Chapter 1

Introduction & Overview

 If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. --Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1729)
A dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants sees farther than a giant himself. --Robert Burton (1577-1640)
Pygmies placed on the shoulders of giants see more than the giants themselves. -- Marcus Lucan (39-65)

So you want to create a strategic plan for your organization, do you? Perhaps your CEO, President, or Board has suggested that it is time to initiate a new planning process or to create an innovative strategy in your department. Perhaps you are engaged in the profession of planning, are a student of planning, or are trying to create a 'world class organization' in an ever changing and increasingly complex reality. Possibly you read a text on leadership that claimed you needed to provide a vision for your organization, your department, or your employees; yet you do not know how to envision that future, let alone inspire others to follow you toward your vision and goals.

Now you have determined that you want--and need--as much information as you can obtain to make sure that the strategic planning process you choose is a success, leads to greater profits, creates better organizational outcomes, and is enjoyable from the start so that your staff will want to participate. You do not have the time to waste on mistakes; in fact, you do not even have the time to develop such a process. You still have the normal demands of your job, and strategic planning can be a cumbersome burden. You need information immediately in order to create results for your organization or department as quickly as possible.

You might decide to go to the bookstore, a business book catalogue, the Internet, or the library to find books on strategic planning. You could read the most recent information on leadership, change, employee performance, process reengineering, corporate restructuring, or developing high performance teams. But this process will take time, and it is essential that you find an informative and useful reference as soon as possible. So, I encourage you to join me as I stand upon the shoulders of the giants in leadership and management theory. You have discovered a key resource in developing and initiating your strategic plan.

The Quest

Rather than learn these lessons myself through trial and error over the span of my career, I would have relished a practical, simple, systematic guide to strategic planning. I wish that when I was first approached ten years ago by my corporate president that there had been a practical guide that outlined what a strategic planning process really entailed; something that demonstrated the leadership and management skills that were needed and how to develop a successful plan and how this might impact the future of the organization.

I still recall the emptiness in the pit of my stomach and the sheer terror I felt when that CEO walked into my office (this unusual occurrence alone should have made me hide under my desk) and asked me to lead the organization's strategic planning process. He then handed me a stack of plans that had been developed by my predecessors. The level of anxiety within me doubled.

In reality, when that CEO walked into my office and asked me to lead this strategic planning process, I enthusiastically accepted my charge. I naively thought that strategic planning represented an established, sophisticated practice that would be easy to initiate, develop, and implement. Since I was formally trained as a researcher and I had just graduated from a research university, I initiated a formal research model (i.e., the scientific model). In retrospect, I should have just winged it.

First, I defined my problem. I did not know how to develop, implement, or evaluate a strategic plan. I wanted my process to be highly professional, and to be successful in impacting the organization in a positive way in order to promote growth and opportunity. I decided to research planning models and found the work of those giants who had defined the contemporary leadership paradigm.

I soon learned that there were lots of books on management, business practice, leadership, and one or two on strategic planning. Words like forecasting, environmental scanning, situational analysis, and SWOT/TOWS appeared. However, the books on strategic planning did not seem to have any relevance to contemporary books on leadership, change, or creating the successful organization. There were no contemporary sources defining a simplistic inclusive model of strategic planning based on contemporary leadership paradigms or relevant to the ideas of the new economy.

At this point, according to the scientific method, I was supposed to have a hypothesis (or in this case a model process) to help develop my company's strategic plan. I had a hypothesis all right, but I cannot repeat it here without getting a parental advisory warning label on the front cover of this book. Basically, still perplexed, I skipped this step and jumped right to the collection and analysis of data.

I called the person who had created the previous strategic plan for the organization (he had left the company at this point for greener pastures). He invited me to take him to lunch, where he shared the new strategic plan he had developed for his present company. I paged through the document, three pages of the company’s turbulent but progressive history, a page on the magnificence of the current CEO's leadership, a page detailing the process, a page citing the company's mission and goals, fifty pages of basically meaningless organizational statistics (known as the situational analysis) that alluded to the current CEO's brilliance, and a final page of recommendations. The recommendations suggested that the company should boost employee morale, cut costs, increase market share, increase stock value for shareholders, increase the use of technology, and expand operations. Yet, it had failed to explain the plan beyond just offering the recommendations.

My search for more data produced similar results. I found committees that had been brainstorming for so long their easel pads had moved from white to yellow to brown. I found lone wolves writing plans in offices without ever talking to a fellow employee (in fact people seemed to despise these 'planners'). I found copies of plans on employee shelves that had never been read (this appeared to be the norm). I found people taking three years to develop a five-year plan. I found men and women with bags under their eyes the size of golf balls.

I could never seem to find, however, a group of people who could cite their mission, or who had implemented a plan. I heard a rumor about a certain hotel chain that revolutionized planning and employee empowerment. I paid my money, checked in, and could find no evidence of validity in the rumor. I called a corporate executive at the chain; she assured me that the rumor was indeed true (I guess she could afford a better hotel).

