I had a recent exchange with a colleague who had just attended a conference where she heard, “a strategic plan is passé and we should all become strategic thinkers instead.” Knowing strategic planning is a primary focus of Bloom’s work, she was being both provocative and genuinely interested in my reaction. Here’s what I emailed back:
I appreciate you sharing the snippet of critique on strategic plans. I'm not sure if they are "passé" but I do know that we often come in to assist organizations who have had abysmal strategic planning experiences prior to hiring us. Either the process was terrible, or the output was terrible. It's embarrassing. I've often found myself in the position that you are putting me in now—having to defend my craft in the face of the field being rife with underperformance. So then, I agree that strategic thinking is of paramount importance. I consider the fact that Bloom’s primary offerings are time and good process which enable us to work with organizations to develop strategic thinking, to learn and employ more functional individual and system-level behaviors, and to evolve organizational structures that will support the new initiatives and changes that are being planned through the process.
The plan itself is a memorialization of the work we've put into it but it won't be implemented successfully unless the organization is thinking and behaving differently than it was at the start of the process. All of this is also why we don't do "weekend" or "retreat" strategic planning. It’s why our process tends to take 6-16 months to complete. Even a very skilled leadership team can't (or shouldn't) create a plan over a weekend and expect that on Monday morning everything changes. Mindsets and structures take time to change, and change is intellectual, social, and emotional.
I share this collegial exchange because there will (and should) always be critiques of the strategic planning process—is it worth the time, the money, the effort?
As with most things, you get out what you put in, and when strategic planning is done well, the result is, in fact, an improved use of an organization’s time, money, and efforts moving forward. Paramount to its success is having leadership that trusts and drives this process.
What leaders are likely afraid of isn't wasting time, money, effort... they are afraid of discomfort—theirs and their constituents'—but that’s a post for a future date.
If an organization has leaders who operate as strategic thinkers, all the better, but strategic plans are more than just the words on the paper. They communicate leaders’ strategic thinking to a broader audience, whether internal or external stakeholders.
A planning process is an opportunity to open up the brains of the leaders and lay out a clearly articulated plan for what the organization will prioritize and where it is headed. When done inclusively, as Bloom promotes, it also invites others into the strategic thinking and creates opportunities for constructive grappling that yields more durable (and shared) mindsets and beliefs about what the organization stands for and where it’s headed next.
So yes, let’s all become strategic thinkers who contribute to, and produce, highly effective strategic plans.
