. Your strategic planning process should include an intentional roll-out of the plan to all stakeholders for your plan to thrive. This includes internal communications about the process, its goals, and its benchmarks, as well as external communications so that the broader community understands your enterprise’s planning objectives. (In the case of public enterprises, this is critical for accountability.)

Build a marketing and PR component into your planning timeline. And be sure to ensure that the component is owned and implemented by capable and dedicated team members. Finally, make sure that communication around the plan is bidirectional: solicit feedback and suggestions from others in addition to telling them about your goals and objectives.

4.   Build In Metrics

Building in regular assessments will help you analyze how well your organization is following the strategic plan once launched. By focusing on SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound) within the plan, your planning team will naturally identify points for evaluation. Deploying automated data collection and processing can help you capture the return on investment (ROI) and progress evaluations in real-time without making significantly more work for the planning team or any single one of its members.

With adequate data and a well-designed benchmarking component designed into your strategic plan, you should be able to tell three things at a glimpse:

1. Where you are in the planning process.
2. How well you’re meeting your goals.
3. How much further do you have to go before your goals are met.

Use this information to help decide the next steps and determine whether expectations need to be adjusted to keep your process on track.

5.   Recruit Help When Necessary

Strategic planning is, by definition, overarching, which can make it feel overwhelming. This is especially the case because planning efforts can often fall outside of regular, daily work tasks. If you are struggling to keep up with the near term, long-term planning feels even more onerous. Engaging the services of a planning consultant out the outset is the best approach to making the process feel more manageable. Still, consultants can also come in at various stages to help with, for instance, SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), communication, or implementation of the plan.

If you need assistance drafting a strategic plan that addresses a particular challenge or challenges in your organization, drop us a line. We’re ready to help you cultivate a visionary strategic plan to help your enterprise thrive.