Foiled Again

With our big planing conference starting in two days, it pains me to report that "stymied again by indecisiveness" is in the lead by a big margin.

Keep Your Folks Open to Change

Change happens, perhaps more so in creative fields simply by the nature of creativity. Creatives may be more open to change than others by virtue of their innovative temperament. But they still develop habits, and if things pop up that require a change in those habits, that change can still be rough. So if you can, keep your Creatives in a frame of mind that leaves them open to change. Such a culture of flexibility isn’t natural; it can se a few things to help encourage it.

The foundation of an organization’s culture comes from its strategy, which can be expressed and developed in a strategic plan. You should have a plan that recognizes and accommodates change. The goals and objectives in your plan should acknowledge the need for flexibility and demonstrate the importance of a human capital development program that encourages adaptability. With this as your basis, you can build a workforce that’s more flexible.

Make sure you recruit people with the mindset you’re looking for. This will come through more in the interviews than in resumes. Try to get a sense for how potential employees deal with something new before you bring them in.

In addition to recruiting, look at retention having long-term employees provides for more in depth knowledge, but such employees can often be more settled in their ways. Ask yourself if you want to have mostly long-termers, short-timers, or some half-and-half mix.

You also need to be willing to let people go if you find they can’t keep up with the demands you place upon them. “Seniority” should not equal "guaranteed employment” if they simply can’t -- or won’t -- do what you need them to do.

Try to keep as flat an organizational structure as possible, with the fewest possible leaders. You’ll often find that people in authority are the most resistant to change because they’re afraid their authority will disappear -- and it just might.

Try to keep your budgeting as flexible as possible. Yes, you need some stability there so you can plan your resources, but you also need to be able to shift those resources when changes demand it. Striking that balance isn’t easy, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Businesses that don’t change to meet new conditions around them are more likely to miss opportunities or succumb to challenges, and ultimately fade away. Creative organizations are particularly susceptible to this, since the whole reason they exist is to create new things, and failing to do so makes them irrelevant. A culture that accepts the need to change is not automatic -- if anything, resistance to change is the default human condition. Take some steps to make change easier, because the alternative is to just make things harder on yourself.

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.

Looking for Challenges

Last year the National Academy of Engineering got a project going called the Grand Challenges for Engineering. The idea is an interesting one: "create a list of the grand challenges and opportunities for engineering facing those born at the dawn of this new century." The Academy solicited the input of scientific and engineering experts as well as the general public.

Consider doing something like this for your firm. What big, unsolved challenges do you see in your industry? How about just within your firm? As you continue to provide a product or service, can you also be looking beyond your immediate requirements toward a wall that has yet to be scaled? Can you take that creative brainpower that's working for you and develop answers to the challenges you face?

Where would your suggestions for great challenges come from? Well, some will probably come from you, say, from your experience in the field, or from your professional reading, or from your interaction with other professionals. Some ideas will of course come from your employees, and you should pay close attention to these, because these are the ones they're probably going to be most interested in tackling. You could also solicit some from your customers. After all, their demands are the ones you're currently meeting, so get an idea from them about what they will likely be looking for in the future.

One critique of the project is that there's no context, no real guidance when it comes to identifying the challenges, and so the suggestions seem to be all over the map. Coming at this from the context of your industry, your firm, or a narrower specialty within your firm, should provide you some focus and allow you to come up with challenges that are suitable for your Creatives.

Once you have some suggestions, make sure to include them in your strategic planning. Try to put some resources against them...Google had the idea of requiring its workers to spend a percentage of their time working on projects outside their day-to-day, so see how you can allow your Creatives to allocate time to work on these new challenges.

Maybe it seems crazy to go looking for new challenges when you already have plenty to do. Still, if you do it within reason, it can be a very good thing for your firm. You don't have to save the world with a project like this, but you will still end up doing something to keep you Creatives interested in the job. You'll give them a chance to do something new, which is what Creatives enjoy, and in doing so you give them a good reason for staying with you rather than changing jobs. So take a look beyond your Inbox and see what opportunities might be out there. You never know...in addition to finding an interesting challenge, you might also start working on something that will be profitable for your firm in the end. And that's not a bad thing, either.

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.

