Strategic planning, like change management, has a spotty track record buttressed by reams of research on why the idea and process looks so good on paper but delivers lackluster results. That does not mean we should not plan or develop strategies but we should be aware of their fundamental issues, which are outlined fairly well in an article at Innovation Excellence.

How strategic planning smothered a company

Planning is control and therefore its weakness is that it can destroy emergence.

Jim Clemmer writes an interesting article on strategic planning which I believe is really about destroying a scale free network. Here are some of the good bits:

From a standing start, a financial services company had two decades of very strong growth. They were entrepreneurial and opportunistic… But its growth wasn’t always a pretty sight.

Product and service ideas seemed to come from the wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong ways, and for all the wrong reasons. Often they had to be developed on a shoestring budget… However imperfectly, customers were well served, product leadership was established, and in key markets, dominance was achieved.

Then senior management changed. These were “processes out of control”, management declared.

So a Strategic Planning Committee was formed. They surveyed, researched, collected data, discussed, analyzed, diagrammed, and planned marketing strategies and new products. They wrote a powerful vision, values, purpose, and strategic planning document that could have been a business school case study.

Each thoughtful new product and marketing campaign took off with a bang…and then slowly fizzled… But the company’s history of ever-rising sales success flattened out. Key people started leaving. Passion and energy levels slowly sank. Today, the company is struggling to catch up with its changing markets and ever-stronger competitors.

Innovation Excellence | Strategic Planning Smothers Innovation
Jim Clemmer
Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:19:41 GMT

Clemmer goes on to describe how stabilizing planning only provides comfort for the bureaucratic machine. There is a difference between analysis and synthesis. Then he outlines the characteristics of “strategic planning traps.”

I have been a strategic planning consultant, although I never fell into the common trap of believing that senior management vision, data analysis and process could replace emergent ideas from specialists and customers. The dirty secret is that most consulting in large companies is primarily about listening to Associates further down the food chain and passing on their ideas to executives who are not utilizing their own communication channels. In other words, their hierarchy has only one direction.

Scale free network perspective

But there is another clearer perspective to view the above story. The new management team killed the characteristics of the scale free network. They replaced it with an organizational structure that was hierarchical and controlled. They destroyed autonomy and robust redundancy, replacing it with a top-down model that by its nature negated self-organization. They took away the ability of the organization to adapt.

Innovation is most often gradualism, more akin to evolution than paradigm shifting originality. Complexity uses the term emergence to describe this innovation. Planning must always seek to avoid crushing that gradualism, and that is its greatest weakness. We keep forgetting that people are not machines and that treating them as such causes immediate disengagement.

The rise and fall of strategic planning

Clemmer refers to a new book on strategic planning that is a refreshing read. We find it is best ingested with a general knowledge of complexity. In fact, there may be a growing trend in innovation and management science in general; it seems to be learning the rules of complexity as it concentrates more on flattening organizations and decentralizing. The book is worth reading.

Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Mintzberg

Image by De Lima at Stock.xchng

Defining accountability and responsibility immediately improves execution rates in any process.

RACI concepts

Teams without clear roles and responsibilities struggle. The issue is exacerbated when teams or processes straddle departments which often have different priorities and perspectives. Clearly defining accountability and responsibility pays immediate dividends and is an ongoing critical success factor.

Supportively, assigning roles and responsibilities prevents reversion to pre-project perspectives and activity. We can not develop new habits if it is easy to revert to old ones.

The RACI model

RACI is an acronym:

• R – Responsible
• A – Accountable
• C – Consult
• I – Inform

Projects of virtually any size benefit from constructing a RACI matrix as a management and communication tool. It is best utilized early in project planning to assist in clarifying roles and stakeholders.

How to assign roles

RACI matrices also have the benefit of clarifying the big picture so team members understand how and where they fit into the puzzle. Doing so as a first step in the planning process creates alignment.

Therefore the fundamental purpose of a RACI is not just duplication avoidance, but coordination and integration.

Accountable

There can be only one ‘A.’ One person, and only one, must be held accountable for the overall success or failure of activities including the entire project.

We find that holding more than one person accountable creates room for confusion and projection which ultimately has a rippling effect throughout the team.

