Nail your next 8 weeks: how to keep strategy alive

In this article:

• How to run a great strategic check-in
• Free template for a 2-day strategy session

Strategies are great, and 3-5 year plans are important, but they can be too abstract to take priority over the urgent and unexpected things that pop up on the daily.

Strategic progress is the most important job of any leader. It's why we have leaders. You're the ones who can see the big picture and connect the outcomes you want to the work people do everyday.

Keeping those big dreams alive and making them real doesn't come easy, but it is the single most important function of your job and the time you spend together as a group.

Most of your leadership team meetings probably get hijacked by operational rats and mice. You quickly mention an email before you get stuck into the real stuff, and half an hour is lost. Your phone rings, so you step out. 

Unless you carve out a regular cadence of dedicated strategy-only time, it will not happen by accident. In my work, I've found eight weeks to be the magic number. It's why Not An MBA is eight weeks long - students stay motivated and invested, without getting bored or skipping sessions. 

8 week planning works because:

• It's long enough to do something important, but short enough to stay motivated about
• Change that isn't implemented within 8 weeks is exponentially more likely to fail
• It's outside of regular planning cycles (quarterly, annually) and thus picks up more initiatives that are in-train or mid-implementation

But how do you use that time well?

Here's some ideas for how to run exciting and engaging strategy away days that will keep people on track and keep your big picture plan moving forward.

Logistics

• Spend your time out of the office so that people bring fresh perspective to the conversation
• Put it in people's calendar with enough time to enable them to plan for it, and let them know this is an important part of their job as leaders - not an "extra" to add on top of their existing workload
• Order good catering. It's easier to think well when we're fed and nourished. Food brings people together.
• Spend more than one day on it. It alleviates some of the pressure on Day 1 to get to "decision making" mode and disrupts the time-boxing that comes with a regular work day.

What to Do Together

Here's a sample agenda for your strategy away time

DAY 1

1. Remind people of your goals and big picture plans.

Distribute hard copies of your most recent strategic document and keep them handy throughout the day. Make strategy the focus and the lens through which all conversations take place.

2. Celebrate success

Talk about what's gone well over the last eight weeks, sharing all the ways you've made progress. You've definitely achieved more than you realise, and you've already forgotten half of it. Measuring the distance we've already travelled stops our goals from feeling like hypothetical future states and repositions them as work-in-progress.  

3. Scrutinise failure

Use problems and disruptions as valuable learning experiences. Debug something that went badly and take immediate action by changing a process, policy or rule that will make it harder for the same failure to happen next time. The people who made the mistakes don't have the mandate you do to fix it, so don't just theorise - make the decision while you're there.

4. Rally around a shared project 

Look at the work you've got already coming up and workshop how to do that in a way that aligns with your strategic priorities. Most strategic planning days wind up with us committing to do new things when our plates are already full, rather than changing how we do the stuff that's happening anyway.

One Council I'm working with is currently reviewing their asset management planning for the next ten years. Rather than focusing their next strategy session on all the new things they want to do (service level reviews, community engagement strategy, organisational structure et al) they're spending their time working out how to make this project a lever for strategic progress.

Each business group will feed into the process, bringing their expertise to the table, rather than leaving it up to the Infrastructure department to handle alone.

Finance - How do we make these numbers easy for people to understand and engage with?

Democracy - How can we make these future scenarios tangible for Councillors?

Regulatory - How do we make our development rules more enabling and useful?

HR - How do we encourage people to make long-term decisions rather than focus on short-term KPIs?

IT - How do we make sure the right information is accessible and useful?

And so on. By making their goals concrete and working together on an important piece of work, this Council makes strategy a shared daily job, not a siloed theoretical future.

DAY 2

The second day of your strategy session has only one job: planning for action. After all the good ideas that came out of yesterday's workshopping session, it's time to make good.

1. Tasks, time and money

Set achievable targets and deadlines that lead to tangible steps over the next eight weeks, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Agree how you'll communicate these intentions to your teams, and make trade-offs in the room about other projects or funding that may need de-prioritising as a result.

2. Premortem

Look at what might go wrong, test your thinking for holes and assumptions and, where-ever possible shrink the size of your plans. The excitement and inspiration from yesterday will inflate your optimism bias and make it difficult to stick to your intentions when you get back to your desk.

3. Implementation

Spend your final session of the day doing. Put things in your calendar, draft memos to staff, reallocate budget and make initial phone calls to get the ball rolling. Committing in the room gives you a head start and makes it much harder to back out later.

Here's a sample agenda you can use to plan your next two-day strategy session.

Good luck!

For more help on how to run powerful strategic conversations, take a look at Meetings that Matter, the only facilitator training that teaches leaders how to drive action outside the meeting room. The final live training for 2022 takes place on 13 September.