Keeping a Long-Term Focus

When Saturday Night Live started in 1975 the cast members were collectively known as “The Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players.” The idea was that they were on late at night on Saturdays because their material wasn’t suitable for the family audiences who tune in from 8pm-11pm for their television fix. But since then, the show has had a few TV specials that aired during prime time. Perhaps they weren’t ready for prime time at first, but prime time caught up with them. Sometimes, you have to take a chance on something that doesn’t seem right for the conditions, and then wait for the conditions to change and catch up with you.

American research and innovation in the 1950s and 1960s had a long-term vision underlying them. The shock of the Soviet sputnik launch and the race to get to the moon spurred scientists and other innovators to pursue projects that would take many years to come to fruition. The products of defense and space research often didn’t affect lives for years or even decades, but the basic research continued nonetheless.

Despite some changes in the business world during the 1980s and 1990s, this long-term spirit continued, especially in emerging fields like information technology. But with the bursting of the Internet bubble and the failure of major firms such as Enron and others, shareholder accountability increased and a short-term focus on the company’s bottom line replaced that long-term vision. The current economic problems have increased the focus on short-term survivability so that companies can even have a long-term.

Creativity, however, does not always conform to the quarterly report schedule. Things that aren’t “right for now” may be “right for the future.” Consider that new technologies and new thought processes take time to grow and to be accepted, and you may need to pursue them now and then put them “on the shelf,” or introduce them while realizing they won’t be profitable, until the time is right for them. In some cases, your Creatives will try new ideas only to find they don’t work out, and even though that doesn’t add to the profit/loss statement, that’s OK (as long as not EVERYTHING fails). If your Creatives never come up with a bad or unworkable idea, that means they aren’t taking enough chances. Encourage them to try new approaches that may not be “ready for prime time” just yet.

While you need to meet your clients’ requirements and need to make sure you can stay in business long enough for your new ideas to take hold, those shouldn’t be your only concerns. The difference between having a successful business tomorrow and having a successful business 20 years from now is keeping a long-term focus for your firm. In creative fields you’re in a position to look to the future, and with good Creatives working for you, you should be able to do that pretty well.

Saturday Night Live, by the way, is now in its 34th season. Not bad for a show that wasn’t “ready” for its time.

Break It Down

A strategic plan is broad in scope and addresses a lot of general themes for your business. Ultimately, though, you have to provide leaders and employees with the specific tasks they need to do to advance your business. It's important to identify your vision and mission, and figure out what point you're starting from, but then you need to address how you're going to get from here to there.

My suggestion: get from the big picture down to a little picture. Start with a set of goals that you want to reach, then break those down into objectives you have to achieve to reach your goals, and finally, figure out what tasks you need to do to accomplish your objectives.

GOALS: A goal is an end that the organization strives to attain. Goals should be challenging, but achievable. Accomplishment of goals will ensure fulfillment of the mission and realization of the vision. Goals transform your mission and vision statements into areas of focus and direction. Goals tend to be far reaching in that they give direction to many programs, and often to the company as a whole.

Strategic goal setting requires planners to identify goals that:
• challenge the status quo;
• require little or no explanation, but instead are easily understandable throughout the firm;
• are consistent with the vision and mission; and,
• are measurable, so you know when you reach them.

Goals focus on desired changes. They are the ends that the organization strives to attain. The purpose of goals is to provide discipline. More specifically, the "objectives for having objectives" include:

OBJECTIVES: Objectives are specific accomplishments that must be accomplished in total, or in some combination, to achieve the goals in the plan. Objectives are usually "milestones" along the way when implementing the strategies. They add some meat to the plan by identifying specific means to achieve the goals. Objectives represent pieces of a goal that can be accomplished over a shorter period. They provide direction for decision-making and a criterion against which outcomes are measured. Thus, objectives are the foundation of planning.

Guidelines for Defining Objectives

Specific An objective must be specific with a single key result. If more than one result is to be accomplished, more than one objective should be written. Just knowing what is to be accomplished is a big step toward achieving it. What is important to you? Once you clarify what you want to achieve, your attention will be focused on the objective that you deliberately set. You will be doing something important to you.

