Strategic Planning Is More Important than Ever

One of your jobs as a leader is to minimize uncertainty. That's particularly important in creative fields, which are very different from bureaucracies or assembly lines or customer service positions where the same work gets done day after day after day. Your Creatives are involved in projects that require original thinking, and that often have "end points" after which new projects will start. Without some guidance your Creatives may be all over the map, and if you haven't planned for new projects after the current ones are done, that map may lead you to the unemployment office.

This month some folks at The McKinsey Quarterly have some hints to help you out. An article called Strategic Planning: Three Tips for 2009 offers, not surprisingly, three useful tips for strategic planning in this uncertain period. The authors focus on:

Having a realistic focus
More monitoring of the implementation
Looking beyond the crisis

One of the hardest things to do with Creatives is keep them realistic. You don't want to stifle creativity and innovation, but you still have to keep them within uncontrollable constraints. While they always have to think "inside the box," the trick is to shape "the box"in such a way that you take full advantage of your resources and give yourself as many options as possible. Once you understand those options you can develop your strategic plans to reach the most desirable one(s). In the longer term you can try to change those constraints and resize your "box" even more.

You also need monitor the implementation of your plan to see if it's working or if you need to make changes. To do this you need a set of benchmarks you're trying to reach, and indicators that tell you whether or not you're making progress. One unfortunate tactic some leaders use is to start implementing their plan, look for the positive signs of success and then create indicators that use those signs, rather than creating reliable indicators first and then looking to see if they come true. If you do that, you're only cheating yourself, because you could be failing and not even know it, and then you have no chance to correct it.

Finally, the authors of the McKinsey article point out the importance of looking beyond the current crisis, and they're absolutely correct. It's easy to get wrapped up in what's going wrong now or in the opportunities presented by the crisis without looking past it. You need be thinking about how you'll proceed if you're successful at weathering the current crisis, because otherwise you'll come out the other side of it and then be wondering what to do and how to keep your momentum going. Looking at a particular problem is tactical; looking at that problem in the larger context of your business environment is getting you toward a strategic sense.

A lot of people avoid strategic planning because they think it's too hard, or it will tie their hands too much. Your Creatives, though, need guidance from you in order to do their jobs. They need to understand the possibilities and the limitations, and most importantly, they need to understand the direction in which you want them to go. So don't leave them hanging.