Responsible

Just because a person is accountable does not mean they are required to do all the work. People assigned to meeting specific timelines and deliverables are responsible. There can be many of these individuals for any activity depending on size and scope.

Consult

Consultants are individuals who hold organizational or subject expertise that is viewed as critical to project success. Although they are not technically part of the team, their input will prove invaluable.

In addition to providing information and perspective, consultants may also provide mentorship and network connections, or help clear paths through the hierarchy. Intelligently chosen consultants also build stakeholder understanding and organizational support of the project necessary for its continued success.

Too often teams do not utilize consultants external to their organization. This omission is a costly mistake. The vast resources available in the world almost guarantee that the issue a team faces has been tackled before, including any number of suggestions on improvement. Further, these consultants can provide all manner of feedback and ideas only partially integral to the specific project, which has a multiplier effect on further ideas and improvements.

Therefore there are two requirements for effective consultation. The first is getting over the “not invented here” syndrome. And the second is to develop ongoing relationships that are viewed as extensions to traditional organizational structures. Familiarity compounds solutions.

To be clear, this construct may be the most important source of innovation for the firm:

The thing we have to fight against is the “not invented here syndrome.”

They have to be completely aware and plugged in to that innovation network. And it has to be a purposeful objective of the firm, because all natural tendencies are to focus on what you’ve got in-house. And so that innovation connection is probably the most important aspect of networking that is unique to the bio-pharmaceutical field, although it may have application in other innovation intensive industries as well. Half of our products in our pipeline were developed outside of our company.

Kevin Sharer

CEO, Amgen

We suggest that the potential for companies to develop relationships with external consultants (not nearly all of whom will have a monetary relationship) is the single largest opportunity for their advancement and progress. This statement is true for organizations of almost any size. We refer the reader to these articles for more information:

Knowledge brokering

Belonging

Inform

Projects inevitably impact the organization on a variety of touch points. Identify these people and build a communication strategy that will ensure a continuous information and progress flow. Make it clear that the receiver of information is always encouraged to provide feedback.

Some managers advocate tailoring communication to various constituencies according to their particular interest. The argument against this approach is twofold. First, it deprives the receiver of context and therefore motive and understanding. Second, since the receiver does not have the big picture, the full panorama of their feedback is no longer possible. Therefore parceling information diminishes both the team and the receiver.

A last reminder

More than one successful team has decided to short circuit the RACI process in an attempt to further accelerate their execution times. After all, a full fledged RACI can require days of hard work.

Invariably the team then eventually loses its effectiveness. The mistake is the belief that members are so conversant in their interaction that they can leave RACIs unspoken. We all need reinforcements, regardless of the level of our engagement and performance.

Taylor and Weber brought statistics to management.  Unfortunately the approach also often engendered an unhealthy and unproductive chasm between the new management positions it implied and the workers it no longer asked to think.

Taylor, Weber and others taught us to develop logical and statistical blueprints of work that rationality pounds into efficiency and productivity.

Unfortunately, these philosophies arguably engendered a significant portion of the union movement in the early 20th century, pitting the worker and the manager on opposite ends of a spectrum that destroys innovation and synergy and does not inherently find legitimacy in any organization. No team can be effective when it is split down the middle or harbors adversarial emotion. Much of the legendary works by Drucker in the decades since then consciously form a response to the negative effects of this hierarchical paradigm.

Later we learned that informal social relationships within every organization evolve that have as much or more to do with successful outcomes as the blueprints Taylor taught us to produce. We began investigating matrices, and empowerment, and currently a great deal of research centers on complex networks and differential status structures.  Deming taught us to stop focusing so much on discrete tasks, as Taylor espoused, and measure the total system.  The early adopting Japanese developed a significant manufacturing advantage as a result.

The challenge made here is that the blueprint is not yet quite squarely on-center.  It is missing key pieces of the puzzle that other disciplines have identified as crucial, whether they are the maturation and effectiveness of organisms, innovative free markets, or emergent complex systems.

We shall return to the individual. We shall investigate the model of the individual maturing in a complex, non-linear world and review what we learned in the past hundreds of years about what that means. We shall start at the beginning.