Measurable An objective must be measurable. Only an objective that affects behavior in a measurable way can be optimally effective. If possible, state the objective as a quantity. Some objectives are more difficult to measure than others. However, "difficult" does not mean that they cannot be measured. Avoid statements of objectives in generalities. Infinitives to avoid include to know, to understand, to enjoy, and to believe. Action verbs are observable and better communicate the intent of what is to be attempted. They include to write, to apply, to recite, to revise, to contrast, to install, to select, to assemble, to compare, to investigate, and to develop.

Attainable An objective must be attainable with the resources that are available. It must be realistic. Many objectives are realistic. Yet, the time it takes to achieve them may be unrealistic. For example, it is realistic to want to lose ten pounds. However, it is unrealistic to want to lose ten pounds in one week. What barriers stand between you and your objective? How will each barrier be overcome and within what time frame?

Result-oriented: The objective should be central to the goals of the organization. The successful completion of the objective should make a difference. How will this objective help the organization move ahead? Is the objective aligned with the mission of the organization?

Time-limited: The objective should be traceable. By using specific objectives you can prioritize your time better and you can send your time on objectives that really matter.

TASKS: Tasks are the specific approaches, methods and programs -- a work plan -- by which a firm intends to achieve goals and objectives. They are often the basis for your budget and may be a continuation of an existing program, a revision of an existing program, or a new program.

So how does this work? Well, consider an example from a public relations firm:

GOAL: increase public awareness of our client within the age 18-30 demographic

OBJECTIVES: identify at least 5 new outlets for which this demographic is the primary audience, create a message specifically targeted to this demographic with a 30% retention rate after 5 days

TASKS: explore Web 2.0 options, explore HD radio market exposure, form a message development team for this demographic

(OK, I've never been in PR, so no, these aren't meant to be something you'd really see there...but you get the idea)

It's tempting to look at where you are and try to build yourself up toward your vision, but that can take you down the wrong path and you might not realize it until it's way too late. Instead, start with where you want to be and work backwards. Break it down to the point where everyone in a different specialty can explain their unique role. Ultimately, an individual should be able to look at your strategic plan and say "this is what I contribute." If they can't, then how do they -- or you -- know they're doing the right thing?

Who Should Be Planning?

There's a lot of talk about planning in this blog. You might get the impression from this that planning should all be done by the leader. 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 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 the company's strategic plan it's best if they are familiar with it rather than having it 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 think 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.

Our group was a bunch of bureaucrats, many of whom had limited imaginations. Your group, on the other hand, will involve a lot of creative folks with big ideas, and you may have to keep them focused. It's easy for Creatives to go off in some wild directions, and you need to keep them on a path to doing something that fits the company's vision and mission. You might also need to inject some reality into the discussions. the trick in all of this is not to stifle your Creatives but instead to have them focus their energies where they can do the most good.

With all of this, something to keep in mind is that at the end of the day, someone 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.

Planning Assumptions

We've discussed describing the facts of your situation as one of the first steps in the planning process. After all, it's important it is to know what you know. Now, let's add to that "starting status" by knowing what you think.

In addition to the facts -- the things you KNOW to be the case -- it's also important to lay out your assumptions for the present and the future. The idea is to figure out what things you can reasonable expect to happen that haven't happened already. The purpose behind this is to create a plan that's firmly grounded in reality. There's no sense in making a plan, hiring new people, budgeting resources, and blowing off other opportunities if your plan would only work if the laws of physics were suddenly reversed.

Let's try to visualize how this works. Let's say there are a lot of options open to you that use various combinations of money and time, and you could plot all those combinations on a graph:



Then let's say you identify certain facts, like "Our review board has a minimum of three days to examine each phase of the project," or "If our employees work more than 40 hours a week we have to pay them overtime." Such facts will limit your options because they affect the time and money available to you. On our graph, the limitations created by the facts are represented by blue lines:



But to maximize the reality of your plan, you need more than just the things you're sure of; you also need to consider the things you're pretty sure will happen. For example, assuming "Interest rates will drop so we can get cheaper financing" has an effect on your available money. On our graph, these assumptions are represented by red lines:



See how we've gone from a lot of options down to a smaller set? These represent the options that are within our known, and expected, capability.

Because they limit solution sets, assumptions should be few in number, and they should only be for the important issues. As you'll notice, the more limitations you put on yourself, the smaller and smaller the number of options becomes. It's important to be realistic, but it's also important to leave yourself some courses of action, so be careful about saddling yourself with unnecessary limitations.

