Strategic Planning - Optimising the Planning Process

Kia ora koutou, nau mai, haere mai, and welcome to this webinar today. I'm Charlene Harvey and I'm a Senior Consultant here at Allen & Clark. And I work a lot with public sector agencies and non-profits who fail to create really useful strategies and plans, which means that they struggle with prioritisation, effective engagement, creating a compelling vision, or even turning their plans and strategies into action.

And I help them reset their approach to planning so that it really adds value and it drives the organisation forward. You know, the true power of planning is that it creates a coalition of people around a common purpose so that every day, everyone can put their everyday effort around driving the organisation forward, towards organisations' goals. For the past 20 years, I've been involved with various planning-related roles, whether that's being part of a set planning process, at implementing strategies and plans, through to designing and facilitating business planning processes at an enterprise or business group or team level.

And I've seen some of the common pitfalls. I've probably fallen into and been part of them myself. So I've seen what works and I've seen what adds value, and this is what we're going to talk through today.

This is the time of year where many of you are starting your planning processes and many agencies are starting their planning process for the new financial year in July. So now is a really great time to start thinking about how you can optimise your planning process. Today I'm going to take you through the four common pitfalls of planning.

I'm going to walk you through an end-to-end process and I'll give you some tips around how you can design a planning process. Plans are nothing, planning is everything. The famous quote by Eisenhower.

Now I wanted to be upfront with you about this because today I will not be talking about how to structure strategies or plans. So if you want to jump off and gain some time back in your day, now is the time to do it. I believe that this is the key to successful planning and it's actually the foundation for this webinar.

You put the focus and the effort on the planning process and the conversations and the engagement around it, as opposed to focussing on the development of the document itself. You know, documents will naturally fall out of a process and if you focus on building a really robust, engaging process, this is where the planning magic occurs. You get a better quality of plan and you get a coalition of people wrapped around it and the implementation is easier.

Common challenges. First one is prioritisation or how to prioritise against competing views or areas. Actually, this is one of the most common pain points I see across the public sector and actually when I'm working with clients.

And I acknowledge that in the public sector, it can be harder to prioritise, given the nature of the work that you do, but it just means that you need to be more mindful and deliberate when it comes to how you approach prioritisation. In the next three themes, I believe they're all linked. If people don't understand the value of planning, then they're not going to give their time and effort into actually being part of a process.

And you're not going to get the buy-in or the engagement or the stakeholders that you need as part of the process. It actually puts a lot of weight onto creating a process that is valuable and actually turns into something. You know, stakeholders will get involved for the things that matter.

That third thing that came through was around lack of insight. Now, whether the plan lacks a sense of reality, it's really great to have ambitious goals, but if your current business is falling over, you actually need to address it in your plan. Or it could be the opposite.

That came through, where it's lack of strategic insight or lack of strategic thinking. And you tend to get really bland goals and you get the same old, same old plan, which actually doesn't drive the organisation forward. The last thing that came through was around shifting goalposts, you know, unforeseen events or constant change.

You know, the only constant is change, so how do you effectively plan when everything is changing around you? And actually, some of the more traditional approaches to planning don't account for this. So the approach that I'll take you through today will help you address these challenges. So let's work through some of the common pitfalls that I see every day.

Pitfall number one, planning is a tick box exercise. You know, this is where planning is more like a compliance exercise to create a document. You might be given a template which needs to be completed and the focus is just get the document out.

Now, I'm not adverse to templates, but of course it has to be supported by the right conversations and the buy-in from stakeholders around the content that you're actually putting into the template. So what you tend to get is documents that are generic. Not a lot of people have been involved, or if they had, it's more in the wordsmithing instead of discussing where do you want to be, how will we get there, and what will it take? Now, these are really important questions.

Actually, they're the key planning questions, and the key planning capability that's required is to facilitate these questions and make sure that everyone is on the same page around them. Pitfall number two, no time for planning. You know, I understand where this comes from.

We've all been part of planning processes that are a waste of time or been given planning documents such as strategies or plans that actually don't say much. And so I understand that there can be a limited appreciation for what it would take to actually deliver an end-to-end process, the capability, the tools, the techniques. They all need to be in play to get a really good outcome and to drive the organisation forward.

I do see this quite a bit. For example, I was approached to help out with an organisation's planning, and they had set aside a leadership away day to start the conversations. Thought, oh, that'll be great.

How much time do we have, thinking that we'd have either a half day or a full day set aside to really get into some juicy conversations. And they said that they'd put aside 30 minutes, 30 minutes to decide the organisation's priorities. Now, I'm slightly biassed because I'm passionate about this, but planning ensures that you have the right work programme for today and tomorrow.

