Spin #5: Strategic planning

Deadly spin #5:

You should invite everyone to help you write the strategic plan.

Strategic planning is like the World Cup and Olympics of employee engagement. Every four years, it's an organization-wide event and everyone's invited.

It's a great opportunity for you to win over employees. You can show that you're a big fan of consultation and collaboration. That you listen. Genuinely care what employees have to say. And you're humble and confident enough to admit you don't know all the answers or have a monopoly on the best ideas.

As an added bonus, it pays to get employees involved upfront. It builds a sense of shared ownership. The payoff comes when it's time to deliver on the deliverables. Employees will be ready and willing to help with the heavy lifting. Many hands make light work. And as the African proverb says "if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

So here's how we can get everyone going together.

First, let's brand it and make it a full-on campaign. We can call it Momentum 2026 or Mission Forward or Building a Better Tomorrow Today Together. To build some early buzz, let's invite employees to pitch and pick a logo, tagline and even a strat plan mascot. We'll have you kick off the campaign with an all-staff memo, a video (where you talk about the future while looking off into the distance, preferably from the top of a hill) and a high-energy all-staff town hall streamed live with a talk show format and feel. You'll remind us how far we've come and how much we've accomplished. How we're building on a strong foundation standing on the shoulders of giants -with the opportunity to add to our remarkable legacy of success and well-earned reputation for excellence. We're looking for ways to not just sustain our success but to accelerate -turbocharge -our momentum. You'll also highlight a few threats and challenges coming our way -challenges that we'll recast as opportunities so it's good vibes only.

And we'll work some inspirational quotes into your memo, video and town hall remarks. There's John Naisbitt's "strategic planning is worthless unless there is first a strategic vision", Yogi Berra's "if you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else", Will Roger's "even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there", Andre Gide's "man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore" and Lewis Carroll's "if you don't know where you're going any road will do".

We'll then break out the Post-it Notes, flip chart paper, coloured markers and stickers for a series of in-person and online consultations with employees. We'll launch a new and interactive strat plan webpage and mobile app.

We'll run a series of invitation-only brainstorming sessions plus drop-in workshops to round up employee ideas. We'll draw crowds to the workshops with the promise of free lunches and snacks.

We'll host conversation cafes and strat plan pop-ups in the cafeteria, lobby and parking lot. We'll have you host a live and interactive online chat. We'll put daily posts out on social media and posters up in hallways. We'll give out strat plan swag pens, mouse pads and coffee mugs are always a hit. Maybe we can even give bigger prizes for the best or most popular ideas, as voted on by employees.

After the consultations wrap up and all the ideas are sorted, collated and rolled into a plan, we'll repeat the cycle. You'll send out another all-staff memo and video (maybe walk down the hill and onto the frontlines with shirt sleeves rolled up?) and host a town hall / closing ceremony with upgraded snacks (celebratory cupcakes or premium cookies for everyone). You'll unveil our bold new strategic plan and thank employees for helping chart a brilliant future for our organization. We'll send out strat plan posters to be displayed in every office and department. We'll pass around quick reference wallet cards for every employee to carry with them at all times. We'll put plan highlights out on social media and update the strategic plan webpage. Two questions and a comment.

Why are we doing your job?

What is this costing us?

And you might be overestimating our level of interest in helping you chart the future.

Remember that all-staff memo announcing your appointment as our new leader? Right in the first sentence of that memo, you were billed as "a bold visionary and brilliant strategic thinker who will guide us to an even brighter and better tomorrow".

You're being paid the big bucks to be visionary and strategic. To think bold and brilliant thoughts. You have the luxury of working at 30,000 feet while the rest of us are in the weeds focused on the day-to-day. So why are you offloading the "charting a better and brighter tomorrow" to us? Isn't that in your job description and the reason you're here?

It's not just us doing your work. You've brought in an army of consultants. They're getting paid a small fortune to be workshop flight attendants. Instead of passing out drinks and bags of peanuts, they're handing out markers, Post-it Notes and flip chart paper, sorting us into breakout groups and telling us when it's time to head back to our seats for some show and share with the entire group. Sadly, the consultants aren't pushing around a drink cart.

But the consultants definitely work hard for their money. They have to decipher and somehow make sense of what we've written on all those Post-it Notes and sheets of flip chart paper. While they told us at the start of the workshops that there are no dumb ideas, we proved them wrong. The consultants spend long hours preparing a report that senior leaders then scrub and sanitize, taking out the problematic ideas (reduce the number of senior leaders) and inserting their own big ideas. Like us, the consultants are probably also wishing there was a drink cart.

