Reverb Consulting: Ground the Strategic Plan in Realism

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Reverb Consulting is a young consultancy interested in helping people and organizations fulfill their missions. Our name is inspired from one of Phil's heroes, Buckminster Fuller. Bucky Fuller said, "I seem to be a verb." We love that because it is all about action, action that we believe is derived from active thinking, re-thinking, re-formulating the pieces of the puzzle that confounds you. In re-directing learning and understanding, we help people see anew, or re-see, so that more is possible. We are Reverb because the need to re-_____ is always there. The process is evolutionary and never ending. Change, therefore, is natural, desired, and celebrated as life.

Contact us:
Jamie@reverbconsulting.com 901-337-0525
Phil@reverbconsulting.com 901-337-0411

Conversational Workshops

Margaret Wheatley's work is truly inspiring. Like ecosystems and biological systems, organizations are dynamic. Their cultures can be healthy or unhealthy, uncooperative, hostile, and disengaged. One of the best ways to re-energize and discover the nature of an organization's culture is to have it expose its thinking through focused and facilitated conversation around questions that count. Our conversation-based workshops actively involve large groups in thinking together. The results are astonishing. Key to the success of such a workshop is having realistic expectations for outcomes, understanding the value of the process which is fluid and not open to explicit control, and determining right questions.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Ground the Strategic Plan in Realism

A good strategic plan is grounded in realism and born of imagination. An organization's efforts are wasted in formulating a strategic plan if they do not take the necessary, and often painful, first steps of understanding fully who we are, what we do, how well we do what we say we do, and the current environment in which we are operating on a local, regional, national and global level. You also have to ask, do future customers want what we do, how we do it? And, you best get real in your answers. Only when you bring an honest assessment of these elements to the planning table are you able to design a way forward. Knocking the sugar-coating from the environment and actually objectively quantifying your current state of operations and affairs is critical to planning for your future.

Using a completely different set of skills, planning for the future requires imagination and fancy, as well as critical thinking abilities. You must be able to imagine what it will take for your organization to find alignment with the world as it will be in 6 months to two or three years from now. Someone on your team must be able to see the future that you will plan to create. You must see it whole and work backwards from there to fill in the action steps and time table. If you take the opposite approach and try to build the future by extending from where you are now, you have perpetuated, very logically, the status quo. Unless you can argue convincingly that the status quo is relevant in the changed and ever-changing environment of the future, your logical efforts are suicide.

Forget about the staid and steady 3 to 5 year strategic plan that is neat and laid out and incrementally wise because market forces do not shower that sort of stability on anybody in any industry anymore. For a modern, viable, realistic strategic plan for the 21st century, know from the onset that it must be dynamic and flexible, pliable and expandable in order for your organization to respond to changes in your industry, your customer base, the economy, technology, etc, etc.