So I believe that you want to dedicate a good chunk of time on this. And it generally takes more than 30 minutes. Now, one of the challenges that was called out earlier was shifting goals.

And sometimes this can be a symptom of not having full agreement and not taking the time to actually understand where you are heading and what it will take to get there. But what you get from a really good planning process is that it brings to light all the possible things that could derail a business. So if you don't understand the current environment, there's a risk that you're going to end up firefighting and constantly reacting, and this can lead to chopping and changing of the plan.

And I actually believe that a good planning process will help with this. So the time taken as part of the planning conversations will save time later down the track. Pitfall number three, lack of integration of key processes.

So a robust planning process should be connected and integrated with your financial management, your workforce management and your risk management processes. Now, usually there's a singular focus on getting the work programme derived, and discussions can be separate from the other areas. And what tends to happen is that you don't understand the levers that are within your control, you don't understand the constraints, and you tend to have siloed conversations that just are not aligned and don't make sense.

You need to include finance and the workforce dimensions into your planning conversations to understand and connect the right work programme with what are the impacts on the budget, and then what does it mean for your capacity and capability. Pitfall number four, no bridge to action. How many of you have seen high-level strategy documents or plans that you just can't see how they're going to be implemented, and there is no line of sight between the goals that are stated down to the work that staff do every day, and what does it mean for them.

Now, this can be quite common in top-down planning approaches where there's high-level goals and there's really limited understanding or narrative within the document around how it's going to be implemented, how is it going to be translated into action. So you tend to get quite a big translation gap. Sometimes this is called the missing middle in enterprise planning.

So those accountable for implementation are left trying to figure out what actually do these goals mean and what were the guide rails that we needed to effectively implement them. You've also got the opposite where you've got leadership teams who are setting the goals and they're doing so in isolation of what would it take to deliver them. And sometimes what I've seen come through is that when the goals are eventually implemented, there comes some surprises in implementation.

Let's jump into the planning process. Here we have the high-level planning process. Six phases, which goes from understand, where you get a really good understanding of the current state, the current context, through to moving on to confirm your purpose, then defining your end states, what do you want to achieve, then moving through to understanding the implications, and then locking it all down, developing an artefact, and then moving through to implementation.

Now the way I usually work is that for the first three to four phases, it's usually done through a series of workshops. When we get to phase five, which is the decide phase, this is where we develop the document and look to get sign-off and endorsement, and that's usually through a governance group. And then we have the last phase, activate, which is all around how you deploy the document and actually turn the document into action.

So you're thinking about how to embed the document into everyday actions. You'll also notice that there's a couple of phases where there's feedback loops attached, and this is because we wanted to reflect that there might be some back and forth and iteration between the phases, because that confirms how the goals will be delivered. Let's jump into the first phase.

This first phase is about ensuring that you understand both the internal and the external context in which you're operating. So what is happening within the business? What are the pain points? What are the issues? What are the risks? What are your main concerns? And then when you've brought it out, what are the external factors that might impact your organisation, such as market trends, industry trends, what's happening in the regions that could impact you, such as the labour market? So what this looks like is that during this phase, you're going to be pulling together a whole lot of different information, and then you'll be analysing it, so usually through a workshop. Now, this is really important because it is through the workshop that you're actually going to get a joint understanding of what is important, what is material, and what are the key implications for the organisation.

You want to make sure that by the end of this phase, you've got an agreed understanding of the current state and what this means for you moving forward. Now, some of the tools I like to use in this phase is SWOT analysis, PESTEL analysis. You can include some stakeholder analysis or system analysis.

You could be analysing performance or bringing in external research. You want to be broad. So that leads me to my first tip.

You want to have a really broad sweep of anything that may impact your organisation. You want to be getting insights from multiple sources. Finance, workforce trends, performance, risks.

And this is because this provides you your analytical foundation for the rest of the planning process. You also want to make sure that this process eliminates any surprises that could emerge later on. You really want to check the tree and make sure that you've covered all areas.

Confirm. So this phase is about ensuring that you've got a clear understanding of your role. Now, these aren't your outputs, but your role and how you add value to your customers.

Now, you might think this has already been set and it's already been agreed, but it tends to get forgotten and it doesn't tend to get reviewed or explicitly tested. And this is a perfect opportunity to make sure that you're calibrating your purpose and value and making sure that value is taken from the point of view of your customers and who you're serving. So in this phase, you're going to be validating what you're here to do, who are your customers, and what do they deem valuable.