Along with what you're paying consultants, there are the off-site retreats for senior leaders who apparently can't think big thoughts onsite, the catered meals, refreshments, snacks and the swag that our keener co-workers will prominently display on their desks for the next five years. The rest of us will us the branded t-shirt when we're painting the walls at home.

And here's the hard truth. We're spending a lot of time and money on something that most of us will pay little to no attention to, won't remember or think about ever again. Ask your IT folks to pull the visitor stats for your current strategic plan website. Now validate those numbers by randomly stopping employees in the hallway. Ask us to name a strategic priority from the plan and recite the mission and vision statements. No dropping hints or telling us what our priorities rhyme with. You'll be lucky if the majority of us know the strat plan is posted somewhere on our organization's website. ‘\Here's the deal. Lots of us aren't looking five years out. Best of luck if you're working on a 20-year plan. We honestly don't know if we'll still be here or if we'll be gone by choice or circumstance. And we'll be genuinely surprised / shocked if you haven't moved on before all the deliverables are delivered and a new strategic planning process (Momentum 2031!) starts up all over again with a new leader and a fresh bunch of swag.

What you can do instead:

Go first. Write a draft of the strategic plan all on your own. Don't consult with anyone or have someone ghostwrite it for you. Take an informed, educated guess on where your organization needs to be in five years. Then put your name to the plan.

I've been part of many strategic planning exercises. We didn't always know at the start what the leader was thinking. What was keeping the leader up at night? What got them excited? What was changing in our industry and with our competitors?

What did they think were our organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? It was a mystery. We only knew the answers once the leader had made final edits to the strat plan. And then it all made some sense.

I was at a strategic planning workshop earlier in my career where the leader did their best not to leave any fingerprints on the plan. A consultant counted us off into break-out groups. We rotated from table to table. Each table had its own strategic theme. Every time a new group moved to one of the tables, the leader wandered over. The leader pitched their big and unworkable idea to each and every group. Each group then dutifully adopted the leader's pet project, adding it to the list of their ideas. At the end of the workshop, the groups shared their lists. Every group talked about the leader's idea, which made it seem like an obvious choice to put in the strat plan -a consensus pick and evidence of great minds thinking alike. Instead of lobbying each group, the leader could've stood up at the start of the workshop and said "we're going to ask for your big ideas. Let me go first. Here's my big idea. I'd love to know what you honestly think."

Make it clear your draft plan is the first word but not the last. It's the starting line, not the finish line. Tell employees what you believe your organization should start, stop and continue doing. Provide the context and rationale -here's what we're good at, here's where we can be great, these are our constraints, here's what is shifting under our feet and here's who we're competing against and what they're up to. Keep your draft plan to no more than six pages. Write your plan using complete sentences and paragraphs -no bullet points, charts, tables or PowerPoint slides. Make it a narrative, with a beginning, middle and end. Show us what success will look like when we achieve what's in your draft plan. Who's the hero? Who's the villain? What's at stake? Write your plan like it's a feature-length magazine profile about your organization written five years in the future. Now release your draft plan into the wild. Email it to employees. Put it up on a website. Send around hard copies. Instead of inviting employees to help write a plan from scratch, ask them to edit it. Focus their feedback on telling you:

(1) what's the best idea in your plan and why? (2) what's the worst idea and why? (3) what's the one idea that's missing from your plan? Why should you add that missing idea to the plan?

Try to avoid groupthink when asking for feedback. We've all been in planning workshops where we're given markers or a sheet of stickers and told to put check marks or stickers beside the best ideas. It's dotmocracy in action! I admit that I've sometimes followed the crowd and added my stickers to an idea that was the most popular but maybe not the best.

Use that focused, individual feedback from employees to revise and refine your plan. Settle on a handful of priorities. As Stephen Covey once said, "when you have too many top priorities, you effectively have no top priorities." What you have with three dozen priorities is a wish list where not every wish will come true. There's only so much you can do over the next five years. And many of those 1,825 days will be consumed by issues, crises and course corrections you didn't see coming and aren't in your plan.

If your plan includes core values, know that the worst behaviors you tolerate and ignore in your organization are your real values no matter what's listed in your plan.

Now share the new and improved strat plan with employees. Thank them for their feedback. Highlight what you added, deleted or tweaked based on their feedback. Tell them why some ideas didn't make the cut. Tell them this plan is everyone's roadmap for the next five years. This is where we're going. How we get to there is up to you. So let's get this show on the road. Feel free to borrow this quote from Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher. "We have a strategic plan, it's called doing things." The sooner you get through talking and brainstorming about the strategic plan, the sooner everyone can start doing what's in the plan. It's actually possible to go both fast and far if you have the courage to go first. And you might not need swag, cupcakes or video shoots at the top of a hill.