The Strategic Challenge
In reviewing these three approaches to strategic planning I would suggest that you ask yourself, as a leader or coach, the following three questions in determining which of these approaches is most appropriate:
1. Which of these approaches has been most commonly used by you during the past five years? Why have you used this particular approach?
2. If you look at a project, change initiative or organizational improvement in which you are about to engage, which approach seems most appropriate? Why?
3. Look back on your planning efforts in the past, your preferred way of doing planning (question one) and the planning challenges you now face (question two) what are the lessons learned from these past efforts that are applicable to today’s challenges? When have your planning efforts been most effective? Why do you think they have been effective? When have they been least effective? Why do you think this is the case?
You might find that none of the three approaches offered in this blog will do the trick. Perhaps one of the two more complex and often subtle approaches will be a better fit as you engage the personal enemy inherent in postmodern leadership.
I propose that the three strategic planning processes just described are each rather “safe.” We hide behind precipitous action (command model), behind vision (symbolic model) or behind data (rational model). Unfortunately, our postmodern world of complexity, unpredictability and turbulence requires that we move beyond these three models and that we effectively interweave information, intentions and ideas. There are two models of strategic planning that facilitate this interweaving and that enable a postmodern leader to take appropriate risks—and most importantly to learn from these risks and the mistakes that inevitably occur when facing the challenges of postmodern complexity, unpredictability and turbulence.
Approach Four: Transaction-Based Planning
The transactional approach to strategic planning begins with a focus on all three domains—information, intentions and ideas. When using a transactional approach, the postmodern leader can begin anywhere; however, any dialogue or exploration of any one of the three domains automatically moves a postmodern leader and his planning group over to the other two domains. It is the transactions between the three domains that lead to powerful ideas that can be translated into successful action.
This approach is also transactional in that the planning does not end with the movement to action. There is ongoing organizational learning, for any action not only provides valuable information about the quality of the idea being engaged, but also provides greater clarity regarding organizational intentions (“Oh, that’s what we really want to achieve”), as well as clarity regarding additional information that needs to be collected (“Oh, I guess we made a wrong assumption about this; we need to find out more about it”). At this moment, the postmodern leader becomes a leader/learner.
Transactional planning is rarely placed in the hands of the upper level executives in the organization. However, unlike the third approach, transactional planning is not housed in a planning office, planning committee, or the Management Information (or Budget) Office; rather, this fourth approach is usually housed deep in the organization and involves many players. There may be a series of ad hoc planning committees, or a series of intensive large-scale meetings involving many representatives from different areas and layers of the organization. The major outcome should be a broad based understanding of what is now happening and what is about to happen in the organization. Organizational learning takes place at all levels of the organization. Thus, there is a third way in which this approach to planning is transactional—it involves transactions between and among all levels and departments of the organization.
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