Strategic Planning is a Skill

I've been thinking lately about who should be doing strategic planning in a firm, and I've kind of reconsidered my earlier views on the subject. While I still believe you need a diverse group of people with some degree of involvement, I've reconsidered exactly what role that group should have.

There's a sense in many organizations that strategic planning should be done by everybody. That is to say, rather than merely having some input about their specialty, lots of people should have a decision-making role in what the final plan looks like. In small companies everyone sits around a table and comes up with a plan, while in larger firms, every department has a representative at the table. But is this really the best way?

You wouldn't bring an untrained, inexperienced person in off the street to do graphic artwork, or interior design, or certainly not your hair. So why would you take someone untrained in strategic planning and expect them to do it? Strategic planning is a skill like any other and it should be done by people who are prepared to do it.

I've had to lead strategic planning efforts a couple times. The first time around, we did the "everyone has a seat at the table and a veto on the final product" way, and I spent the first month teaching all the departmental representatives about strategic planning. That set us back quite a bit, and some people still never got it. The process ended up taking a year, when it could have been done in a few months, starting as we were from scratch.

The next time around, rather than reconstituting that group, I ran the effort myself, but went out and got inputs one-on-one from the different departments. One person, the big boss, had veto power over the final version. We still addressed everyone's specific requirements, they still participated in the process so they felt their needs were represented and we got their buy in, but the whole process went much faster. Everyone was satisfied with the final product, and individuals felt like they'd been listened to rather than being pushed into something over their heads. They were happier now, because let's face it, if they wanted to be strategic planners, they'd be doing that rather than their specialty.

Bottom line: strategic planning is important, too important to be left to amateurs. It's a skill, like anything else your firm does, and it requires people who know what they're doing. You need information from throughout your firm but you don't need people who don't know what they're doing in a position to mess up the process. Let a professional put these inputs into a coherent whole.