Strategic Planning & strategy articulation
Everyone talks about strategy, Everyone claims to have a strategy
Strategy is probably one of the most abused words in today's business world. Everyone claims to have a strategy, even for topics which do not require a strategy in the first place. Many organizations talk about strategy for things which do not fall within the strategic time horizon, things that are mainly at the tactical level or even at the operational level. There seems also to be a big confusion between plans (strategic or not), action plans, procedures, projects or programs.
Two things we should keep in mind when we talk strategy.
It is about future vision and what we want to be in the future. In this context, the strategy is the road which should take us from where we are now to where we desire to be in the future.
Ensure the time frame is within the strategic definition of 5 years and more ( some industries/businesses talk about 50 years or even 100 years as their strategic time frame)
One of the weird and funny things I came across happened in one of the local conferences where a "government speaker" mentioned something about the "government strategy" and quite honestly, I almost laughed at the "notion" and my neighbor noticed that. During the break, he asked for an explanation, and I told him "it is all about the time frame". I have an issue with someone talking about government strategy (which should be expectedly 5 years or more, while the average lifetime of our governments since our independence is less than a year as can be proven by dividing the number of years since independence by the number of governments we had since then. This is even worse when we come to know that the "succession and continuity" practice is missing in our part of the world.
What does it take?
Articulating a strategy is different than just copy/paste and modify an existing fluffy strategy from somewhere. Doing it roots up will require lots of organization's own specifics and based on the internals of its own business model, interests of the key stakeholder, and many others.
You cannot formulate/articulate a successful and effective strategy without knowing/understanding the basic business model descriptors of the entity being addressed. Things like the mission/vision statements are absolutely necessary to be able to describe where the entity is heading and what it is aiming for. Hence, we need well-articulated mission/vision statements specific to each and every situation we deal with, and not just nicely-worded statements copied from somewhere.