Nothing ever stays the same. Change is a constant of life.

And while the last half century has heralded exciting and unimaginable advances in just about everything, despite the many positives, once-healthy organizations are experiencing challenges leadership seems powerless to successfully address and overcome.

This article outlines a different mothodology for strategic planning, one which enrolls the organization’s entire constituency, enabling the participation of stakeholders in conversations for possibilities. This different planning model encourages organizations to leave their baggage behind, create new opportunity to dream of, and document the "what could be", consistent with the organization's vision.

Start in the Future

Despite best intensions, strategic planning exercises sometimes fizzle out without producing desired results, leaving participants disillusioned and reluctant to re-engage…or worse.

Sound familiar? 

Fortunately, there is a better way - one which begins in the future, includes the setting of outrageous goals, and which is characterized by different terminology.

For example, a description of an organization’s future reality might include:

• the organization's new being is a fully integrated, highly recognized and respected organization representing the interests of all its members.

And a description of the strategic outcomes of that future reality might read:

• the leadership team becomes complete with its past as it was known it to be, honouring all that has been accomplished, with respect and dignity.
• the leadership team transforms into a newly integrated, high-performance team which develops guiding principles and practices, demonstrating unprecedented abilities for teamwork, communications, management, and planning.
• this newly integrated leadership team shifts from a reactive, fly by the seat of its pants culture, to being a well orchestrated and managed team, employing the competence, excellence, and mastery of all team members.
• the newly integrated leadership team develops an actionable, dynamic strategic plan, formulated collectively, communicated powerfully, demonstrating implementation day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year.
• the newly integrated leadership team restores the relationship with its constituencies in such a way that new conversations for possibilities, opportunities and action emerge.
• the newly integrated leadership team designs and *enrolls its entire constituency into its new beginning and its organizational culture, committing to complete integration, collaboration, and co-operation, effectively creating a forward-thinking network of conversations.

Note: * "enrollment" is defined as generating a possibility in another person's listening, such that the other person, group, or organization takes action consistent with that possibility. Note also, this approach starts in the future - at the end point - and works backward to the present. 

In other words, the leadership team creates the organization’s strategic future, transports itself there, and documents the action plan that got it there.

Not rocket-science, but hard to do

The process is difficult because of the natural tendency to hold on to what is known to be, what works, and what doesn’t work. And because there is no shortage of past experiences, and because of a lack of sufficient trust and a collective vision, truly committing to a strategic future does not happen easily.

Using this different methodology, conversations take place against a background of relatedness, either for possibility, to identify opportunity, to specify action, or to resolve breakdowns.

With this model, the leadership team redefines its business, and commits to, and documents:

• its strategic intent (e.g., “the leadership team leads the transformation of the organization into one which is recognized and respected as being world class”)
• its strategic purpose (e.g., “the organization outperforms on every expectation”)
• its new being in the form of a bold promise of what the organization will become

For example, if the organization's strategic purpose was - “within 3 years we outperform on every expectation”, the leadership team would document:

• what that would look like and feel like, and
• what each member of the team would need to do to make that happen 

Using this strategic planning model, planning is everything; the plan is nothing…