Meeting #5 for Strategic Planning (SP)

This meeting will be held off site for reasons previously stated.

Up to this point, the SP Team has come together to establish rules of engagement, gather data, discuss opinions/points of view, and analyze. Special emphasis has been placed upon the needs of your customers, strengths & weaknesses of your organization and competitors, and opportunities to add value and achieve growth.

If the process is working, you should be poised to shore up weaknesses, build on your strengths & take advantage of opportunities that are a fit (or can be) for your focus, core competencies, and culture. This is not to say that there won't be some stretching, which should be embraced, because it is a prerequisite for real growth.

Therefore, the time is at hand to set goals for where you're going, and how you're going to get there. This is a critical time in your SP endeavor, and yes, there is a process to assist you in accomplishing it.

An easy way to look at it is to consider that goals should be SMARTER:
Specific; Measurable; Acceptable (consensus); Realistic; Time Line; Extending (stretching); & Rewarding.

Be careful here, however, to discuss & agree upon your broad goals; the specifics will come at the next meeting where you will Action Plan. Examples might be to introduce a new product that delivers what your customers want while taking advantage of your core competencies. Or you might choose to broaden an underutilized production area that would enable you to reduce cost & pass at least some of the reductions on to the customer.

If you did your homework in Meeting #4, you used Porter's Five Forces to analyze your marketplace. With that information at hand, opportunities should have emerged, and been discussed. Now is the time to formalize & reach consensus on them. There is a wealth of other methods of discernment available here with which your facilitator can assist you.

Another one is a Goals Grid, similar to the four quadrants used in the previous two meetings for customers & products, except that it deals with four questions regarding your goals: What do you want to achieve that you don't already have? What do you want to preserve that you already have? What do you want to avoid that you don't have? What do you have now that you want to eliminate? Answering these questions as a group, and the discussing that follows should be lively, enlightening, and steer you toward meaningful goals.

There are many other aids that can be used. In the interest of time and space, we will not list them here, but your facilitator should be well versed in providing them to you.

Finally, there should be significant homework here for all. By the next meeting, where you will build Action Plans, your goals need to be formulated clearly. Drafts of agreed upon goals should be assigned to volunteers (ideally the biggest advocate). A paragraph with the SMARTER goals will be fine, & will provide a nice platform upon which to build your Action Plans.

At this point momentum should be significant as real progress begins to be seen.