Strategy Planning Challenges

            A strategy should be clear and concise. It should be easily understandable by and guide employees at all levels of the company. Given that a company has been created with a mission, a vision, and a set of values, one might think that devising such a strategy is not much of a challenge. However, taking a closer look at the basic elements of a strategy as well as the many strategic options a company may have, it’s clear that devising such a strategy can be a challenging process. 

            Having worked at a medium-sized startup, I have closely witnessed the challenges involved in such strategy planning sessions. During the planning sessions, the executive team spending many hours together, either onsite or offsite, brainstorming ideas and landing on a strategy, which they would then share with the rest of the company. This was received in a variety of ways: while some employees appreciated the insight into the strategy process and results, others wanted more details around the conversations that were had and how they had arrived at such a strategy. Although their process had some benefits, I think there is room for improvement. 

            In the strategy planning meetings, there were about 10 executives, 90% of which were white men and 60% of which were founders of the company. As per ‘Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy,’ it’s important that the strategy planning group consist of a diverse group of people.¹ Most of these 10 people likely favored the status quo, particularly because they were not in the weeds day-to-day and quite proud of how far their status quo strategy had gotten them thus far. Although I don’t think it would have been efficient to have had a large group in that meeting, adding some people with more diverse backgrounds would have encouraged discussion of a wider range of possibilities and conditions.   

            Additionally, although the strategy planning results of this group were enticing, they tended to ignore the capabilities of the current organization. As explained in ‘Good Strategy Execution Requires Balancing 4 Tensions,’ this is often one of the tensions in strategy execution.² In this case, although the team had planned to build a new data analytics product, they did not seriously consider the existing state of their product and engineering team, which at the time included cultural dysfunctions and a messy codebase. Ultimately, such issues caused employee attrition, leading to delays in meeting strategic product and company goals.

            It’s vital to recognize the difficulty in devising and communicating a strategy effectively. Although this team did many things right, it would be greatly beneficial for them to carry out a retrospective on their strategic planning process to acknowledge what went well, what went badly, and what can be improved. Hopefully, with time, this can lead to improved strategic planning processes. 

References:

(1)  Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy (Lafley, Martin, Rivin, and Siggelkow, Harvard Business Review, September 2012) Article: 

(2)  Good Strategy Execution Requires Balancing Four Tensions (Horan and Connerty, Harvard Business Review, November 2017);