During the process I emailed the company's CEO, told him what a wonderful job he was doing, cited six statistical facts, and told him that increasing profits and training employees in technology were a good idea. I also suggested that we might want to increase our stock value, give good employees a raise, and weed out the bad employees to cut costs. He emailed back, nicely suggested that my email was too verbose, and suggested that I should have my planning process in place by the end of the month.

Concerned that he might take my suggestion on bad employees and start with my position, I looked on my shelf and pulled off the most basic research book. In the final chapter, I found the answer. The author suggested that the researcher should always include ideas for further research. My idea was to develop a planning process based in the theoretical frameworks I thought were most relevant. I would stand on the shoulders of giants and see further than my colleagues. I developed my first planning process. It failed miserably.

The ideas, however, kept on coming. Finally, I developed a planning process that worked better than any other I had previously encountered. I now invite you to review the development of this process, to try it, to analyze it, and to modify it. I invite you to join me on the shoulders of the giants from whom I found the answers, the methods, and the way to create a plan that achieves the recommendations we all strive to achieve.

A Summary of the Basics

I am convinced from all my research and experience as an organizational change consultant that we are in the midst of an era of great challenge and opportunity for organizations, and the individuals that comprise them. Leadership and management writings of the day suggest that organizations, which are resistant to changing their management theory, are predetermined toward failure. Simultaneously, those organizations that adopt new paradigms and new mental models, yet neglect to transform business practices such as strategic planning are merely sugarcoated rotten apples. It is the individuals that work within the organizations who need to transform practice, the conceptualization of work, and their ideals to match the new leadership paradigms.

Organizations should realize and confront the new realities that confound them. They should develop a strategic planning process that is designed to promote change and sensible risk taking. The process should address the competitive demands of the post-industrial world of ever increasing knowledge and technology. The process should address the emergent environments, cultures, and structures that challenge leaders. The process should focus on the current construction of the organization, addressing both short and long-term effectiveness, and finally it should embrace chaos in an attempt to create order.

This new planning process, which I call triadic heterarchical strategic planning, will suggest that all executives and staff should be given greater decision-making power and a larger sphere of influence through the planning process. It will further demonstrate that power and influence are guided by principles of trust and responsibility when the emphasis is on collaboration and "win-win" outcomes. The model will show that an emphasis on quality is paramount in the development of an organizational planning and outcomes model where measurements of success emphasize institutional, departmental, and personal outcomes over the planning process. Finally, this book will demonstrate that organizational traditions and standards should come into question and should be reviewed systematically.

This is dramatically different from traditional models of strategic planning that emphasize the conventional hierarchy, command-and-control, and the development of plans through a standard systemic process. In this sort of planning, brainstorming is key and the central decision for leaders is whether the plan should occur every year, every three years, or every five years.

Most strategies focus on developing a planning model rarely accompanied by a planning manual. The leaders then review the mission statement, add a vision if they do not have one, then decide if they want goals (or lately values). The next step includes a statistical review of data (usually known as environmental scanning, competitive analysis, fact book development, or some other form of data review). This is where many organizations stop. If the organization completes this process, they begin to analyze their data. This process is known as situational analysis, SWOT, performance review, or some other variation of the same process. This is where most organizations enter the realm of brainstorming from which there is often no progress.

Once data has been analyzed and situations have been addressed, the organization begins to set goals, objectives, and strategies. This process usually takes one of two forms: 1) the group form – where leaders sit in countless meetings (or go away on a retreat) and argue over the semantics of the terms goal, objective, and strategy, or 2) where a company planner enters a room with a large coffee machine and pumps out the company’s new plan.

Once the plan has been written, it is published and disseminated, and employees quickly throw away their old plans and replace the space left on their shelves with the new plan; the two are often indistinguishable. The strategies used for implementing the plan, once written, are usually very vague and the outcomes are not normally assessed until the end of the official plan, when senior management goes to another retreat to review the next situational analysis. This work is designed to examine the contemporary strategic planning process, to suggest revision, to offer a real strategy for implementation, and to offer a strategy to actually involve the employees expected to implement the plan in its development and realization process.

In attempts to modernize the process, some authors suggest that employee performance is influenced by a gap between planning, budgeting, and the daily operational activities of specific departments. Closing these gaps should be of central importance to the planning design of any organization. Fundamental to this idea should be the relationship between organizational planning and individual understanding of decision-making and the goals of the organization. Most leaders and managers deal mainly in the work of daily crisis situations, and they are often inept at viewing organizational issues and "crises" as long-range institutional problems. A great deal of leadership and management theory has been written to support the notion that planning is an institutional endeavor that should be placed in the hands of decision-makers, leaders, followers, and all stakeholders of an organization. The missing element at most institutions is the ability to take these theoretical ideals and create an applied process.

There is a disparity between the individuals' values and the organization's values. In traditional strategic planning practices, even where there is a goal for the establishment of a common vision, mission, and values, there is not a process in which employees are encouraged to internalize the vision, mission, and values. The nature of the problem is the gap between individual responsibility and departmental/institutional responsibility. The current issue with the traditional planning process is that it fails to address (a) opening honest, prudent lines of cross-institutional communication, (b) building trust throughout the organization, (c) creating a system of motivation, (d) ensuring professional treatment of all employees, and (e) the creating of a system that integrates the values of all employees with the mission and plans of the company and its departments.

