Dear Reader,

Welcome to the March issue of perspectives!

Thanks to everyone who responded to last month's issue 'A leap of faith'. It's always great to hear your views, and encouraging to know that the article was stimulating and useful.

Do keep the comments coming – and please forward the newsletter to anyone else you think might be interested!

This month, I'm going back to the basics of what strategic planning is ultimately about.


David Booth



Making sense

Mention the term ‘strategic planning' and the chances are it will conjure up images of awayday workshops, detailed projections, spreadsheet models and 2x2 (or 3x3) matrices. Or perhaps it's the final tome of a document or long PowerPoint presentations that spring to mind!

Open any textbook on strategic planning and it's easy to see why it gives the impression of being highly complex and difficult. It's often perceived as a combination of the intellectual, aspirational and confidential that happens away from the day-to-day work of the organisation and that might at some stage be partially shared and even more partially explained.

Yet for all the apparent mystique that surrounds it, strategic planning is ultimately about something very simple: it's how the people in an organisation make sense of where it's going and how it's going to get there.

Everything else follows from this. The process of developing strategy is the journey of discovery the organisation undertakes to make sense of where it's got to and how it sees the issues and opportunities for the future. The techniques of strategic planning are the tools to help this collective thinking.

One way of looking at this is that it's about developing a collective shared view of the world as seen by the organisation. So creating a picture or frame of reference that can be commonly understood is important, and finding the language to express this is a vital part of ‘strategising' - it's about the struggle to make sense and explain what's happening.

This really does emphasise the crucial role of language, pictures, and the process of developing them through discussion and debate – strategy develops through conversations. Much of the effort goes into trying to find and refine how this is expressed so that it ‘strikes a chord' with people in the organisation. Effective strategising results in conveying views that make sense and resonate – often the end result then seems obvious to people. Ineffective strategising ‘falls flat' – analysis without creating meaning, words without motivating a desire to act.

Strategies might or might not be successful – who really knows what will transpire, what events might change the situation facing an organisation? But the difference with effective strategising is that people in the organisation have a common map to help them on their journey – they have a shared way of looking at their situation, and have agreed a direction to set out on, even if they modify these subsequently in the light of what they encounter.

There's a well-known story about a group of Hungarian soldiers who got lost in the Alps, going round in circles in increasing despair. When they had just about given up all hope one of them found an old map in his pocket. Using this, together they managed to make their way back home safely. However, they learnt later that the map was of the Pyrenees, not the Alps! The moral of the story is that the map gave them confidence to act, to make a start on their journey – they picked up the cues on their way that enabled them to adapt and modify their journey.

Effective strategising recognises too how important it is for individuals as well as the organisation to make sense of where they fit and how they can contribute – and as the organisation changes and moves forward, so they need to work out what it means for them. Each of us applies a personal ‘filter' to the way we look at things, a context defined by our individual perspective and understanding. These ‘mental models' continue to develop and adapt as we learn and experience things. So unless we are able to make sense of the organisation's strategy, we will struggle to accept and change what we do accordingly. Being part of the strategising conversations, sharing how the thinking is developing, is vital. It can be easy to just ‘brief' people on the organisation's strategic plan, without recognising that they too need to go through the same mental process of ‘making sense' of things, and it's important to invest time and effort in conversations to help their understanding.

So whenever any of us next find ourselves becoming embroiled in the complexities and technicalities of strategic planning, or wrapped up in the myriad of data, workshops and organisational processes, we can bring ourselves back to what really matters by asking the question, “Are we making sense?”


For further exploration...

Karl Weick is one of the main proponents of the concept of ‘sensemaking'. The story about the Hungarian soldiers was told by him in ‘The Social Psychology of Organizing', Addison Wesley (1979)

In their article ‘Leadership as the enabler of strategizing and organizing' in the December 2006 issue of Long Range Planning, Colville and Murphy express this very succinctly: “The first question in sensemaking is ‘what is going on?' and the second is ‘What do we do next?'. Articles from Long Range Planning can be downloaded from http://www.sciencedirect.com

There is increasing recognition of the importance of language and strategy conversations, as a balance to the traditional view of strategy development as analytical and somewhat detached. For example, Henry Mintzberg uses the term ‘crafting strategy' to reflect the skill and approach required in guiding an organisation on its strategy journey.

 

What do you think?

Reflecting on your own experience of strategic planning processes, and the way in which these happened (rather than the content of the result), does the idea of ‘sensemaking' ring true? Is it useful to consider strategising and organising in this way?

All views welcome!