This allows you to calibrate not just what you're offering or what you're delivering, but actually how you're delivering it and your performance with that of what your customers need. And if it hasn't been done in the previous phase, this is where you'll want to analyse what the changing external environment means to your customers, and therefore what will this mean for you moving forward. This is where you also want to get a bit of insight from your customers, direct insight, so whether that's quotes or research.

And the most powerful that I have found is actually using videos of customers and talking them through your experiences with your organisation. This is where you get some really good ahas about the work that you're doing, how you're doing it, or whether there are big gaps that you're missing. You know, I was facilitating a planning session with an organisational strategy business group and their customers were the delivery leadership teams.

And so we went and asked them, you know, what was their experience of the outputs and the engagement and just what they thought about this organisational strategy, this internal strategy group. Now, up to this point in the planning process, this team were very clear on who they were, what they were doing and how they approached it, but when we showed them the videos of their customers, you know, what they really talked about was the value of the engagement, the knowledge and the support that they brought, where the team had been talking about the value of their products and how good they needed to make their products. And so by having these videos within their planning sessions, the team was able to recalibrate their work programme.

They were also able to change how they went about engaging with their customers, the way that they did it. So it actually changed their work programme and their future plan moving forward. Forecast.

This phase is in two parts and I've purposely split this phase into two parts because there is different capabilities and you'll take a different approach for each part. The first part is where you want to create a really inspiring aspiration for the future. You want to call out the outcomes that you want to achieve.

What does success look like? And you're going to be using tools such as visioning exercises, foresighting, scenarios and you want to derive a really rich, compelling view of what the future looks like and what you want to achieve. You can also include any strategic direction that you might be given from the organisation such as other corporate strategies or ministerial direction and then derive down what does this mean for your business group or team. Now here's a wee tip.

This is the phase that you really want to make sure that people have got the headspace for this step. You want to make sure that you can rise above and take them away from the everyday kind of pressures and firefighting. The risk is if you don't, they're going to be dragged into the everyday reality and you really want to get them out of today and get them thinking about the future.

You might have heard about the term strategic reach or strategic pull. That's when you create really ambitious strategies or goals that really drive really big change and drive the organisation forward. The moon launch was a really great example of this.

When President Kennedy said that he was going to land on a man on the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade, NASA didn't know how they were going to do it but with a lot of money and effort, they were able to deliver within the time frame. The key here is that you don't want to, you don't want your goals to be filtered by your everyday constraints. Usually people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in two.

This is where the art of planning really comes in. Creating a real ambitious vision for the future and then turning that into reality. The next part of this phase is that you wrap around some details, evidence, information and you bring that next level of detail around the goals, around the outcomes that you're looking to achieve.

Now this could be extrapolating revenue or budgets, articulating what is the future performance required or work volumes. This is quite an analytical step and it also unpicks any assumptions that you might have around what you need to achieve or what are some of the key dynamics you need to be mindful of. And what this does is it creates an analytical foundation that helps you bridge today to tomorrow.

The analyse phase. This is the step that I see missing most in practise. And this is where you work through the choices that play out in order to deliver the end state that you've just articulated.

Up to this point in the planning conversations, we would have been having the same core group, usually a leadership team. However, this is where you take the work that you've just completed and you're able to inject those accountable for delivery to help work through the how. What would it take to effectively deliver on the goals? So for example, up to this point, I would have been working with a leadership team.

We would have had a series of workshops to work through the phases. And at this point, I would broaden out the workshops to inject those that are accountable for delivery into the conversations. And then we'd start to unpick what are the strategic choices that are going to be required to deliver the goals.

Now, that could be additional funding. It could be additional capability. It might be additional capacity.

It might be a technology solution. But you want to make sure that not just everyone knows where we're heading, but what will it take to get there. I'll give you another example.

I was working with an organisation and they had stated three key priorities. Deliver performance, deliver their large change programme, and deliver on their governmental priorities. So as part of the planning conversations, we worked through what would it take to deliver all three stated goals.

We had to deliver the large change programme. We had to deliver on the government priorities. And we had to redefine what does performance look like in a time of change.

That was the only lever we had. And so what we did was we worked through what would be the change impact for our customers. What would be the work position that would be required to get us through the change.

So we were able to play with the different elements of our work programme in terms of what would be the areas of focus or what does performance look like in these various states of impact because of the change. We worked through our approach and then we fed that back to the exec team. It was really important that they understood what the next couple of years were going to look like and what were the trade-offs that we were making in order to deliver good performance during change was that we needed to turn down or turn off some elements of our work programme.