The goal of this work is to create a comprehensive planning process that unites individual planning projects of the organization. Planning at the level of the institution is integrated with planning at the level of the department. Planning at the department level is integrated with planning at the level of the individual. The entire process is solidified through the integration of both the budgeting process and the human resource appraisal (evaluation) method. Once the three level (triadic) process is in place, the emphasis on the top of the hierarchy is diminished by turning the entire process upside-down (i.e., the personal planning process suggests the need for departmental planning, which then identifies institutional needs and strategies). When this strategy is initiated, managing the organization evolves from a hierarchical model to an emergent heterarchy.

The Journey

This work is intended to be simple and "user friendly," yet practical. The chapter sequence is designed like a college curriculum and is likely to be appropriate for any course in leadership, management, human resources, strategic planning, or as a supplement to a mini-course or training program. The book is arranged to briefly recreate the intellectual journey I undertook to develop a contemporary, cross-institutional, cross-functional, strategic planning process based within the best practices of leadership and management theory currently conceptualized.

This book reviews relevant planning, management, and leadership literature to create a context for a strategic planning system within the theoretical framework of contemporary leadership, planning, human resource development, and heterarchical thinking. However, the general utility of the book is to act as a nuts and bolts how-to guide for contemporary strategic planning.

The book is basically designed as a "how-to" for strategic planning at all levels of the organization. The benefits of the book are that it will provide step-by-step strategies and practices to develop an institutional strategic plan, implement the plan through departmental planning, and realize the goals of the plan through the development of high performance teams and personal/professional planning. So many leaders enter the planning process with no idea of where it might take them or what the end product should look like. This book provides planners with achievable ideals of where their planning processes should lead them. Readers are presented with potential outcomes in relation to their identified goals.

Chapters Two through Four review strategic planning theory, the current nature of planning theory, its emergence as organizational practice, organizational structure schemes, and the limitations of current theoretical frameworks. These chapters demonstrate the need for strategic plans for the institution, local departments, team-based projects, and for each person employed or associated with the organization.

Chapter Five demonstrates a cross-institutional, cross-functional design that allows an organization to complete its strategic planning process for the institution, department, and each employee in less than one year. It then illustrates how the planning process becomes a dynamic expected enterprise that creates the organizational culture of success.

Chapters Six through Eight express how to use this planning process to generate a culture of empowerment, how to facilitate the use of teams, and how planning becomes the means and method of continuous improvement for the organization. These ideas are summarized within the context of heterarchy, which demonstrates how this planning process can serve as a step-by-step guide toward achieving the learning organization macro-level goal.

Chapter Nine provides a "how-to" approach to data development, to the situational analysis, and toward the constructive facilitation of the planning process across all three levels. This chapter formulates the means of quantifying and measuring the success of the organization, the progress of departments, and the activities of individual employees.

Chapters Ten through Twelve offer a series of three step-by-step workbooks for strategic planning. Each workbook (institutional, departmental, and personal) represents a unique but integrated process designed to ensure that your organization reaches its maximum potential. The workbooks suggest strategies for success, ask framing questions, suggest meeting agendas, and illustrate templates for each of the three unique plans. Finally, the concept of "owed to" is offered as the key element of integrating the three planning models into one comprehensive model of change.

Chapter Thirteen demonstrates the key leadership principles needed to implement the process as written. The ideal strategy of inspiration is defined and exemplified as the method needed to lead the successful organization of tomorrow. Chapter Fourteen discusses the need for cross-institutional, cross-functional reward systems, and a comprehensive system of employee appraisal that is integrated into the planning model. Finally, in Chapter Fifteen the goals of the planning system are summarized, implementation caveats are provided, and an argument for emergent heterarchical inspirational leadership is provided.

Leading the strategic planning process is not a project for everyone. But for those few leaders and sages with the energy, passion for change, and wisdom, strategic planning can prove to be an exciting manner of earning your living or increasing your value to the organization. I have been doing it well for over a decade and have found it to be an exhilarating profession and a life-fulfilling experience. It is, at its best, the means of change and life-fulfillment for the organization and its employees. It is, at its worst, the most confusing waste of human resources that occurs in many organizations. It is what I have chosen and will continue to choose to do with the remainder of my life because making a positive difference in the companies and people I serve is the foundation of my life work.

Remember that there are many books on strategic planning and/or leading the change process for the organization. There are also numerous books on institutional planning, departmental planning, technology planning, facilities planning, and human resource planning. This work is designed to provide a one-system integrated approach to strategic planning that affects and unites all facets of the organization. This systemic approach leverages the organization across three levels (Triadic), managed within a dynamic emergent structure (Heterarchy), that continuously examines data, culture, and leadership practice (Strategic), within a simple process for achieving goals and a successful future (Planning). Thus, I wish you a fond welcome to Triadic Heterarchical Strategic Planning.  

We will either find a way, or make one. -- Hannibal