With that in mind there are a few criteria you should consider for your assumptions:

First, they should be logical. Simply wishing something was the case doesn't make it so. Remember what we mentioned earlier about changing the laws of physics? Ain't gonna happen, so don't assume it.

Similarly, they should be realistic. You should have some evidence to back it up. If there's been a behavior trend among your clients up until now, don't assume that's going to change without some effort on your part. If you need it to change, maybe that needs to be part of your plan.

Finally, they should be essential. Each assumption has the potential to reduce your possible courses of action, so make 'em count. Consider it this way: if you make an assumption, and it turns out your wrong, and that would wreck your plan, then it's essential. If a bad assumption wouldn't have any effect on your plan, then it's not that important and you should leave it out.

One of the biggest criticisms of strategic planning is that all too often it takes place in a fantasy world completely disconnected from reality. That's especially problematic in creative fields where your employees are trying to think beyond limitations. It's your job as a leader to occasionally bring them back down to Earth, and then encourage them to focus their energy on the things that really are possible.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

When Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department responded to a new case, all he wanted were the facts. He needed to know what really happened, not what the witness thought happened. Once he knew what was real he had his starting point for working the case.

As you begin your strategic planning you need to know the facts. They tell you the rules of the game. Trying to play football on a basketball court doesn't really help you. Identifying the facts about your company, your market, and your whole operating environment gives you an idea of what paths are open to you and what tools are available for your use. If you're trying to figure out how to get from "here" to "there," you first need to know where "here" is. The facts help you identify the point where you're beginning.

What do we mean by "facts?" Well, these are the things that are true about your operating environment. They involve what is happening now, not what might happen in the future. They are things you know, not things you assume. They are an observation of reality, not a description of your ideal world, so you need to include inconvenient and unpleasant truths as well as those you think are helpful.

These might include such things as:

- laws
- available resources during a particular period
- existing technologies
- current size and skills of your workforce
- existing inventory
- contractual agreements
- current organizational structure

These are the things you take as a given...for now, anyway. Some of them might be changed -- inventory, for instance, or the size and skills of your employees -- and those changes, if you want to make them, will need to be addressed in your plan. Others, such as laws or contracts, are things you may be stuck with, depending upon the time frame of your plan...if you're looking beyond the length of your contracts then changing them in the future may be an option but if you're looking at a shorter term, you have to work with what you have now. The unchangeable facts will, in many cases, form the outer boundaries of your set of available options...you can look inside that set for courses of action, but looking beyond them is a waste of time and effort.

Your more experienced employees play a critical role here because they know your history and the limits under which they operate. A potential problem with them is that they may be so used to working under certain conditions that what they call a "fact," thinking it to be an immutable force of nature, may instead be something changeable that has simply been around so long that they can't imagine life without it. Newer employees are useful for challenging those statements of "fact" that in reality may be perceived limitations that can be easily ignored.

The more creative your workforce, the more facts you will uncover if you turn them loose upon the problem. This is a good thing, not because it creates more limitations, but because it better defines the limitations that are there whether you see them or not. Facts exist -- wishing they didn't doesn't make it so. The better you understand your operating environment the more you'll be able to shape that environment to best suit your needs and create the most profitable opportunities through your planning efforts.

Knowing your facts helps you best refine your mission and start thinking of ways to accomplish it. Just as Sergeant Friday needed his facts to get the ball rolling, so do you. The difference is, he managed to get his work done in 30 minutes (with time for commercials) whereas you'll have a little more work to do.

Mission Analysis

We've talked about having a vision for your company and the importance of having a mission statement, but how do you understand what your vision and mission are? These aren't things you just sit down and scratch out after 5 minutes of sitting in Starbucks (well, at least, they SHOULDN'T be). If they're going to be meaningful, if they're going to help you lead your employees, and if they're going to help you with your planning, then they need to be grounded in the real world and have some real applicability to what you want to do. If you just pull them out of nowhere then that's exactly where they'll lead you. But if you put some thought into these, then they will serve as the bedrock of your strategic planning process and help you figure out what your employees should be doing and what resources they need to do it. And in the end, you should be far more successful.

