Effective Strategic Planning

This January Rural Resurrection is celebrating the sixth annual National Implementation Month! So let the festivities begin!

Many communities are starting to use strategic planning to help focus their councils, boards, and staff on a direction that helps the community reach its goals. However, the impact of strategic plans is often limited by poor execution of the planning process. Let’s look at some ways to make that planning process better.

Difference Between Strategic Planning and Comprehensive Planning

To understand strategic planning, it is important to differentiate it from comprehensive planning. Both planning efforts help communities chart a course towards the future. But they operate a different scales and have different purposes.

A comprehensive plan looks at the big picture of how your community should grow and change over the next couple of decades. It considers all of the major systems that shape your community’s daily life. Looking at housing, land use, transportation, parks, utilities, and economic development, and how they will shape the future of your city.

A strategic plan, on the other hand, is more focused on immediate impact. Instead of focusing on what the community looks and feels like in 20 years, it targets what the city and staff need to accomplish in the next three to five years. Strategic planning is about setting priorities, laying out measurable goals, and improving internal performance. It typically addresses organizational challenges, service, delivery, budgeting, staffing, and specific initiatives to be completed within the lifespan of the plan. While community input can still happen due to the Open Meetings Act, strategic plans typically rely more on leadership teams, staff, and specific stakeholders.

Put simply, the comprehensive plan shapes where the community is going, while the strategic plan shapes a portion of the path for the organization to get there.

Get Out of City Hall

The aspect that is important for successful strategic planning is often the most overlooked. The location. Most strategic planning, unfortunately, takes place in the city’s council chambers. With council members sitting in their standard seats and staff in theirs, effective discussions are unlikely to happen. The hierarchy still remains, which is the opposite of what you want for the frank conversations that need to be had.

So get out of City Hall. Get your council members off of that “dias” and into seats intermingled with city staff. Find space at a local meeting hall or similar facility where everyone can be at the table, together.

Setting the Scene

With a strategic planning session, it is important to set the scene. This includes making sure everyone is there. Just having the City Clerk/City Administrator in the room is not conducive to an effective planning session. Representatives of any departments you have should be in attendance. Your Public Works Director knows the needs of the sewer system better than a City Administrator. Experts in the necessary areas need to be there. This may even include third-party representatives of the City. Even if you utilize outside entities to act as the City Engineer or City Attorney, they should be considered to be at the table.

Speaking of tables, they need to be available for everyone. If documentation is provided for the session or if staff needs to bring their own, they need a place to access it easily. Placement of the tables is also important to the success of the meeting. An arrangement that promotes a conversational atmosphere, rather than the typical hierarchical setup of a council meeting, is best. You want everyone in the room to feel like they can have a say in what is planned. A true conversational atmosphere is not merely born from the request of others to do so, but also the comfort of those involved. The atmosphere needs to be right to get engagement from everyone.

Seek Outside Help

In the variety of roles I have been in over the years, I’ve had the chance to witness the interaction of several different city councils. Each one of them was different from the rest. How they interacted with each other, with staff, or with the general public varied from town to town. Most of them had at least one sore subject. A subject with widely differing views between the council and staff, or the public, or even among themselves.

This is why you should seek outside help for the strategic planning process. No, I don’t mean that a psychiatrist needs to be provided at the strategic planning session. (Though I have seen communities that would clearly benefit from that.) It means having a facilitator involved in the process would be highly beneficial. An outside facilitator can guide the discussion and keep everyone on task. They can also act as somewhat of a mediator on those tough subjects. Being from outside the organization, the facilitator wouldn’t have any ties to certain staff or council members either. They may also be able to look at tough issues from a different viewpoint as well.

Keeping on Task

Keeping on task is critical to ensuring a successful strategic planning session. Without order and leadership, boredom and disdain for the event ensue. That’s why it is important to have an agenda for everyone to follow. It helps to keep everyone on task, helps give order, and provides a pathway to completion.

It is also important to take breaks. Most strategic planning processes take more than an hour or two. People need breaks in the monotony. Or they need to emotionally break from one tough subject to move on to the next. Remember to provide food and beverages at break time (and during the session). Food helps to make any mundane sessions tolerable. It’s also an easy reward for trudging through the muck of governmental decision-making.

The process should also have interactive activities. Although strategic planning should have a conversational feel, you still need to stay on task. Interactive activities help to focus the discussion and gather consensus. Brainstorming with the help of dry-erase boards or large easel pads is one typical interactive exercise. The use of voting dots to make selections is another typical interactive method.

Make It Count

The end result needs to be a strategic plan that reads easily and is readily implementable. It shouldn’t be overly complicated with details on how to complete the actions, but provide clear and concise direction.

Just as important as the preparation of the report is the need to review it on a regular basis. Those involved, from those making the votes to those doing the work to implement the plan, need to review it on a regular basis.

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Hopefully, these tips will help make your next strategic planning process more effective with results that are impactful.