Creating a strategy involves looking forward in to the long term and creating fairly big goals. It necessarily involves planning the steps that will take you to those goals. Successful strategy development is way more than scribbling a few ideas on post-it notes. It requires fairly detailed and dedicated thinking to create a series of steps to get you to where you need to be.
Once you have gathered the people that are needed to create the strategy – and possibly even some of those that will be affected by it – you need to decide: what are your steps?
Here are our 8 steps for a successful strategy development workshop
- How long your strategy is going to be for? Common strategy time frames are 3-5 years. But this may not work for you. Too long and it will seem so far away that no one can get their head around it. Too short term and you run the risk of not making big enough changes. You also don’t want to be in the awkward situation where you are still writing your strategy whilst in the time frame you have set to achieve it. These things take time!
- What is the vision or guiding light for this strategic period? What is it that you are aiming for? This probably won’t be the vision that you steer your organisation towards in its entirety, but something for you to help you focus on for the next strategy period.
- Create some strategic directions, or goals. Specifically, the overarching goals that sit beneath your strategic vision. You won’t need too many of these. You can call these what you want, whatever makes sense for you. It is easy to get in a tangle with whether things are aims, or objectives, or goals, or directions. Yes they are different, but don’t spend more time arguing what they all are than creating them. Decide what you want them to mean and stick to them.
- Work out what objectives you need to set to meet your strategic goals. These are the more finely tuned goals and they have some specificity around them (something you can measure). Maybe start by creating these for the first year and then review.
- Narrow it down even further. Bite off a smaller time frame, maybe the next 6 months and create some more concrete actions.
- Don’t forget to include indicators of some kind so you know when you have achieved what you set out to do. Also include set times to review your strategy.
- Agree who is taking care of which part of the strategy. If no one is accountable, how will it get done?
- Finally, and this is the crucial bit. Strategies are not just 2 or 3 days of creation, ignore and then recreate in 5 years. They need careful checking in on and reviewing and refining and adapting. Successful strategy development is a constant process. Build the check ins when you create the strategy in the first place so you can keep on top of it and not just plough on with a rigid plan.
These tips will help you turn any strategy development workshop into a successful strategy development workshop.
But if you need more help in getting your workshop off the ground and running it in a way that results in a clear and functional strategy, get in touch.
