An email appeared touting a blog about completing your strategic planning process for the year ahead. Based on the source, the description, and the consultant who wrote it, I fully expected to see the same old tired approach to developing strategy. Clicking through to the blog revealed copy-and-paste graphics of all the well-known strategic planning templates and models.
SWOT? Check. Five forces? Check. Balanced scorecard? Check.
The consultant focused the article on the history and development of these strategy tools. That's easy information for an author to track down. If you are scrambling to get your strategic plan done, however, none of that information helps you move ahead successfully. That leave you, as a reader, to:
- Figure out whether these models apply to your business, and
- Work through and complete them successfully if they do apply
That kind of here's a strategy model from a textbook, now go figure out yourself how to complete it approach to developing strategy frosts me. It's mentally lazy and designed to create dependency on the consultant instead of setting you up to successfully developing a winning strategy.
That's why Brainzooming takes a completely different approach to advancing your strategic planning process.
A New Way to Approach a Strategic Planning Process
Not wanting to leave you with my mini-rant, here are resources to help you move forward immediately and complete your strategic plan for next year.
Speeding Up Your Strategic Planning Process
If you need to accelerate your process to develop strategy when time is tight, get your FREE copy of Right Now - 29 Ideas to Speed Up Strategic Planning. Its title is self-explanatory: plenty of ideas to speed up developing your strategy by simplifying it, eliminating wasted steps, and reusing things that still apply.
Addressing Important Strategic Issues
Trying to identify productive strategic thinking questions to answer to successfully complete blank strategic planning templates? Download The 600 Most Powerful Strategic Planning Questions. This Brainzooming resource helps you target the right questions to ask when developing a vision, plus business, branding, marketing, innovation, and customer experience strategies.
Courses to Make Strategy Fun and Engaging
Whether you are facilitating your first strategy process (as one reader was who downloaded 11 Fun Ideas for Strategic Planning) or want to grow your skills and dramatically simplify your process, we have a new answer for you: enroll in Strategy for Success: Strategic Planning Made Simple.
Offering three different strategy courses to match your objectives, I’m even directly available for select enrollees. I will personally accompany you through improving your strategic planning process, saving thousands of dollars in productivity gains for your executive team while delivering dramatically better results.
Help Is Available to Develop Your Strategy!
Don’t get stuck sorting through strategic planning templates without an actionable way to complete them. Take advantage of these and other Brainzooming resources to successfully develop and finish your plan right away!
