A VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS | Call or text now for a FREE consultation: +1 (770) 765-3692 | 
Strategic Planning Best Practice 9 – Avoid Using Jargon
Not everyone within an organization is a Harvard MBA graduate with a decade or more of business planning experience. Business planners using highly technical terms as a way to impress others with their business planning prowess will often find that they confuse the very people they are trying to communicate with, namely, the organization’s workforce.
In order for a strategic plan to foster a high degree of organizational alignment, it must possess a clear, concise focus and be translatable to the day-to-day actions of every member of the workforce. To achieve this, planners should write the strategic plan in a language familiar to everyone within the organization; incorporating words, phrases, and colloquialisms traditionally used by the workforce. A strategic plan written in the organization’s language will speak to and ultimately be embraced by its implementers.
About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Organizations do well during times of crisis because executives, managers, and individual contributors all gain clarity of purpose, expectation, and action. Clarity, along with a sense of urgency, breaks down organizational barriers allowing people to work efficiently together toward achievement of the shared goal(s). These factors enable the organization to resolve the crisis quickly and return to normal operations.
Executives and managers maximize their company’s value when they focus the efforts of the entire workforce on the organization’s prioritized mission goals and supporting objectives. Some executives and managers, by making the mission measurable, prioritizing those measures, and sharing accountability for identifying and executing the most value adding initiatives, ensure their workforce focuses on those activities that maximize the organization’s overall value. In other organizations, planning and/or execution shortfalls allow the pursuit of initiatives that do not optimally support mission achievement; diminishing the organization’s value creation capacity. While many factors result in misaligned focus at all levels of the organization, one in particular, the failure to align the organization’s programs, budgets, and procedures to the mission’s prioritized goals and supporting objectives is the most devastating.
Business Programs