Transforming Strategic Planning

Here at Virtual, Inc., strategic planning facilitation is one of our core competencies. Each year we work with countless client groups and outside organizations to help them re-imagine their futures, seize opportunities, or address challenges or threats. Up until last year, most of our planning sessions were in-person. As a member of our company who facilitates many of these planning sessions, I can speak first-hand to the satisfaction of leaving an intensive, multi-day strategy session in which a group hammered out a crisp, actionable plan. To me, great planning sessions are energizing and inspiring.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic introduced some acute challenges to our facilitation practice. After all, if groups could not get together in person, how could we help them develop effective strategic plans? Instantly our facilitation team’s travel bag of post-it notes, flip charts, and sharpie markers was rendered moot. Our strategy facilitation playbook, which took years to craft, was now alarmingly out of date. Yet, at the same time our usual methods of facilitation were blocked, our clients seemingly needed our help more than ever as they wrestled with sudden (and, in some cases, acute) business uncertainties.

Just as panic was beginning to set in, we decided to act. Specifically, we called our good friend Jay Vogt, Principal at the firm Peoplesworth. Jay’s firm is an organizational development consultancy that works with nonprofits and mission-driven businesses. Jay himself has helped our company develop and refine its business strategy over the years. Through our conversation we quickly discovered that our companies shared the same call to action: we needed to transform how we facilitated strategic planning, and we needed to do it fast! We immediately set forth on a partnership to do just that.

Over the next year, through a combination of continuous collaboration and trial and error, we realized that we were able to drive effective planning engagements, even when our client groups could not meet in person. Digging deeper, we identified seven key underpinnings – we call them our Seven Transformations – that we felt most enabled our planning practices to pivot successfully:

• Rethinking Participation: The Benefits of Asynchronous Planning
• Refocusing Team Time: Using Team Time to Drive Decisions
• Strategic Planning Safe Spaces: Anonymity Fuels Stronger Engagement
• Inclusion: Broader Participation = Better Results
• Smart Tools: The Right Technologies Help Achieve Good Outcomes
• Highly Focused: Driving Planning towards Critical Outcomes
• Strong Facilitation: Needed Now More than Ever

In our view, these Seven Transformations will remain key elements of our facilitation practice, even when the business world returns to “normal.” We feel strongly that our collaboration over the past year has enabled us to help our clients create better plans through more efficient and effective processes. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing additional blog posts that expand on each of the Seven Transformations. You can also join our webinar on Wednesday, 28 April at 1 pm EDT.