Mission analysis should be the first step in any strategic planning process. Whether you are writing your initial business plan or preparing for a transformation of an established company, you need to understand what you want and the basics of how to get there. there are some things you have to accept in this world and there are other things you can change...we'll talk a bit more about those in future weeks but for now just understand that you really need to know what it is you what to achieve and how that fits into the environment where you'll be achieving it.

First, you need to have some guidance from the top dog in your company. If YOU are the top dog, well then ask yourself why you started all this in the first place. Write down all the things that occur to you. Knowing all of the rationales for having this creative group of employees will help shape the set of "acceptable options" for your vision and mission statements.

Look at the state of your competitive field. Are you all alone, so unique that you have no direct competition? Or are you in a field that is already pretty filled up, which might require you to create your own niche, or maybe take up the excess demand that exists in your market? Understanding what's already out there will give you an idea of what goals will be realistic, and what's needed in the industry. Are you going to provide a service to any potential customer or only to those with particular needs? How broad, or how narrow, will your vision be? Only by understanding the competitive market will you have an idea what you should be doing.

Take a look at the industry's history to understand what works and what doesn't. There's no sense in aiming for a goal that has been proven unattainable. Santayana said "those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." So don't be like those guys. At the same time, if something's been tried before and failed but the circumstances are different now, then it may be time to go for it again and see what happens. If you're going to jump into an industry, know what you're jumping into.

Consider your own history too, of course, with "your own" being defined as both yours and your firm's. If you're leading the firm then think about your own demonstrated skills and resources. Whether you're at the top or not, give some thought to what your firm has tried before, what's worked and what hasn't, what opportunities seemed out of reach in the past. Is your firm ready to evolve into something new, maybe growing bigger or expanding into a new field? Or do you perhaps have enough on your plate for now, and maybe just some tightening up of your business processes is all you should really attempt for now? In order to have a firm grasp on where you are and where you want to go it helps to understand how you got here.

If you're able to articulate your own desires, and the limitations and possibilities presented by the environment, then you're in a position to define you vision and mission. This is the first step in your strategic planning and if you take the time and do this well it will make everything that follows SO much easier, and much more useful, too.

What's Your Mission?

What do you do?

Seriously, when you come to work in the morning do you ever ask yourself, "why am I here?"

A lot of people go to church to answer this question, but for our purposes, giving it a little thought in the office can do wonders for you.

When you're making decisions about your business -- such things as what jobs you want your employees to perform, what skills they need, how many people you have, how to spend your money -- all of this should be designed to support your mission.

But what do we mean by "your mission?" Well, if you identified your firm's vision, then that tells you what you want the world to look like. Your mission is what you do to get there. It's the main function that you perform, and everything your employees do should either advance that mission or support those who do.

Unlike vision statements, which should be involve more nouns than verbs, mission statement should be more "verby." These are action statement, they say what you DO, not what you WANT. For example, let's say you're in a public relations firm. Your vision statement might be something along the lines of "Our clients can walk into any room of their choosing and everyone there knows who they are." Your mission, then, is to create that environment. Your mission statement could be something like "we use every available medium of communication to put our clients' names in the forefront of the public's mind," which says you see your purpose as creating public familiarity with your clients. Or maybe, "we tout our clients' successes while allowing them to learn from their mistakes in private," suggesting that your function is to promote the good news stories while keeping quiet those things that will hurt your clients' reputations, so the public has good feelings about them.

Your mission statement should be specific enough to get you to your vision while being broad enough to encompass all you do. It doesn't need to identify every specific task performed in your company, but every specific task should fit within the broad outline you've described.

The most important outcome of defining your mission is that it gives your employees some focus. In a bureaucratic environment where the mission is pretty well understood -- "we'll do the same things tomorrow we did yesterday" -- it's easier for employees to absorb that focus by immersing themselves in the organizational culture. But when it comes to more creative enterprises, especially those in fast-paced, changing environments, your employees are going to be thrown into a mixing bowl at high speed and they'll need some direction to keep them moving forward and avoid the blades of this really bad metaphor that I just decided I don't like. OK, here's the thing: you get a bunch of talented, free-thinking, creative people together and they will come up with great ideas that may have nothing to do with your business. Ten people could easily go in ten different directions if you don't have something that ties them together. That's what a mission statement does for you.

