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.
 

With market place changes happening at lightning speed, some challenge the relevancy of a long term Strategic Plan.   According to Jason Fried in 37signals’ book Rework, "What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan”.  That’s quite a fascinating assertion. 

But, Strategic Plans do play an important part in setting up a visionary focus for the company.  Complaints about being outdated or being words and not deeds, ignores the need for validating what direction to go into. If you don’t know where you are going, you will get there fast.  
 
An article by Michael Allison in Stanford Innovation Social Review titled ”Strategy Needs a Plan”  emphasizes that the strategic plan is far from dead—it’s alive and adapting.  The problem doesn’t lie with the output, it lies with how we keep it current, relevant and pursue effective implementation.

Michael introduces three faulty assertions contributing to the incorrect assumption that Strategic Planning is dead:

• Strategic plans are static and preclude adaptive leadership.
• Strategic plans are futile because the future is impossible to predict.
• Strategic plans are irrelevant because some strategic plans have been seen to sit on shelves “gathering dust.”
  

Note that all these issues can be addressed:

1. Update Strategic Plans more frequently. Consider every 6 months or for extremely volatile marketplaces, 3 months.
   
2. Acknowledge that the Strategic Plan is not a vehicle to 100% predict the future, but rather to set a direction for the organization to navigate. Plan for being wrong but setup processes to adjust the path more quickly.
   
3. Invest in the time to make the Strategic Plan more of a living document than a static snapshot that sits on the coffee table for a year. 
   

 
Have a closer, more regular, business relationship with your organization’s Strategic Plan.