The “new normal” of post-pandemic strategy development.
Just as the last year presented unprecedented management challenges, post-pandemic strategy development conversations will face issues never...
3 min read
Cecilia Lynch
Mar 22, 2021 7:04:29 PM
Let me know if this rings true for you.
You are in a conference room (or now in a virtual meeting) where a team member presents a slide of data in a teeny-tiny font. You think you have seen these slides before, yet your eyes strain to identify the piece of data the presenter is discussing.
As you squint your eyes a little tighter, you wonder if there is a paper handout you missed that would help you keep track of the point she’s trying to make.
You are a bit lost; you thought this was a planning meeting.
What role does this data have in your strategic planning?
Is it supposed to reveal some insight into how you should proceed?
When do you get to talk about new stuff?
Sound familiar?
Management teams love data and their tools to analyze them, but they often expect more from them than they can deliver.When attention turns to planning, leadership teams expand their regular review of transactional reporting to include a business evaluation with assessment tools like the four-quadrant SWOT analysis or a deeper dive on their Balanced Scorecard dashboards. They might even spend more time presenting charts and graphs on performance trends against prior periods and targets. This analysis reveals a great deal about current performance, but they rarely show much about what to focus on next.
I too love to analyze data, and assessments are necessary to ground planning efforts. But for the most part, the analysis of data is a focus on lagging indicators. An in-depth review of current performance typically fails to stimulate new thinking that will build on this year’s success to achieve true competitive advantage in the next.
What today’s planning needs more of is context.
But, how do you know you are missing context?
A lack of context makes itself known in many ways. We recognize it when we see these three patterns in our client groups.
Each of these patterns can produce strategic thinking blind spots.
So, as we renew strategic plans post-pandemic, don’t sit through a presentation of teeny-tiny data or waiting for the analysis to end and the new thinking to start. Raise your hand and ask for more context.
You might try one of these questions:
“How should this data influence our strategic thinking?”
“What are the insights you hope your analysis will have on our future direction?”
If there is no immediate response, delicately suggest the group discuss the context you should be examining this data within before proceeding.
If you’ve already tried something like this with less than ideal results, your group may be desperate for strategic planning. Download our Strategy Session Checklist or reach out to us directly to discuss how we can help.
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