It's easy to just pencil-whip these, crank out something that sounds high-minded but is devoid of any real meaning. "Quality is Job #1" was a statement used by Ford Motor Company for many years -- I'm not sure if they intended it to be their mission statement but it was on banners and everything, so maybe it was. But it didn't give any direction to employees, except perhaps to say "don't make mistakes," but really, the mission of Ford isn't to not make mistakes...it's to make money. So why not describe your mission in such a way as to help you get to that?

Something to keep in mind: if you're doing something, and you can't figure out how it relates to your mission, then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be doing it. If you come across something like that, and you're afraid to make a change and stop doing it, well, just accept that you're spending resources on something that doesn't really matter, which translates into "wasting time and money." That's not good. When we talk about being creative, we don't mean "find a creative way to go out of business."

Understanding why you're here is important. Gaining that understanding isn't always easy. But with a little thought you'll gain a lot of focus, and that will keep you moving ahead of your competitors, and also help your employees understand why, exactly, they should show up for work each day.

It's Not the Plan, It's the Planning

A well-developed business plan, with lots of PowerPoint slides, appendices, bibliographies, all wrapped up in a nice shiny binder, is a great thing. For example, it makes a great doorstop. It can be used to prop up the corner of a crooked desk. It makes a great place to set your coffee. One thing is doesn't provide, though, is a guarantee of success.

Does that mean you shouldn't bother with a plan? Of course not! A good plan, whether for your long-term business, your management in the office, or a who-woulda-thunk-it contingency, is a useful thing to have. It provides a starting point...sure, things will change, but it helps to have something to change from, rather than just standing around slack-jawed waiting for someone to come up with an idea when the world starts to change around you.

The real benefit, though, isn't in the plan...it's in the planning.

A good planning process starts with questions. What is the world around me like? What resources do I have? What do I want to accomplish? What are my obstacles and opportunities? How do I get from Point A to Point B? Do I even want to be at Point B? These questions help you define your world and determine not only how to make it look like you want, but what it is you want it to look like in the first place.

Once you start answering these questions, the impossible (or at least, the improbable) often becomes possible. You start to see what's important and what's not, you see new avenues open up, you consider connections and networks that weren't obvious before. You may find that where you really want to be is far different from what you originally thought. Or maybe it's the same. The thing is, you won't know until you ask...and start answering.

It's not enough to just dream about what could be...a good planning effort forces you to be realistic, but also helps you redefine "realistic." The simple act of putting things down on paper forces you to really think, to debate ideas, to divide up your resources and match them to your goals. In short, it gets you away from talking about all those things you should be doing and moves you in the direction of doing them.

This last point is critical. "Talk talk talk" does no good if not followed by "act act act"." For many of us in the creative fields we like to explore new possibilities, consider what we could do "if...," and talk long into the night about great opportunities. A popular ad campaign in the 1980s said, "At Hewlitt-Packard, we never stop asking "what if?,'" but some follow-on action is necessary to turn "what if?" into "sweet!"

So as you harness your creative power you need to focus it in a positive direction. Move beyond questions to answers. Identify what you really want to do, find the best way to do it, and move out. And when the world changes and you need a new plan, at least you know how to do it.

Think Inside a Bigger Box

The phrase "think outside the box" is one of those clichés that started out with a basis in a great idea but has been so overused that its original meaning was lost. My boss has taken it one step further, telling us to "throw away the box." On the surface it's an appealing idea: develop options without limitation. But the reality is, we always have constraints and restraints on our actions - there are things we have to do, there are things we cannot do - and there is the reality of the environment around us. The trick is not to throw away the box or try to step completely outside it; the trick is to understand the borders of your box, make it bigger where you can, and take advantage of opportunities that exist.

What are some things that can't change? Well, laws, for one (assuming we're talking about the immediate to short-term...maybe, with enough time, you can get laws changed, but that's a pretty drastic process). And of course, that doesn't just mean the laws of man, but the laws of nature, too. Once you accept that there really are some things beyond your control you'll be open to the idea and start looking for other limitations, rather than just chanting "there is no box...there is no box..." Those limits define the realm of the possible, and within that realm lie all the options available to you.

