A Thousand Ideas, One Path: Why Priorities Make Strategy Work
Set the Direction. Define the Path. Move with Purpose.
As I shared in the last blog, over the past several months, ETP has been afforded the opportunity to help a number of small to mid-sized organizations advance their strategic planning objectives. In this journey, we’ve been able to bring diverse groups of people together to define and articulate their aspirational future together. Gathering multiple voices and perspectives to fuel strategy is, and always will be, the secret sauce to team growth and development, as it’s as much about the what as the how. As I wrote last time:
Strategic planning is not just an exercise about defining a desired future and detailing actionable goals to get there. It is, far more importantly, an engagement exercise, an opportunity to (re)connect with the entire team to plan a future together and prioritize the work that will get you there. It is a road trip with everyone in the bus singing in tune to the music, not a lone rider quietly rolling towards the sunset he/she wants …. gathering the diverse voices and perspectives of everyone to design, build, and imagine the initiatives ahead is the real secret sauce. Thriving organizations need strategy. But, in that process, they need the collective wisdom and understanding of everyone far, far more.
Daring to dream, envisioning an aspirational future, or simply just reclarifying where the organization needs to be in the next several years all benefit from this harmony of collective wisdom and voice. Facilitated well with a shared understanding of and appreciation for inclusion of all perspectives, these moments can simultaneously reignite a team and enrich recruitment and retention. After all, who wouldn’t want to be part of an organization where the future is clearly defined, outcomes are transparently communicated, and all team members clearly comprehend the journey ahead? It is in these moments that opportunity and promise turn into hope and connection.
All hyperbole aside, developing strategy together presents a very real, very tangible mechanism to strengthen teams through powerful conversations aligning towards a collective vision. This work, though, is not without its challenges. It needs to be masterfully facilitated, it needs to appreciate and consider all voices, and, perhaps most difficult of all, it must have a mechanism to prioritize the breadth of wisdom and information that surfaces through these discussions. Why? I am old enough to remember the World Book Encyclopedia, a compendium of information captured tidily in alphabetical order and neatly bound, with just enough weight in the entire collection to bend - if not break - a bookshelf. Without priorities, a strategic plan risks becoming an organization’s version of these encyclopedias: a vast library of details, ideas, and information, well kept, well preserved, but not entirely helpful for decision making.
Choices need to be made, decisions determined, for, as we all know, if everything is a priority, then really nothing is. While the act of gathering all voices and diverse perspectives is key, so, too, is the means to prioritize the ideas, initiatives, and recommendations that spring forth. Team members understand - they expect - that not everything will make it into the final plan, and not all suggestions will be enacted. With financial and operational constraints, there simply isn’t time, room, or capacity to boldly say as an organization “we will do absolutely everything in the coming five years.”
Prioritization, then, is critical, if not fundamental to the planning process. If there is another secret ingredient in the recipe of strategic planning, we have found this to be it. Nothing fancy, just two interwoven steps, carefully curated and facilitated:
Criteria definition and finalization
Criteria application and tiered filtering
Done together and done well, this transforms the strategic plan from an encyclopedia of wonderful, bite-sized pieces of information into a succinct, sorted list of collaboratively developed priorities for the coming years. The benefits of this effort have proved to be multifaceted and game changing to organizations: shared understanding, collectively designed and understood priorities, and a tool that enables further powerful conversations as shift happens.
One simple addition, another helpful ingredient. A strategic plan with actions designed, built, and prioritized by the very people expected to live it.
Sounds intriguing? Please reach out for more information! Conversations work wonders.