Plan Today, Succeed Tomorrow:
The importance of Strategic Planning Meetings
We’re just a few months away from the end of what has been a truly tumultuous two years. As we look towards the future, it is more important than ever to take stock and start the process of recrafting your company’s direction for the year ahead with a Strategic Planning Meeting. It’s time to take a pause from reacting and pivoting and trying to keep the wheels on the road. To take stock of the current challenges and identify exciting new opportunities. To give your team a chance to think, develop ideas and action plans. Because there are more unexpected curve balls coming your way.
In their article “Why is Strategic Planning Important?” Catherine Cote of Harvard Business School detailed that strategic planning has the benefits of creating one, forward focus vision; drawing attention to biases and flaws in reasoning; and allowing you to track your progress based on strategic goals. Creating a singular vision is paramount now, especially for companies who have been physically divided by remote working or social distancing. Despite our best efforts to stay on a focused path, time to recalibrate is always necessary at LEAST once a year if not more. It can never hurt to remind your team of the who, what, where, when, and how of your company’s goals.
Focused input on decisions your business is making allows your team to uncover base assumptions or biases behind how they were made. Cote lays these biases out as such:
- The recency effect: The tendency to select the option presented most recently because it’s fresh in your mind
- Occam’s razor bias: The tendency to assume the most obvious decision to be the best decision
- Inertia bias: The tendency to select options that allow you to think, feel, and act in familiar ways
This is why it’s important to have many different minds dissecting ideas and decisions to see where they’re coming from as well as encouraging your group to intentionally think in ways they normally wouldn’t. The most effective strategic planning meetings will do this with intention and encourage dissenting ideas on the regular. If you feel your team is too entrenched it may be invaluable to bring in outside thinkers or a facilitator to guide you towards this goal.
Lastly, a strategic planning meeting not only unifies your company’s goals in the minds of your team, but also serves as the jumping off point for the year. From there you have the ability to set short and long-term checkpoints to evaluate the successful implementation and realistic achievement of strategies that you’ve come up with. As an ongoing process it may be wise to plan shorter follow-up meetings to continually reinforce these checkpoints and make sure that they’re being reached.
For many of you I would assume that the importance of the strategic planning meeting is well known and evident. We can achieve nothing without goals and planning. However, the effective execution of these planning meetings may still be a struggle for many. Part of our own plan here at Catalyst Ranch was to come up with a way to help our clients through just such a dilemma. That is why we partnered with our long-time facilitator, Brian Kupersmit, to create our Strategic Planning Meeting Bundle. This is an all-in-one solution for your strategic planning goals, including a hefty facilitation package, rental of our space, catering, and all of the amenities that come with a meeting at Catalyst Ranch! Now is the time to start planning and we’re hoping that all of us come out of this era of pandemic upheaval with strong focused visions.
Please make sure to take a look at our other pre-planned meeting bundles (click here) including Team-Building, Wellness, and our Transformational Leadership Retreat.
