Why Strategic Planning Is Important

Let's start off with a little bit of data.  Organizations don't spend a lot of time going over strategy.  According to research done by the Harvard Business Review:

• 85% of executive leaderships spends less than 1 hour per month discussing strategy

• 50% spend no time at all

• 95% of company employees don’t understand it’s strategy

• 90% of businesses fail to meet their strategic targets

If  you want to learn more about how to create a strategic plan, check out our article here where we discuss how we facilitate our strategic planning sessions.  

Let's dive into why strategic planning is important.  

Aligned Vision For Executive Leadership, Managers And All Employees

Having a clear strategic plan in place allows leadership to communicate the strategy to the rest of the company.  Often leaders may have a general idea of the strategy in their head.  But once there is a clear plan, leadership can communicate the plan and bring the rest of the team on board.  

Once everyone in the company is on board, there can be a united front that focuses on the vision.  This helps prevent managers and other employees from making choices that counteract the overall strategy.  

Now the company can fully align all its resources and efforts to get the best results. 

Stress Test Ideas

When working on a strategic plan it's invaluable to have a diverse group of people and perspectives.  As the team develops the plan, each person brings their unique view of the situation.  Having different ways of looking at things creates the opportunity to challenge each other's ideas, leading to the best idea.  

Also having a diverse team can help remove biases like group think or recent biases (selecting an idea because you recently thought about it).

Agility And Adaptability 

Strategic planning is meant to be an ever changing process.  You can use the original strategic plans as a benchmark to look back and see if that plan makes sense with the current conditions of markets. 

Coming back to the strategic plan allows changes to be made in a way that still targets your goals.  It's easy for a team to make changes that steer away from the original vision.  

De-risk The Plan

Traditional planning usually has a goal and steps to get to that goal.  A big part about strategic planning is thinking about what challenges will get in the way.  What roadblocks will prevent the team from reaching the goal?  

Then to create ideas and plans that will mitigate or reduce the difficulty of those challenges so the team can be successful in reaching their goals.  

Conclusion

Creating a strategic plan helps an organization to get aligned, stress test ideas, keeps the team agile and helps overall reduce risk.  If you are looking to learn more about strategic plans, check out more of our resources below!