Strategic Planning - Closing the Loop

I just read an interesting blog entry on “bringing perpetual reality to strategic planning”. This is EXACTLY what you need in your strategic planning – a process that drives from good strategy and vision to the hard realities of what is going to happen, who will do it, and how much it will cost. Putting real feedback into your planning process helps us to correct, improve and build on what we learn in implementation.

In Simplified Strategic Planning, we drive this approach three distinct ways:

1. The structure of the process flows toward an end-point that makes very specific, measurable objectives and implementation plans.
2. The implementation planning process leads to a regular monitoring process where progress on execution is tracked and discussed.
3. The entire experience is reviewed at the beginning of the subsequent cycles for learning and opportunities for improvement.

Does your strategic planning do these things? If not – let’s talk about how you can improve the “reality connection” in your strategic planning!