Type & Strategic Planning:Connecting Vision and Action

Jennifer TuckerHile RutledgeOKA (Otto Kroeger Associates)(703) 591-6284www.typetalk.com

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Agenda

• What is Strategic Planning? • Elements of a Strategic Plan • A Strategic Plan Model• Adding Type Context• Exercises to Support Strategic Planning• A Temperament Perspective

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What Is Strategic Planning?

• Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy.

• How it happens:

– Time bound activity performed intermittently - by Executive team, or by a cross-functional, multi-level team

– Dedicated office or point of responsibility who “owns” ongoing evolution and maintenance of plan

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Elements of a Strategic Plan

• Mission and Vision• Environmental Scan (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opps, Threats)• Customer Analysis• Strategic Goals and Objectives • Priority Actions and Performance Measures• Principles (Values) and Evaluation Criteria• Implementation and Communication

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A Strategic Plan Model

Vision Goals

S W

O T

Objectives | Priority Actions | Performance Measures

TIMELINE

MISSION

• Principles/Values and Evaluation Criteria• Implementation and Communication Planning

Customers/Stakeholders

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Strategic Planning: A Type Context

• Strategic planning is positioned as an predominantly Intuitive activity. Common terms: visioning, thinking outside the box. Too often, this results in plans that are too abstract and not used to support daily decision making and business planning.

• When a plan is overly Sensing, it becomes a compilation of people’s daily activities – too specific and all encompassing to reveal the big picture and general decision making criteria.

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Strategic Planning: A Type Context

• Strategic planning that overemphasizes Thinking tends to leave out the customer’s perspective, and fails to spend adequate time on change management and communication.

• Strategic planning that overemphasizes Feeling tends to omit the decision criteria and performance measures that will drive tradeoff decisions and objective measures of progress.

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Strategic Planning as an Iterative Z-ModelAll Function Problem Solving Model

SENSING•Describe the “As-Is” - What facts describe

where we are?•What past experience can we learn from? •What are the important details on which to

focus?•What are the practical realities with which to

contend? •What should we keep that works?

INTUITION•What are the patterns or themes in the “As

Is” data?•What’s the big picture view of the future?

What’s “To Be?”•Are there relevant models or concepts to help

frame our future?•What are the possibilities or options ahead

of us? What could we do?

THINKING•What are the criteria that will determine the

best goals and decisions?•What are our best alternatives, with their

respective pros and cons? •What are the most logical solutions and

directions?•How will we objectively assess progress and

success?

FEELING•With whom do we need to collaborate and

in what ways?•How will the proposed options and goals

impact the various people (both internal and external stakeholders) in the situation?

•Which solutions will promote maximum acceptance and ownership?

•How will we communicate our plan to others?

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Pulling in the Attitudes

Involvement & Communication

• Who to involve in the Strategic Planning process? Breadth of engagement?

• How to communicate and maintain both internally and with customers?

• What parts of the plan reflect competitive intell, and should be kept close? To whom and how?

Milestones & Contingency Checks

• What milestones will be set as check-in points, and how will that occur? Who “owns” the plan?

• How do we plan to be flexible? How will we know when a goal or objective no longer makes sense?

• What are some of the contingencies that would trigger a plan review?

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Exercises to Support Strategic Planning

• Environmental Scan: SWOT Analysis• Customer (Stakeholder) Inventory • Establishing Goals • Mission and Vision • Principles and Values

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Environmental Scan: SWOT Analysis

• Establish four total stations: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Ask the question, “In thinking about the next 1 (3, 5) years,” what are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?”

• Each person gets a marker, and in open space format, takes 15-ish minutes to visit all charts to put up ideas. You can check ideas you agree with, or write a question mark if you don’t understand. You may not cross others’ ideas out.

• You may want to follow with a voting exercise to narrow down to a subset on each chart.

• If the group has type, follow with a discussion about how the group’s preferences play out in its SWOT – what is Sensing, Intuitive, etc etc about the charts?

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Customer (Stakeholder) Inventory

• Each participant gets a pad of sticky notes, and is asked to generate one post-it for each customer – group may decide to focus on a broader term, like “stakeholder.”

• All post-its are put on a flip chart; repeats and similar responses are clustered together.

• Process the data: What kinds of customers got the most post-its? What post-its can be grouped together and which need to be segmented?

• Rank the groups in order of importance. What criteria did the group use (overtly or not) to do the ranking?

• Start a new chart next to your “Customer Map” - how might the map change in 1, 2, 5 years? Who might disappear? Who would we want to see added? How will the list change?

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Establishing Goals

• This is a process for sparking ideas for new goals that uses and builds on the SWOT analysis.