What's important to notice are those limits that CAN be changed. What is within your power to control? If you are limited by your employees' technical skills, how about recruiting new employees with the technical skills you need? If the amount of available office space is the only thing standing between you and a bigger workforce, how about implementing a telecommuting option?

When your employees bring you ideas for changes, it's common for your default response to be "we can't," because you've been working within those limits and are used to them. But ask yourself; why not? Why can't we do this differently? Do we really have to accept this restriction? Is it being forced upon us by outsiders, or is it something we're forcing upon ourselves? Very often it's the latter, and in that case you need to consider whether changing that limit would give you a bigger set of options, at a cost you can afford.

A big advantage to a creative workforce is that they often find solutions outside of their primary function, simply because they have a broader general view. Consider putting cross-functional teams to work with the specific goal of finding places where the box can be stretched and pulled and shaped in a way that gives you more opportunities for success. You might not choose one of those new opportunities, but it's always nice to have options.

Such groups should include newer and older employees; the newer ones are less constrained by history ("we've always done it that way") whereas your more experienced people know what has worked and what hasn't in the past ("here's WHY we've always done it that way"). Between the two you should be able to expand the ways in which your business can succeed. Still inside a box...but with a little more room to flex your creative muscles.

Seeing Your Vision

How do you want your world to look?

When you say your business is successful…what do you mean?

If everybody does what they’re supposed to do, what have they done?

The answers to these help you find your Vision. For many large companies and government agencies, “Vision Statements” are nothing more than something to print on a poster and hang everywhere, or stick on a website so your clients think you “get them.” But if it’s just a slogan, or if it’s designed to fit on a coffee mug in a pleasing font, then it isn’t going to help you at all. On the other hand, if you really put some thought into it, it’ll help you drive your business toward success, and it will offer some focus to all those wild-eyed dreamers, and squinty-eyed accountants, working for you.

If you're going to do some planning -- and you should - - you need to have some idea where you want to go. You really need to know where this business should be heading before you start worrying about budgeting, personnel, where to buy the coffee, key things like that. And as you're trying to lead your employees, you should be able to communicate your Vision to them to give them a target to shoot for. As for you, your leadership style and the techniques you use should be based on what it is you're trying to accomplish. So don't just pencil-whip it. Your Vision Statement should be the result of some real effort.

A good Vision Statement should be descriptive, using lots of nouns and not a whole lot of verbs. It’s not so much what you want to do -– that comes later -– it’s what you want to be, what you want to create, what you want your clients or customers to do or have or get. This should be the first step in any serious planning you do because it allows you to define success and puts a goal out there around which everything you do should revolve. If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you decide how to get there? For that matter, how will you ever know you’ve arrived?

It really shouldn't be the result of just one person's thinking. I mean, if you're the creator of a new firm, you probably have a pretty good idea where you want it go. But as you grow, you'll want to include others in that discussion and decision. Why? Because the discussions you have about your Vision will help you know if you've got a collection of like-minded team members or if you have 20 people going in 20 different directions (hint: that's not so good)

You need to make your Vision Statement realistic, but remember that “realistic” and “likely” are different words. It’s like the difference between “possible” and “probable” – the former is adventurous, the latter is safe. Realism depends on the time frame of your planning…if you’re only looking a year down the road you’re likely to be stuck with the resources you have, but if you look five years away, a lot more options (and challenges) occur.

When I wrote my doctoral dissertation I discussed how government agencies change (or not) when the world around them changes. One of the things I emphasized was the need for a good Vision that was communicated to, and accepted by, the members of the organization. One of my advisors said she thought government agencies spent too much time writing Vision Statements and then ignoring them, and she's probably right. But she was wrong when she said they were unimportant...if done right, they're one of the most important tools to help you lead your business.

Consider some of these:

“Places we’d be proud to have our children work for.” (Trium)

“A free and democratic Iraq.”

“We focus on our clients’ outer beauty so they can focus on their inner beauty.” (Hair by Mulan)

“Maximum shareholder value.”

These don’t tell you how they’re going to get there or where the money’s coming from to get there, but they DO tell where “there” is. With that in mind you’re in a better position to recruit the right people, obtain the right resources, and develop the best courses of action. It will also let you figure out if you’re biting off more than you can chew.

And if it fits on a coffee cup…that’s cool too.