Yo creo que una buena sesion de planificacion estrategica es el primer eslabon clave en tener un trimestre de exitos!
Desafortunadamente, cuando empece haciendo estos talleres con mis equipos, tenia dificultad de saber donde empezar y en que enfocarme para tener los mejores resultados.
Three Steps to an Effective Strategic Planning Session
I want to write an article on my three steps to have an amazing strategic planning session with your team that inspires, motivates, and sets forth the key objectives to elevate the company, business, or team to the next level of performance.
Step one is to conduct the session off-site. I firmly believe in this approach. By taking the team outside of the usual business environment, you can encourage more strategic thinking. This allows for a broader perspective, enabling you to view the situation from above rather than being stuck in the day-to-day operational rut. This change in environment is crucial as it helps to reframe thinking at least every three months regarding what is important and how to course correct. Therefore, it is essential to hold these sessions off-site and every three months.
Why every three months instead of once a year or once every three years? I have tried various approaches, and I have observed that holding the session once a year opens the door to procrastination. You may start to lag in follow-up, thinking, “Oh, it’s okay. I can skip this week.” However, what doesn’t get followed up on, what isn’t measured, doesn’t get done. It is vital to maintain momentum and drive after the off-site.
Step two is that the most important aspect is not just the off-site itself, but what you do immediately afterward. Schedule the second and third sessions of the year on the calendar and ensure that the necessary people are involved. More importantly, consider what actions you are taking on a weekly basis. After the strategic off-site, everyone should be clear on the objectives, targets, and stretch targets. You should have a vision, whether it is a three-year, five-year, or even a ten-year plan. Personally, I prefer a three-year plan, as it provides a fundamental direction for the team to understand where they need to go.
The key is to break down the three-year vision into smaller, manageable chunks, which are the key initiatives. I recommend having no more than eight key initiatives every quarter that the team focuses on. Additionally, it is crucial to schedule weekly strategic checkpoints to assess progress. I typically conduct these on Wednesdays right after my staff meeting. All team members involved in specific projects sit down to review progress and outline key actions for the upcoming week.
If any projects require more attention, we define the deliverables and what success looks like for each project in a separate strategic meeting. This may involve bringing in additional experts or seeking feedback from other businesses with more experience. The purpose of these weekly checkpoints is to monitor progress, identify key actions for the coming week, and ensure that we are moving in the right direction without needing to course correct.
Step three is to incorporate team-building activities throughout the workshop. Avoid separating business discussions from team-building exercises. I prefer to sprinkle team-building activities throughout the session. For example, after a vision-setting session, you might engage in a simple team-building exercise, such as passing a hula hoop around or holding a paper airplane competition. These activities do not need to be extravagant; the key is to take the time to do something that fosters team bonding and relationships.
Continue to integrate these activities throughout the day. I typically conduct my sessions over one or two long days, which allows for ample attention and strategic discussions to clarify each key initiative and its objectives for the next three months.
For bonus points, ensure that you include team-building and breakout sessions focused on the projects. I like to start with visioning and identifying what is working and what is not, gathering input from the team. I utilize tools such as Menti to collect feedback and engage the team in games that highlight important metrics from the past year, such as product shipments, on-time delivery, revenue, and margins.
In the afternoon, we review the projects we have been working on as a business, distilling them down to the critical ones we want to focus on. We showcase these in the morning session and select the most important projects through voting or other methods. In the afternoon, we conduct breakout sessions with experts and other perspectives to keep the energy high and prevent fatigue.
I prefer to keep breakout groups small, with no more than four or five people, to encourage discussion and collaboration. At the end of the session, we create a one-pager that outlines the problem, what we aim to accomplish with the project in three months, key actions, next steps, and a potential timeline for completion.
These are my tips for conducting an effective strategic planning session. I hope this helps, and feel free to reach out with any comments or questions. Thank you!
