The science behind strategic planning

The best of both worlds: strategic planning for boosting productivity and employee well-being

Very often organisations, from small to big, spend a lot of time in strategy meetings (ie., deciding what’s our next big goal), but then they just don’t do enough to implement their strategy.

It’s the common strategy-execution gap. An intermediate layer, we call it strategic planning, can be extremely useful for bringing your team on the same page and showing all the big picture. You show them all what’s important to do and why, set (realistic!) deadlines, and periodically track your outcomes, it’s not so hard and has multiple benefits for your business.

Lack of clarity and focus, procrastination, investing a lot of effort in activities that don’t move the business forward but trick us in feeling ‘productive’, loss of motivation, working at cross purposes… I don’t go so far as saying that strategic planning is the final solution to all these problems which are commonly found in organisations of all sizes, but for sure it could help.

There are many reasons why strategic planning is so effective. Here I’ll review some of the research findings which explain the usefulness of strategic planning.

There are at least two causes of this problems, our innate tendency to procrastinate what is hard to do or we just don’t like, and the lack of explicit priorities, and both can be tackled by accurate strategic planning.

It’s hard to close the intention-action gap. We make plans, but then we often fail in executing them. From not attending gym classes to postponing that cold-call to a potential new customer, we often put off important tasks. Yes, procrastination.

During a standard working day, we usually have a lot of things to do. Some are very important, many are just trivial tasks. What should be done first? How should I schedule my tasks for the day or for the week?

Strategic planning can be very useful for making the priorities explicit: a well-crafted visual strategic plan shows the important activities only, so at a glance all your team will understand which are the things they should focus in order to move the business forward. Anything not included in the strategic plan, including all the nitty-gritty stuff such as fix bugs, reply emails, and so on, has a lower priority and should be done ‘when there is time’.

You can easily imagine the consequences: misalignment, frustration, working at cross purposes, lack of focus, poor productivity, and so on.

The core idea behind the Commander’s Intent (CSI) is that, rather than apply tight command and control, leaders should provide a clear sense of the outcomes they seek and the parameters they will accept. In other words, you should tell your team where you want to go and why you need to get there and leave them free to use their skills and knowledge to reach the desired outcome.

This smart communication tool has been developed by U.S. Army to help them plan in the face of extreme uncertainty, and it’s very useful in business too: it then doesn’t matter if something unexpected occurs, with the CSI your employees will be free to improvise and take initiative to reach the desired goal anyway, instead of just freezing or calling for another meeting.

Here’s a template for starting to use the Commander’s Intent right now in your startup:

Our goal is to …………………………………………………… because …………………………………………………… and we have to do it before ………………………… .

Success would be …………………………………………………… .

It would be okay if …………………………………………………… .

We need to reconsider if …………………………………………………… .

If you’re using I Am Why for strategic planning, you’ll find that all the stuff you need for create a CSI that really delivers is already there, just click on a bar of an activity to open it and fill out the fields.

One of the most useful skills for any leader is the ability to point out the right objective. For all of us who are not born already as leaders, there are some easy rules we can follow when creating a new goal for our team.

If your goal is just a to-do list, then you’re doing it wrong. Describe what the desired final state is and why it’s so important, this is the main lesson of the Commander’s Intent.

Communication can easily be destroyed by a very frequent (although too often overlooked) cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge. According to it, when communicating we unknowingly assume that the others have the background to understand. In other words, recipients get maybe 60% of the original message, while we are sure that they got 90% or more of it. You can’t expect focus and alignment if your teammates just don’t understand your plan and, as a team leader, is your duty to send out clear messages. Beat the curse of knowledge by using a simple (but not simplistic, you’re not communicating to preschoolers!) language and, more importantly, keeping in mind your teammates (how they call things, what they already know and what information could be missing, etc.).

The principles of good goal setting, according to the Management by Objectives criteria developed by Peter Drucker, can be summarised by the SMART acronym. Therefore, a good objective should be:

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Research agrees with this common wisdom: according to a phenomenon called picture superiority effect, we respond to, process and remember visual data better than any other type of data.

Finding the right information on a long text document is a costly process in terms of time and cognitive resources (especially attention and working memory), while the same process using visual content is faster and cheaper, thus leaving our precious cognitive resources free for what’s really important, such as starting to get the important things done. This means that if your strategic planning is a long text document or a big spreadsheet, then well, you’re placing an extra cognitive burden on everyone who should read it and act on it.

It’s hard to accurately forecast how long will it take to accomplish a project. We are usually too optimistic, so when planning how long will take us to complete a project, we systematically underestimate the total expenditure of time. This happens for big projects (the building of the Sydney Opera House, for example, took ten years longer than expected, and cost $ 102 million instead of the estimated $ 7 million) and small projects (writing this article took me a week longer than planned) too.

This widespread cognitive bias is called planning fallacy, and was first reported by the dynamic duo of cognitive psychology Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky already at the end of the 70s.

Although admittedly hard to completely overcome, there are some ways visual planning can help in debiasing the planning fallacy and create more accurate forecasts.

Seeing your project on a timeline is dramatically more effective for taking an outside view and understanding the passing of time than just imagining it. For example, you can see that a month doesn’t last forever but has a fixed number of working days, and you can see also that there are already some planned activities that will overlap in the same period, so it’s better to be more cautious and move the deadline to a later time.

In sum, investing in effective strategic planning means investing in productivity for your company, but also in employees’ well-being. It’s a clear win-win situation.

Thanks for reading! If you find this article useful, feel free to share it with your network. Happy project managing!

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