Questions for Strategic Imagination

So, you are in business, and your company has a strategic plan?  What is the thing that you find most challenging about it?  What would you like to be different?  What is the question, where if you had an answer, could change the success rate of your organization?  Wisdom Selling would like the opportunity to address your question.  Please like us on Facebook and enter your questions, or join our group on Linkedin.

The more practice we have in applying this technique, the better our ultimate product offering will be.

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Using Imagination in Strategic Planning - Introduction

Does your plan give you enough room for flexibility? Is there any opportunity for you to reach your destination in another way than the specific roadmap you have written down?  Imagine if the only way to get from your town to another, such as from Spartanburg to Greenville was the Interstate, and you knew you had to be there in the 33 minutes. This should be no problem, right, because that's how long Google map says it takes to get there. So you tell your most important customer that you're going to be in Greenville in 35 minutes, and you take off down the interstate.

A friend of mine had a meeting in Greenville the other day, and as he was heading down the interstate, a truck coming the other way hit a sign which stretched all the way across the interstate knocking it down.  The sign was blocking traffic in all six lanes of traffic, three in each direction. My friend was just past the previous exit and not able to reach the next exit, so he was stuck on the interstate for an hour and a half. He ended up having to cancel his seminar and send 30 potential customers back home.  He had no flexibility or other options.  He couldn't imagine or create a different route, because he never been to Greenville before and all he knew was the interstate.

Now those of us who've lived here a while know that you can take Highway 29, or a myriad of other back roads and end up in Greenville as long as time is not the critical factor. Any time you travel on Highway 29 you know you're going to have 30 stoplights to navigate, and there is a random number of times you'll get green and time to get red.  I say it's random but I actually believe that the red lights are timed to match how much of a hurry we are in. I know they get me every time I'm in a rush.

You might look at the trip from Spartanburg to Greenville and think it is just crazy that the only way you allow yourself to get there is the Interstate. You would certainly know the other ways, or you would have a map that showed multiple routes to get there, and since you have been there before, you wouldn't commit to a time that didn't allow you to deal with any risk any traffic any slowdowns, or anything that might delay you like a phone call where you have to pull over and look up some information in a notebook you carrying with you.

We would not commit to do something that doesn't make sense from a trip standpoint, and yet we as company leaders often plan our future - the next 12 months or the next 24 months - as if there's only one way for success to happen. The organization will sell a certain amount, at a certain margin and at a certain price to a certain group of customers beating a certain group of competitors to the punch and everything they do will be sustainable. The organization is confident the market will not change and are confident that they will get all the business that they need out of this deal.

The reality of strategic planning is that anything we’re looking at for the future is full of unpredictability. The science of risk management is all about mitigating your risk by planning for different scenarios. Strategic Imagination is the same process, in that we use our imagination to come up with alternative scenarios, multiple paths to success and ways to hedge our bets for maximum success opportunity. We know that success in itself can be defined in a number of ways for almost any company.  We don't necessarily have to give our plan goals one set of criteria and consider ourselves successful only if we hit those criteria in the time frame allotted. Can you imagine your company as successful, with a different set of goals than you currently have today? Can you imagine reach your goals in a shorter or longer period of time than you have given the company to do so? Can you imagine having a set of shareholder benefits of working with your company that can vary, based on what you need them to be, in order for the company to be most successful? Would you want to give your shareholders a dividend when you need that money to reinvest, or would you want to give your shareholders a dividend so that they will continue to buy and keep this help the share price up, so that you can sell shares and generate capital for the company?

There are all sorts of options out there for strategic success, but we need to be able to dream a bit in order make them reality. And that's what Strategic Imagination is all about. Stay tuned for more and send us your strategy questions.