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Strategic Planning Warning Flag 2 – Near-Term Focus
Executives and managers maximize their organization’s value through transformative change brought about by the effective execution of a long-range plan. Some executives and managers, by setting long-term goals, the achievement of which is supported by a tactically flexible long-range plan, establish the conditions necessary for their organization to realize the significant benefits of transformative change. In other organizations, executives and managers concern themselves with small incremental improvements, eliminating the possibility of attaining the breakaway successes of truly great organizations.
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Additional Information
The following StrategyDriven recommended best practices are designed to reduce the likelihood of near-term planning while simultaneously fostering mission-based planning.
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 1 – Make the Mission Measurable
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 2 – Prioritize the Mission
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 3 – Strategic Discipline
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 6 – Focus on Strength
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 7 – Shared Accountability
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 8 – Results First, Action Second
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 10 – Future Focus
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 1 – Vertically Cascading
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 2 – Horizontally Shared
StrategyDriven contributors have created several illustrations to visually depict the mission to programs, budgets, and procedures alignment. The Strategic Alignment Model highlights the alignment that should exist between an organization’s mission and its programs, budgets, and procedures. The Strategic Organizational Alignment Model reveals the typical executive and managerial responsibilities associated with identifying, reaffirming, and translating the organization’s mission into goals and objectives and then into programs, processes, and procedures.
Portfolio managers direct deployment of assigned resources across the several programs, projects, and processes they oversee in a manner that maximizes the organization’s return on investment. (See Figure 1) Complicating the portfolio manager’s work is the myriad of differing resource types; resources that are often limited and shared by the portfolio’s many components.
As previously stated, we believe organizations act in accordance with the shared values of the people that comprise them. What an organization values is represented by the rewards sought in return for its products and services, the organizationally defined acceptable methods of reward pursuit, and the manner in which benefits realized are parsed to the organization’s members. Therefore, organizational accountability, the timely and consequential pursuit of mission goals, is driven by the ability of the organization to quantifiably measure earned rewards and the culturally determined method of assessing and recognizing employee performance.
Complex decisions require executives and managers to synthesize a multitude of variables into meaningful information from which they must choose a course of action. Some executives and managers combine clarity of thought and depth of knowledge and experience with a true understanding of the organization’s goals to identify and select a well founded decision option. Others find their perspective clouded by personal bias, self interest, misinformation, inexperience, and/or a lack of decision-making fundamentals knowledge; falling prey to logic fallacies, the misapplication of logic during problem solving. While a lack of knowledge and/or experience with problem solving may contribute to logic errors, they are typically the product of decision-makers’ underlying desires.
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