In the ever-changing business landscape, the ability to plan for the future isn’t just a way to achieve a competitive advantage but a necessity in growing a sustainable business. At its core, long-term strategic planning is about creating a ‘vision’ for the future and charting a course to get there. I like to break down long-term strategic planning in three ways. 1. The organization’s Vision. 2. Its 10-year target. 3. And Its 5-year Change Missions. This blog post aims to explain these three concepts and enable you to understand how crafting them will benefit your organization for years.
The Vision:
An organization’s vision is a declarative sentence that paints a picture of the organization in its true, ideal state. It describes what the organization aspires to be or achieve throughout its existence. A vision is not bound by a strict timeline. It describes any point in the distant future where the organization’s goals, dreams, wishes, purpose, etc., are met and the organization functions flawlessly. This sentence is the organization’s dream state.
The vision’s purpose is to facilitate alignment between employees and serve as one of the core tenets of the organization’s culture. Every employee should know the organization’s vision and understand how their role affects progress toward it. The statement should motivate employees, celebrating why the company exists and what it aims to achieve through its products or services. Since the vision is the dream state of the company, it is not necessarily tactical. To start to achieve clarity on what steps are necessary to achieve your organization’s vision, a 10-year target is necessary.
The 10-Year Target:
No longer the organization’s dream state, the 10-year target is grounded in the organization’s current reality and answers the question, ‘Where do we want this organization to be in 10 years?’ Though incredibly difficult to predict, it is crucial to agree upon where the company wants to be in 10 years and agree to work toward that goal. A good 10-year target should consider factors such as revenue, employee count, profit margin, lines of business, locations, target markets, etc.
Here, while your leadership team works to uncover the organization’s 10-year target, you will most likely start to see divisions within the team. Some members will want to see the organization grow immensely, making vast changes to its current structure, and others will want to grow it steadily over time or not grow it at all. This is okay. What’s important is to lay all different opinions on the table, debate each of their merits, and ultimately come to an agreement that everybody can stand behind. This alignment in the leadership team is crucial. Without it, every employee under each team member’s umbrella will also be out of alignment with their counterparts. This will do the organization no good, and the 10-year target will never be met. Once the target is finalized, we must then break down that target into tangible pillars of change that the organization must undergo to achieve this lofty goal. Those pillars are the 5-Year Change Missions.
5-Year Change Missions
Now, even more tactical, we will develop 5 – 7 mission-critical items that must occur in the next five years to make our 10-year target feasible. Then, once we uncover those items, we will assign each to a leadership team member who will take charge of accomplishing that change mission over the next five years. A “change mission” is a targeted initiative within an organization to achieve significant changes or transformations. This targeted initiative could be adopting new technologies, entering new markets, achieving a certain market share, achieving a lofty revenue figure, etc. The key to the 5-Year Change Missions is that they are specific and measurable, so their progress and completeness can easily be determined.
Though defining each Change Mission is important, assigning that mission to an individual is where these strategic initiatives begin. They will be responsible for monitoring the progress of that mission over time and reporting that progress to the leadership team. These progress reports should be done quarterly, allowing the other leadership team members to hold the mission leader accountable for their own change mission. The mission owner will also be responsible for breaking these change missions down into tangible short-term tactics to ensure the change mission is completed. These short-term tactics will be discussed in-depth in the next blog post.
The true beauty of long-term strategic planning is in uncovering these items together. Usually done in a full-day session, setting the vision allows leadership team members to paint a picture of the far-off, much-improved organization. The 10-Year Target enables them to start to see what it would take to get to this picture… like a funnel, narrowing the scope through which the organization is viewed. Then, once again, the 5-year change missions further narrow the organization’s view by assigning tangible yet lofty goals to specific individuals.
Once these long-term strategic initiatives are set, they should be documented and visible to the leadership team. Team members should engage with these initiatives weekly, if not daily, to keep these big-picture items in mind. In our next post, we will discuss how these long-term strategic initiatives become more grounded in action and start to be completed. These short-term tactics take the big-picture vision from long-term planning and further break it down into action items that can be decimated and completed by any member of the organization.
The Ragan Group specializes in helping organization uncover their long-term and short-term strategic initiatives. If you would like assistance uncovering yours, please call The Ragan Group! We are here to help. www.theragangroup.com