– Group is divided into three subgroups, each one develops draft goals based on the following questions: (1) How can we best use our Strengths to Manage our Weaknesses? (2) How can we best use our Strengths to Leverage Opportunities? (3) How can we best use our Strengths to Mitigate Threats?

– If you have enough people, establish a 4th group to answer: How do we best communicate our Strengths both internally and externally?

– The output of this exercise is a brainstormed list of goals that can help jumpstart the goals and objectives process, and as a baseline to assess Vision and Mission – how well do they align? (Do the goals reflect the mission? Will they actually achieve the vision?)

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Mission and Vision

• If the organization has vision and mission already… – Write down on a flip chart and count the number of words in each one.

– Assign group the task of crafting new statements that are each half as

many words as the previous one…. E.g., If mission is 32 words long, groups needs to create variations that are 16, 8, 4 and 2 words long.

– Goal: Cut to the core of what is truly important – also helps identify and align the principles/values with the mission (and see if customer ranking is aligned with the mission).

• If the organization does not yet have these defined…. – Brainstorm a list of concepts or words that should be included in the

vision and mission – and then use that as a “word list” to construct draft statements. If too long, continue with the steps above.

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Principles and Values (Evaluation Criteria)

• If the organization has principles and values already… – Ranking exercise to overtly state relative importance – what trumps

what when difficult decisions need to be made? – Break into pairs, and have each pair select TWO principles or values

that might conflict. Develop a case study for how this conflict might be seen in daily work. How would the conflict play out, and what guidance would you give to those faced with this challenge? Does the case study suggest a change or definition is needed?

• If the organization does not yet have these defined…. – Brainstorm a list of principles and values, using the same process as

the customer exercise above. Continue with the steps above.

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Temperament Summary

QUEST STYLE ACHILLES HEEL

Identity Catalyst Guilt

Competency Visionary Incompetence

Belonging toMeaningfulInstitutions

Stabilizer orTraditionalist

Disarray orDisorganization

ActionTroubleShooter

or Negotiator

Routine orInactivity

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A Summary Temperament Perspective

• Different temperament groups conceptualize and approach strategic planning differently

• Knowing the temperament of both your strategic planning group, and the organization implementing it, can help you design an effective strategic planning effort

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NF Strategic Planning

• Tend to approach Strategic Planning as a way to capture and communicate the human values of the organization – respond well to future-focused visioning focused on employee and customer needs.

• May get caught up in the conceptual model of the future, and fail to connect it with today’s realities or past experiences/lessons learned. May avoid developing specific and concrete actions, milestones and metrics.

• Tend to generate an inspirational document that paints a compelling and motivational vision, focused on values and customer-oriented topics. Communication is generally on the radar – often have lots of energy about the Vision-Mission poster for the reception area.

• Push them to consider the tradeoffs that must be made and the conflicts that may come from deciding NOT to pursue certain goals. Some customers really are less important than others.

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NT Strategic Planning

• Tend to resonate well with traditional (and academic) models of strategic planning – thinking outside the box to vision a future system. Respond well to visioning elements and articulating future focused goals, and are receptive to possibility.

• May get caught up in the conceptual model of the future, and fail to connect it with today’s realities or past experiences/lessons learned. Those in the organization may find the vision compelling, but not be able to connect the dots to the decisions they actually have to make each day.

• Tend to generate a short visionary document focused on outcomes and objective criteria for success; may omit the customer analysis.

• Push them to focus on implementation and accountability , ensuring that concrete actions are identified that tie into the goals and objectives.

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SJ Strategic Planning

• Respond well to structured strategic planning sessions that allow them to utilize their past experiences and data to construct a concrete future with clear desired outcomes.

• May worry about terminology, distracted by the difference between a vision and mission, and how goals and objectives are defined. Will often refer to “thinking outside the box” as something to put on their checklist.

• Will often generate a long plan that includes extensive detail and specific actions that cover today’s activities.

• Likely to see the plan as done when it is completed. Push them to guess what will happen that is not yet known and consider how they will build flexibility and contingency triggers and check-ins into their plan.

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SP Strategic Planning

• Respond well to short, hands-on interactive strategic planning sessions that build on existing scenarios and pain points to build a practical future.

• Use interactive exercises, and real life case studies that help reveal patterns and root cause analysis that have not been previously discussed.

• Will often generate an operational plan that is short, actionable and responsive to near-term practical market realities.

• Push them to imagine the things that could happen or change in the future, and to develop some larger scale goals that have not previously been identified, but which might help solve or overt known daily crises.

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Questions, Comments, Contact!

Presented by:Jennifer TuckerHile RutledgeOKA (Otto Kroeger Associates)(703) 591-6284www.typetalk.com

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