Building a Strategy Agenda: Applying Agile Strategy & Collaboration Principles to Strategic Planning
More and more organizations we encounter are looking for an alternative to the traditional strategic plan, including Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, with whom we’ve been working recently. They recognize the value of identifying the most promising pathways to advance their organizations but have become disillusioned with strategic planning processes that take months to generate, only to be quickly outdated.
Some have come to Franklin Solutions because they associate us with Strategic Doing, a notion that has wide appeal, even if folks don’t know what Strategic Doing specifically entails. “Strategic Doing” is attractive because it connotates action that is strategically oriented.
The discipline of Strategic Doing, as defined by the Strategic Doing Institute, is envisioned as a ten-element process that can be used to strategically align groups of disparate members and move them quickly into actions that test the hypotheses of their strategies.
Groups can complete an end-to-end Strategic Doing process in 2+ hours, during which they center conversation around an opportunity they want to purse together, determine the most promising avenue to realize the opportunity, identify pilot projects that provide feedback in 3-4 months, learn from the pilot projects, and continue to adjust their focus of effort as they work to achieve their goal.
This process often helps disparate groups find common ground and quickly move into action, which has many benefits! However, when there is a need for more of a future-focused strategy map, the Strategic Doing process alone is not sufficient.
We have found that marrying Strategic Doing with elements of strategic planning can satisfy the need for a strategy “map,” can provide the flexibility to shift in the face of dynamic environmental circumstances, and can engage a wide range of stakeholders in both planning and doing in a short period of time.
Our recent work with Penn State University’s (PSU) College of Agricultural Sciences (CAS) is a case in point. PSU CAS was interested in creating a strategy map that would focus on new, large-scale, collaborative priorities for research and graduate education. They wanted something agile. They did not want to spend an inordinate amount of time developing a highly detailed plan that might be obsolete before the ink was dry. Instead, they wanted to create a multi-year template for strategic priorities in which the specific initiatives and activities could be devised on a dynamic basis, to reflect the opportunities and constraints present at various points throughout the life of the plan.
The PSU CAS “Strategy Agenda” was generated through a collaborative process and reflects principles of agile strategy development and implementation. It outlines a handful of priority strategies for research and graduate education that CAS stakeholders collaboratively identified as most important for specific emphasis in the upcoming five-year period. This strategy agenda provides a focus for collaboration to seize opportunities and generate financial resources. It is a framework for pursuing strategic opportunities together. The strategy agenda assumes that learning what is needed and what works is an ongoing process, that resources will be identified across numerous networks, and that agile approaches to build and refresh networks will yield a wide cross-section of assets and expertise.
Penn State’s CAS Strategy Agenda positions the college to be agile, strategic, and inclusive as it shapes its future in a dynamic time. This is precisely the kind of strategy plan and process that many organizations are seeking. We see a bright future for a Strategy Agenda approach to planning in a rapidly evolving environment.