THE 4 ELEMENTS OF STRATEGIC PLANNING TO ACHIEVE BUSINESS LEADERSHIP EXCELLENCE

If you’re not planning to succeed, you’re planning to fail in your business. 

Hey folks, Doctor Kevin here. Today, you’re going to learn the basics of strategic planning, of creating a growth plan in your business so you can have measured milestones towards a greater vision in your company. 

Most businesses do a bad job of strategic planning or don’t do it at all. There are some basics that you need to understand and when you do, you’ll begin to understand your business is biased when it comes to strategic planning, so you can do it with purpose and intention in a way that guarantees your success in hitting that larger vision. 

Let’s dig in. 

There are really just four elements in the strategic planning process. There’s the 

• strategic element, 
• the tactical element, 
• the analytic element,
• and the relational element. 

But they must be done in a particular chronology, a specific order, and the culture of your team is going to drive and dictate a certain order that won’t be optimal. 

Now, the neat thing is these four core elements – the strategic element, the tactical element, the analytical element, and the relational element – are also core art table properties that play out in our own personalities. We all have a bias. Some people are more big picture, some are more detailed.  Some are more urgent and objective, getting stuff done. Some are more driven towards harmony and helping others move forward. 

Understanding your bias and then the bias of your business is an essential first step in being able to plan intentionally. Because intentional planning requires that you do it in a particular order. 

So the first thing I want to do is break down these four core elements to help you understand what they are, and then we’ll look at your team through that lens and be able to understand what that process is. It will walk right through that process, so you have great clarity in taking your team and your organization forward towards the vision. 

Now, strategic planning is so vital, and understanding these four key elements is essential. In fact, I wrote the book about it right, and I understand that these four key elements play out in every team and they play out in the planning process and they play out individually. 

Understanding how they play out is key, and being able to then move through these phases with intention is the key to success. 

So the first of the star processes is the strategic process. Now when you’re in that strategic mindset, it requires that you’re looking at the big picture, your understanding the vision. You’re not grounded in today, you’re projecting into the future. This is where abstraction happens. This is the heart of creativity, innovation, and invention. 

Archetypally, I think of it as the eagle, right? The eagle sees the entire landscape. The eagle is able to see the contours of the land. Not caught in the weeds, not even seeing the forest, but seeing the entire planet, the landscape from above. So the strategic quality is one that requires an out-of-the-box thinking process. That’s the strategic quality. It’s essential to understand this when we’re moving through the strategic planning process. This is one part of that process. 

Another part of the process is the tactical element. The tactical part of the process is often driven by urgency but when done well, tactical teams and teams create a real tactical plan after they understand the strategy, understand who is doing what and when. This is more objectively driven and it’s driven is the keyword. The tactical element really has the drive to get things done to create accountability and measurable results. 

The archetype here is the cougar, the cougar is cunning and relentless as it takes down its prey. It’s not personal, it’s survival. It is singular in its focus. It’ll stalk its prey and it will execute. 

That is the tactical element. When playing out a strategic plan, it plays out as you’ll see in how you create your team. 

The analytic phase is the detail-oriented phase. This is where you’re digging down into the weeds, doing the research, understanding the data. It’s here and now focused. When you’re in the analytical phase of problem-solving, you’re understanding what is. Some organizations will do a SWOT analysis, others will do surveys to understand not only the state of the business but the state of the industry and the economy in general. 

Archetypally, the analytic phase is the squirrel. The squirrel is the one down in the weeds in the crevasses of the rocks and looking down in seeing the details. When you’re in that squirrel load in strategic planning you understand reality as it is, and you’re in the weeds. That’s the analytic phase. 

The last phase is the relational phase. The relational phase really is when you’re on that page, you’re giving attention to the human impact. Every organization is a human organization. I’ve worked with manufacturers who say “we’re manufacturing organizations”, banks who say they’re financial organizations. They miss the mark. All organizations are human organizations. They’re for humans by humans to a human end. End of story.

Now the product they might have could be a manufactured product or a financial product or a healthcare product, but they’re all human organizations. 

Now the interesting thing is often when this isn’t given enough attention, I’ll see organizations that will overlook the human impact and make decisions that have a negative impact they didn’t see coming and they end up having to deal with it in the long term. 

So archetypally, this is the Otter. Now otters live in pods. They depend on each other for their success, for their livelihood, and they play together. This is where cohesion is developed in an organization. Cohesion, collaboration, communication, commitment, all of those human elements. That’s the relational element. 

Now, the amazing thing for me is that every individual, every human, we have these four lenses that we use to look at the world through. Yet based on the preference of your personality, you’re going to favor two of these and disfavor another two. 

For example, I saw a lot of teams and they were strong analytic and tactical teams. Actually, they were tactical 1st and then analytic. They drove to get things done. When there was a problem on the table, without fail, they jumped in and got to work. Then they found the data to support the decision they already made. 

The strategy was an afterthought that is coming up with other possible options to do things differently. They didn’t spend time on it and certainly didn’t pay attention to what the impact was going to be. How did this play out for them? They made quick decisions, found data to support it, nobody in the organization understood why or how it all tied together. They didn’t know how it tied into the larger vision and they didn’t get people on board. So their initiatives flopped, their initiatives failed. They didn’t get engagement, they didn’t get bind. 

I’ve seen other organizations that are structured this way. They’ll prefer the tactical and the analytic, that’s part of the DNA of the organization based on the individual personality preferences of the people around the executive table. So they decided to do an organizational change strategy. They look at it as a chess game. They move the pieces around, they decide it’s great. They find the data to support their perspective that they’ve already bought into, so they’re kind of blinded. These other two will become the blind spot, and they did. In this organization, they executed this change strategy, brought everybody to the central hub down in Charlotte to let them know what this grand idea was. And not only did it flop, but they also didn’t get people on board. 

The best solution to any problem is not only worthless if nobody buys in, it’s detrimental. In this case, people rebelled against it. They created a mutiny. They didn’t see what the impact was gonna be.

It’s essential to understand all four of these elements and to know that every organization will prefer to and defer to. That is we’ll have a blind spot. One more example. I’ve seen one organization that was strongly driven strategically. That was what they looked at. First and foremost, they were strategic and tactical. They saw the big picture and they executed. 

However, what they struggled with was getting people on board, and they often made decisions that were based on all the data, so they didn’t take time to really look into and understand and do their due diligence. Because of that, they ended up finding additional data afterward that did indeed have a negative impact. 

So what I’ve also seen in this one, but it was a marketing organization. I think there were very high-minded individuals, very good at seeing the big picture. However, their mind was always on the future. That’s really good for executives to have a mind and eye for the vision of the future, however, they missed a lot of the important data in detail that ultimately shot them in the foot and created resistance across the organization. 

So understanding your organization’s DNA in your team preference along these four lines, what I call the total, right? To understand that there is an order by which these will be prioritized in your organization in fact, and if I’m your executive team, your executive team will spend half of its time in one of these, it’s preferred area.