In terms of specific outcomes or results observed from implementing this, the first is clarity on what to say no to. One of the biggest issues in business and team management is project creep, where numerous projects pile up, and none of them get completed. Only what has your attention is what you will focus on at the moment. If you divide your energy and attention among 30, 40, or in our case, 223 projects, it becomes challenging to gather enough energy to complete them and achieve the successful outcomes needed.
For me, the most important aspect is focus. With that focus comes the ability to say no to the things we have decided not to prioritize at this time. This is the first key takeaway.
The other key point is that you become significantly more creative with the items you are focusing on. Since you are more focused, you can dedicate more time to release things strategically and work out the tactics necessary to complete them. By allocating more team members and resources to fewer projects, we can actually complete them more quickly. What used to take six months to a year, and often went unfinished, can now be completed in three months.
In terms of the criteria, select the key initiatives for each quarter. This process involves understanding current performance and clearly seeing the vision. From there, identify the gaps and the issues that are capturing everyone’s attention and impacting the center or the business. Prioritize the initiatives that will have the most significant impact and need to be addressed first.
Consider prerequisites and determine what is more important. For example, having a solid process for quotations is essential to secure orders before streamlining the order review process to delivery. It is crucial to have a clear understanding of the current pain points and what needs to be done to foster growth. This understanding represents another major milestone we need to achieve.
In terms of strategies to maintain momentum and accountability between quarterly sessions, we have two key approaches.
First, we utilize a radar approach where we focus our key projects in the center of the radar. We also identify other important projects for the business that need attention, and we determine the levels of the organization that will review these projects and the frequency of those reviews. For critical projects, I have observed that weekly reviews are effective. For us, Wednesdays work best. Our continuous improvement champion reviews the other projects on a biweekly basis.
Regarding accountability, we primarily use Microsoft 365. However, more important than the tool itself is the commitment to carve out one hour to review tasks, regardless of where they are tracked—whether in Microsoft Planner, on a whiteboard, in Asana, or in Trello. During this time, we go through each action for every project, ensuring there is progress and setting forth actions for the coming week.
I believe that having a clear definition of what constitutes project completion and what it will look like is crucial for maintaining momentum and ensuring accountability regarding who will complete each task and by when.
A couple of people have asked me about what to do with engaged participants. I believe there are three main points to consider.
First, I prefer to arrange the room in a U-shape. This way, everyone can see each other. We have strict policies regarding laptops and cell phones during key moments of the presentation, allowing breaks for people to check messages at specific intervals.
Second, it is essential to have the right breakouts, as I explained before, keeping them in smaller sizes of 4 to 5 people maximum per discussion group. This approach ensures that participants are actively engaged in reviewing and providing comments, leading to a smooth flow of discussion.
Finally, the third point involves strategies for rotating teams at the end. Once everyone has their one-page charter for the project, we want to gather more ideas for each project. We keep the leader of one project at their table or area of the room and rotate the other 3 or 4 participants to the next project. For example, if we have 6, 7, or up to 8 projects, we would conduct 6 different rotations of the teams to generate more ideas and strengthen each project.
Some common challenges I observe when teams attempt to implement strategic planning sessions include: 1) not doing enough prework and preplanning, and 2) not allowing sufficient time for conversations or presentations to run over. I always recommend having at least one free hour during the morning session and at least one free hour during the afternoon session for sessions that may extend, especially during brainstorming activities.
Additionally, the leader, with prior input from key team members, needs to have a clear vision and a three-year plan already prepared. Personally, I believe that a significant portion of the prework falls on the team leader. It is essential to start the conversation or the off-site by reflecting on what we have accomplished in the last three months or, if it is a year-end off-site, in the last year.
We should discuss our achievements, identify opportunities or pain points, and consider what our customers are saying. With all this data, we can showcase our three-year plan and establish what I refer to as the strategic compass that everyone needs to align with. This approach reframes the discussion, ensures that we are all on the same page, and provides a clear sense of purpose regarding the objectives of the off-site and what we aim to solve or improve.
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