Strategic Planning - Why your balanced scorecard doesn't work part 4

Your balanced scorecard isn't driving action.

This is most likely true, if you are doing balanced scorecard instead of true strategic planning in your company. Why do I say this? Because true strategic planning focuses attention on the things that will make a difference for your company. Balanced scorecard processes, on the other hand, tend to rely on employee understanding of the links between metrics and reality - and, because of shortcomings I've discussed in earlier posts, these links rarely motivate employees as well as understanding the underlying issues. Granted, your CFO or other technical managers may quickly grasp the relationships - but true strategic competency requires broad participation and support from all parts of the company.

Even if you have excellent training and support throughout the company for balanced scorecard, you are likely to have issues if you are not also driving execution through a routine tool for monitoring and accountability on actions (rather than numbers). The action plan process in Simplified Strategic Planning is an excellent approach to doing this, and can be helpful even if you are not using an optimal strategic planning process. There are several keys to making implementation work - it is, after all, the sore spot in strategic planning for most companies. The most important of these is to have rock solid and unified support for implementation accountability at the top levels of your company. This is a key area where executives must always act as role models for the rest of the organization - failure to do so almost always results in sloppy execution.

---

If you are looking for a strategic planning speaker to help your organization learn better strategic planning implementation - or the whole strategic planning process - please check out my strategic planning speaker brochure or see what past clients have said about me at http://www.strategyspeakers.com/p_rwb.asp