While it’s tempting to keep your organisation’s strategic planning in-house, it really is a false economy, often leading to higher long term costs and missed opportunities. Engaging a planning expert won’t just help to elevate your strategic plan, it will help unlock growth, build team and stakeholder engagement and set your organisation up for success!
Here are our TOP 5 reasons why you need to engage a strategic expert for your next corporate planning cycle:
- When it comes to planning it’s so easy to miss your blind spots or fall into a “group-think” situation. Your team may try to avoid conflict by avoiding difficult conversations, or default to an aligned position where you’ve convinced and reassured each other of the best solution or action over time. Often this can be as simple as a “that’s how we do things here” default. The classic example is Kodak convincing themselves that there would always be a role for film, avoiding or ignoring employees with a different view and fearing the impact of industry change on their business, all the while their competitors investigated and invested in digital. If you always work within the same team, and with the same leaders, there’s a real risk you’re all basing your assumptions from the same information and restricting your own thinking.Organisations often have a short-term bias. It’s often easier to prioritise projects, innovations and investments that will deliver a return in the next 1-2 years or are already underway. The real magic-dust is when your plan balances short term results with longer term opportunities, identifying and tapping into emerging trends and industry innovation to set the organisation on a path to sustainable growth over 3-5 years and beyond.
- While large organisations and listed companies in Australia go through a strategic planning process every 3-5 years, and smaller organisations may review their plans every 1-2 years, strategic planners do this for a living. That means they have fine-tuned the process, bring a level of expertise and efficiency with them as well as tools which help to identify opportunities, draw out ideas and assist with prioritisation. Planning experts can leverage global best practice, the latest technology and recent learnings – while at best it’s an annual process for your team, it’s a strategic planners’ core business.While hiring a strategic planning expert may seem like an unnecessary cost, a poorly executed strategy – or plan that sits unopened – can cost millions of dollars in lost opportunities, lost competitive advantage, or operational inefficiencies. By engaging an expert who understands what your organisation needs, you’ll invest in your organisation, setting it up for long term success.
- There’s nothing like being in a planning session when you identify a way to unlock a business challenge, align on a key priority or see how you can tap into an emerging opportunity. It can be a true game-changer! If you engage a planning expert or business professional who’s worked across diverse industries, categories and businesses, they will be able to see your blind spots, and bring an objectivity to the process which can help you to join the dots within your business and think differently. While every organisation IS unique, there are transferrable learnings in approach, technical advances, and business challenges from agribusinesses to retailers, for-purpose organisations to global brands, and start-up tech firms to health care organisations… an experienced planning expert can help you think outside the box to tackle your barriers to growth and amplify your strengths.Our only caveat? Watch out for industry specialists. If you’re speaking with someone who ONLY works in your industry or with adjacent companies then they will likely have firmly established pre-conceived ideas or an in-built bias and potentially even know your competitor’s plans. This can’t help but subconsciously affect the way they work with you. Confidentiality and a truly unbiased perspective are crucial and in our experience never worth compromising.
- How often have you gone into a strategic planning session with your own agenda – or known that the facilitator or organisers have their own ideal outcomes. A project you’d love to see funded, a view on “what the organisation really needs”, a grab for additional funding, or pre-conceived view of what your team could be focused on. While it’s crucial that you bring your own experience, ideas and skillset, a truly effective planning process (temporarily) parks those short-term ambitions to consider what works best for the entire organisation first, before considering the optimal structure & resourcing to bring it to life. Real long term organisational growth often comes from thinking beyond the usual boundaries and you simply can’t do that if there are unspoken agendas or if the plan is largely locked before you enter the room.Engaging an external planner also means everyone can participate. You won’t need to invest the time or brain space in facilitating the session or following up workmates and you can avoid the internal politics that can come from deciding who will be leading the process. It’s so important that every voice in the room is heard, and that isn’t possible when key managers are running the sessions as well as trying to participate.
- A strong planning expert won’t just “SWOT and leave”. They’ll help to set your plan up for success within the organisation and help build engagement with your key internal and external stakeholders. They can work with you on building in realistic timeframes, considering accountability or who will be responsible for strategic priorities, and ensuring that progress can be tracked and measured.
A clear and widely agreed plan does more than just tick ‘planning’ off your to-do list, it acts as a blueprint for your organisation: creating a competitive advantage, unlocking growth opportunities and providing a framework by which to make crucial decisions. Leveraging external strategic planning expertise while maintaining internal ownership is often the most effective solution for short term results and optimising longer term opportunities.
Need some help? At BlueFish we believe that EVERY organisation deserves world-class strategic planning! With extensive experience, we work with Boards, Executive Teams and Business Owners to develop and implement Strategic Plans that deliver sustainable, profitable growth. Get in touch to see how we can help grow your business.
