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Best Practices for Strategic Planning

Why Strategic Planning Facilitators Rewatch This 60-Minute Best Practices Masterclass SME Strategy's Anthony Taylor reveals 66% of employees are disengaged from work—Gallup study shows re-engaging staff through strategic planning unlocks "up to 20% productivity" gains. Yet most organizations treat planning as document creation rather than alignment process. The three-priorities discipline at 13:41 destroys resource dilution: "If you have ten strategic priorities with 10% resources each, you lose 1-2% switching between floors—spreading resources like peanut butter." Meanwhile nine priorities means "you don't have any strategic priorities because you're just doing too much stuff." The resistance psychology at 26:51 exposes change management failure: "Benefit of vision should be greater than pain of changing to get there"—without compelling future state, employees default to "thing that gets them in least amount of trouble, often not what you want them to do." The Harvard execution study at 30:32 quantifies success factors: interviewed 2,600 people at 31 companies, top three traits were "decision rights, flow of information, and motivators"—understanding what people want versus imposing leader's vision. Strategic lesson: alignment process matters more than plan document quality—pull versus push, three priorities versus ten, cultural buy-in versus executive decree determine execution success. 5 Key Timestamps: [05:37] The Disengagement Productivity Crisis – "Gallup study found 66% of employees are disengaged from work, cause is you're losing lot of productivity—could gain up to 20% productivity by re-engaging staff into strategy and what they're doing." Strategic planning creates engagement mechanism: "biggest benefit for CEOs work with us is after we put strategic planning process in place, they had more time to stay at their level, work on things really important because able to delegate task, empowers team" [08:46] The Alice In Wonderland Direction Problem – "Famous quote from Alice in Wonderland: Alice walking in forest, Cheshire Cat appears, she says 'which road should I take?' Cat says 'where are you trying to go?' She says 'I don't know' and he says 'well any road will get you there.'" Key difference: "if you have nowhere to go then no matter what you do you're gonna get there—strategic planning helps you pick best opportunities for you and your team" [13:41] The Three-Priority Resource Concentration – "Your strategic priorities like floors of building—if you had ten strategic priorities, you move floor to floor with maximum 10% time, money, resources allocated to each, make small progress in lot of initiatives but worse is takes you time to wait for elevator, switching between priorities." Rationale: "using three strategic priorities helps make easy to communicate with rest of team, mentally easier to remember—focusing on everything thus focusing on nothing in particular" [26:51] The Change Management Value Equation – "Benefit of vision and benefit of that future should be greater than pain of changing to get there—people don't like change, so why would people want to change? It's gonna mean doing something differently." Creating compelling future: "vision and benefit of future should be greater than pain of changing to get there will make strategic plan easier to implement"—without this, employees resist execution [30:26] The Default Behavior Economic Reality – "Values and strategic priorities are mental models rooted in psychology to make decisions easier—if employees don't have clear direction, they're gonna do thing that gets them in least amount of trouble." Decision framework absence: "if they don't have clear way of being and acting, don't have values and vision and strategy, they're gonna do thing that gets them in least amount of trouble—often that thing is not what you want them to do" Read More

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• Nov 2025