Who Should Be Planning?
Every Tuesday we talk about some aspect of planning. You might get the impression from this that planning should all be done by the boss. If that's what you thought, my bad. The reality is, strategic planning in a creative industry needs to include input from people throughout the company at all levels of responsibility.
Some aspects of planning, like developing the facts and assumptions that define your starting point, need the input of the worker bees as well as the leadership. The people actually doing your company's job and creating the product or service you provide are in the best position to describe the limitations on their work. If you create this "starting status" without asking the actual Creatives in your firm, but just rely on managers and leaders, you're going to have a false picture of the world. That can lead you to come up with courses of action that lie outside the realm of the possible. In that case, you're going to try to do something only to find that it isn't possible, and that's just a waste of everybody's time.
Even the higher-level guidance, like the vision and mission statements, benefits from input throughout the company. Even though these are generally considered "top-down" statements, from the leaders to the workers, the truth is those statements can be pretty meaningless if they don't address the "real world" of the firm's creative process. Don't ignore employee input to these critical pieces of the planning puzzle.
In addition to making a better plan, including a lot of different people will help you implement it. As people have to carry out our company's strategic plan it's best if they are familiar with it rather than having in sprung upon them by surprise. As they develop the plan they can be thinking ahead to how they're going to implement it, and hopefully sharing it with their peers as well. One thing that helps is if your ideas for implementation are developed right alongside the actual plan itself, kind of a parallel thing. That also helps you identify potential problems sooner, before they turn into show-stoppers.
You'll also find that people are actually more interested in carrying out the plan if they have helped to write it, or if they know that someone at their level was involved. When people get things forced down their throat they get defensive and tend to push back, but if they helped create it, then they have some ownership in it. They're also going to feel like they MUST be involved once you get to talking about things like budgets. They're going to want some say into the resources they're going to get and how they're expected to use them. This kind of "buy in" can really pave the way for smooth implementation later.
So to get back to the original question, who really should be doing the planning? Just as you shouldn't get the idea that it's only the senior leaders, you should also not thin that it's EVERYBODY in the company. If you've got a small firm with just a handful of people, then yeah, maybe so. But in a larger company, what you're really going for is representation from a wide range of groups. Maybe a rep from each section, or someone representing each technical aspect of your firm, something like that. You want a wide range of technical expertise, a few sets of eyes on the process, and a range of experience levels so you maximize the chance of coming up with good ideas and minimize the risk of having a "blind spot" in your effort.
In my last government office we set up a Strategic Planning and Analysis Group, which was an ad hoc collection of people from each division in the office. We had folks who'd been there 20 days and some who's been there 20 years, and with this range of experience we came up with something pretty good. This office had had some misfires in its past planning attempts but it was often done in a vacuum by some specially-designated person than by the working-level folks. Those earlier attempts didn't work so well, but this one did, and the fact that over a dozen people were involved in it helped the mid-level leaders feel comfortable hat they weren't being railroaded into anything.
With all of this, something to keep in mind is that at the end of the day, some one has to be responsible for the planning effort. That is, some single person should have the responsibility for producing your plan, and that "someone" will need to be one of your leaders. In addition to the responsibility for getting it done, they need the authority to direct the process so they CAN get it done.
The goal here is NOT to turn all your Creatives into planners. Instead, you're just trying to make sure your pool of knowledge is as wide and deep as it can be.
Some aspects of planning, like developing the facts and assumptions that define your starting point, need the input of the worker bees as well as the leadership. The people actually doing your company's job and creating the product or service you provide are in the best position to describe the limitations on their work. If you create this "starting status" without asking the actual Creatives in your firm, but just rely on managers and leaders, you're going to have a false picture of the world. That can lead you to come up with courses of action that lie outside the realm of the possible. In that case, you're going to try to do something only to find that it isn't possible, and that's just a waste of everybody's time.
Even the higher-level guidance, like the vision and mission statements, benefits from input throughout the company. Even though these are generally considered "top-down" statements, from the leaders to the workers, the truth is those statements can be pretty meaningless if they don't address the "real world" of the firm's creative process. Don't ignore employee input to these critical pieces of the planning puzzle.
In addition to making a better plan, including a lot of different people will help you implement it. As people have to carry out our company's strategic plan it's best if they are familiar with it rather than having in sprung upon them by surprise. As they develop the plan they can be thinking ahead to how they're going to implement it, and hopefully sharing it with their peers as well. One thing that helps is if your ideas for implementation are developed right alongside the actual plan itself, kind of a parallel thing. That also helps you identify potential problems sooner, before they turn into show-stoppers.
You'll also find that people are actually more interested in carrying out the plan if they have helped to write it, or if they know that someone at their level was involved. When people get things forced down their throat they get defensive and tend to push back, but if they helped create it, then they have some ownership in it. They're also going to feel like they MUST be involved once you get to talking about things like budgets. They're going to want some say into the resources they're going to get and how they're expected to use them. This kind of "buy in" can really pave the way for smooth implementation later.
So to get back to the original question, who really should be doing the planning? Just as you shouldn't get the idea that it's only the senior leaders, you should also not thin that it's EVERYBODY in the company. If you've got a small firm with just a handful of people, then yeah, maybe so. But in a larger company, what you're really going for is representation from a wide range of groups. Maybe a rep from each section, or someone representing each technical aspect of your firm, something like that. You want a wide range of technical expertise, a few sets of eyes on the process, and a range of experience levels so you maximize the chance of coming up with good ideas and minimize the risk of having a "blind spot" in your effort.
In my last government office we set up a Strategic Planning and Analysis Group, which was an ad hoc collection of people from each division in the office. We had folks who'd been there 20 days and some who's been there 20 years, and with this range of experience we came up with something pretty good. This office had had some misfires in its past planning attempts but it was often done in a vacuum by some specially-designated person than by the working-level folks. Those earlier attempts didn't work so well, but this one did, and the fact that over a dozen people were involved in it helped the mid-level leaders feel comfortable hat they weren't being railroaded into anything.
With all of this, something to keep in mind is that at the end of the day, some one has to be responsible for the planning effort. That is, some single person should have the responsibility for producing your plan, and that "someone" will need to be one of your leaders. In addition to the responsibility for getting it done, they need the authority to direct the process so they CAN get it done.
The goal here is NOT to turn all your Creatives into planners. Instead, you're just trying to make sure your pool of knowledge is as wide and deep as it can be.
Labels: Strategic Planning
posted by Will at
7:00 AM
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