Jake's news [4 items]

As members of this site will know all too well, there are loads of tools out there to help you develop a strategy and a strategic plan.

Ever since we started work on our guide to managing change, From Here to There, my team’s been interested in approaches and exercises that help organisations think through how to implement changes to their organisation.

In our experience, one of the outcomes of a strategic planning process is that a group of staff conclude they need to make changes to the organisation in order to deliver their new strategy. Strategic planning tools might help open up options or compare and contrast different opportunities and external trends. Most good practice advice stops short of helping you with implementing your strategy or changing your organisation.

There’s good reasons for this. Organisations are complex things and it is hard to generalise about how to implement strategic change without just stating the obvious.

One approach I’ve seen recently that I liked is McKinsey’s 7-S framework.

It is a tool that highlights different factors that influence an organisation’s ability to change. These are described as,

• style – culture and informal practices
• skills – both institutional and individual
• strategy – what you are trying to achieve?
• shared values – bedrock of your organisation
• structure – how you’re organised and where authority lies in your organisation
• staff – all the different people in your organisation and how they’re developed.
• systems – processes used in managing the organisation.

All these factors are interrelated and on an equal footing, underlining the point that significant change in one aspect of the organisation will be difficult to sustain without planning or accomodating change in the other aspects.

It doesn’t work any magic, sadly, but it can provide a useful reminder about the different issues to consider when planning strategic change in an organisation.

I can be allergic to some private-sector strategy tools. I have found some to be filled with jargon, over-complicated and focusing people on completing the exercise rather than finding and agreeing a solution to a problem.

While this framework isn’t a neat and easy solution to the complexities of change management you might find it a useful tool to add to your planning processes and discussions, whether you’re using it as a simple checklist or working through the framework systematically in planning meetings.

You can view a short narrated introduction to the framework on the McKinsey website here

In the last year, my team’s done some work on involving users and other stakeholders in the running of organisations. Developing our new website has given us the opportunity to pull together some of our thinking on participation: involving users and other people in your work and planning to generate new ideas, challenge your assumptions and help you to ensure that your products, services or campaigns are as relevant as possible.

Phrases like “involving users” and “consulting stakeholders” can get bandied around a lot during strategic planning without getting clear agreement about what they mean for you or how it is going to happen.

Indeed, there are some particular challenges to participation in strategy. Though many people are keen to feedback their experiences and thoughts, their immediate concern is likely to be the project or service they are involved in rather than the future of the whole organisation. Involving people isn’t right for every organisation in every circumstance.

From our work and discussions on user involvement we’ve developed the following top tips for helping people participate in strategy

• Be as specific as possible about who your stakeholders are. Stopping at vague definitions means you might overlook important groups your strategy needs to involve or at least take account of.

• Get commitment from senior managers to support stakeholder input into strategic plans and priorities. Involvement can challenge organisations, and support from managers that legitimate challenge and constructive criticism is useful in the planning process will help prevent an immediate defensive reaction.

• Plan how you want to involve people What role do you and the people participating want to take? Leading the strategy? Giving input? Debating ideas? Making decisions? It could also be helpful to consider the degree of involvement your organisation needs from different people. Once you’ve got answers to these bigger questions deciding on the detail of the how you’re going to involve people in different ways will be easier.

• Build on what you do already. Consider how you can slot strategy discussions into existing meetings, forums and opportunities for stakeholders to feed back on your organisation, don’t just assume stakeholders will always be ready and willing to come to you. There is a massive range of methods and ways to consult and involve stakeholders, and most organisations will get better at this with practice. It’s important to try out a range of ways of helping people get involved and not let a fear of imperfection stop you from getting started.

• Say what you mean and mean what you say. Be clear and honest about the opportunities available for people to get involved, the reasons for this and keep people up-to-date on what you do with the learning and information you get from your stakeholders. Demonstrating that their input influences your strategy and decision-making will help keep people participating in the longer-term.

This list is far from comprehensive. How does it match with your experience of involving people in strategy?

The Performance Hub has recently published a learning report from a piece of research and development work in 2006 which looked at the process of strategy formation in five small third sector organisations. Beyond the writing of the plan, or general principles from management texts, what are the practical lessons from an effective planning process?
The findings of the report are focused on how small organisations can develop effective strategies but are relevant to organisations of any size that are new to strategic planning or looking to refresh their approach.
You can read the full report and a separate summary of the findings on the Performance Hub website

You may be interested in a survey report the Performance Hub have recently published, which looks at what strategic planning tools are used and valued by a range of third sector organisations.
Our findings are based on a survey carried out in 2006 of nearly 250 organisations.
Many of the surveyed organisations have taken an organic, incremental, iterative approach to strategic planning, opting to use techniques such as SWOT, PEST and stakeholder analysis to begin with, and then adding other techniques according to their size or culture.
Interestingly, there were a few more visual tools like strategy mapping and the Balanced Scorecard which weren’t widely used by our sample but were highly valued by those that did use them.
You can see the full survey report on The Performance Hub website
or join in a discussion in the forum about the survey.