How Far Down into the Organization Should Strategic Plans Engage?

At every company or organization I have been part of (public  and private),  strategic plans are developed  to define an organization’s objectives, goals and high level approaches to achieve them. Strategic Plans many times are developed by the few for the many. In other words, a narrow band of people create a plan based on some high level assumptions often passed down from above.  This is not entirely a bad thing.  Having a large percentage of your organization developing their own bottom up strategies is not optimal.  However, leaving behind valuable “out of the box” thinking squanders the brilliance of the people an organization pays dearly to assemble. How should we address this trade off?
 
A 1/22/16 article by David Ciccarelli in Entrepreneur.com titled “4 Strategic Planning Exercises That you should do Annually” broaches the topic of addressing the frequent gap of bypassing some bottoms up contributions.  The key is to perform these 4 exercises at the dept or lowest level feasibly possible:

• SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats)
  • Given marketplace, requires regular revisits.
• Start-Stop-Continue
  • Often not done in a methodical way.
• Employee Engagement Survey
  • The best investment an organization can make to capture sentiment and sometimes visionary ideas from your organization.
• Update the Plan
  • How much of the vision details are discussed but never documented.
  • Document everything for reference and future assumption revalidation

 
When undertaking this effort, you will need to define how low into the organization to go to contribute to this effort.  Clearly calendar implications and prioritization of bandwidth must be done for evaluating undertaking a planning process going lower than typical into the organization.  You will find increased harvesting of “gems” as Strategic Planning inputs engages a broader cross section of your organization.
 

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