This was then pulled together as a plan and it was all documented into the plan. This meant that when we came to implement the plan, everyone was on the same page around these are our three goals and these are the choices that we're making to effectively implement it. And the exec team were able to back us up and help us with our message to key external stakeholders in particular around this is what the next two years look like.

This can be quite a hard step in the process because you'll be facilitating decisions around trade-offs and this is naturally really hard. So you might want to think about what is the prioritisation tools or the techniques that you're using. You might want to think about what is some of the evidence that you're using to support the decisions and the conversations in this space.

This will be a part that, while it is tough, actually adds more value moving forward. So you don't want to skip this part. The decide phase.

This phase is around taking all the conversations and the decisions and turning them into an artefact such as a plan, a strategy, a strategic plan and getting formal sign-off. Now this might mean presenting to a governance group or a leadership group for their endorsement and sign-off. Now after four phases you should have some really great content for your planning document and the key is how do you translate and get down on paper all those key discussions and the decisions from the journey that you've just been to.

You want to consider who is your intended audience. So what is the required look, feel, form of the document? How will it be used? The form needs to be usable and understandable. What is the right blend of images and words? What's the right length? Now if I'm creating a strategy I tend to create two artefacts.

One is the longer strategy which contains the strategic narrative and the context and is a really clear artefact that is really descriptive and describes where we want to be and how we want to get there. I also create a one page, a strategy on a page, a one page document that is short and crisp and tends to get used as a bit of a strategy cheat sheet and this is what I tend to see used ongoing and used most frequently by staff. Another wee tip for this phase is that you want to test your documents with stakeholders.

You're going to test the key concepts, you're going to test the language, you're going to test the imagery, and this testing and refining and wordsmithing can actually take quite a long time and it tends to take longer than what you think but there's no point in having an artefact where there are key concepts that people don't resonate with or they just don't understand. Now many people would stop there and it's usually not part of end-to-end planning process that you typically see. You have your fabulous document but of course this last phase is really important and I purposely put it in here because a successful plan or strategy is one that can be implemented and what I tend to see is a lot of people putting a lot of effort into the development of a document but actually the same amount of effort needs to go into how you deploy the document, the plan, the strategy, and how do you turn that into action and actually embed it into operations.

So in this phase, you're thinking about how do you bring the strategy or the plan to life. The first thing you're going to think about is how do you deploy or launch the strategy and making sure that those accountable for implementing it actually understand the intent of what the strategy or plan is about. As part of that, you're going to think about who launches it, how is it launched, and what are some of the tools and the techniques that you're going to wrap around it.

In terms of who launches it, you might want to think about whether a senior leader launches it because this shows their commitment to it. You might also want to think about what do you wrap around the launch so that staff really understand it. One of the tools that I use quite a bit and I find quite effective is a meeting in a box.

So this is where you're breaking down the strategy or the plan into key concepts and then this is used with leaders and team meetings to actually talk through and work through with staff what it really means and so that collectively they can work through the next little detail and how they're going to implement it. You can also start thinking about what are some of the everyday reminders around the strategy or the plan. And by everyday reminders, I mean it could be a desk framework or it could be posters.

What are the mechanisms to keep the strategy alive? Now once you get past the deployment phase, you need to make sure that the organisation has the mechanisms to monitor and report against progress of the strategy or plan. Now if there's no reporting or monitoring, what I tend to see is that strategy progress or implementation of the strategy or plan actually tends to stall. The other thing you want to think about is what are the regular discussions that you're having around progress? So implementation progress.

So what are the formal governance groups? Is it discussed through team meetings? And then making sure that you're closing the loop and communicating back to staff. You've gone to the effort of launching it with them and you want to take them on the journey around how well the strategy is being progressed. There's a saying that by the time you get a strategy or plan down on paper, it's actually out of date.

And that is because there's always change. Constant change. Things are always happening.

And while I presented this end-to-end process as quite a linear process, in reality it should be more circular. It should be iterative and ongoing. And you want to continually assess do we have the right work programme? So the mechanisms you put in place to effectively monitor, report, discuss should also be testing the strategy and plan against the changes that are occurring.

This way you'll be ingraining the planning approach and planning into just how you do business. If you're designing a process, you're going to be wearing multiple hats. You're going to be a facilitator, an advisor, a negotiator, a challenger.

And this isn't always going to be easy. You're going to be challenging the norm. You're going to be moderating different views.

So you need to think about how you're going to design the process. What are the tools that you're going to need in each phase? What's the capability that you're going to use in each phase? And how do you make sure that each phase has the right evidence and information around it? One of the first things I would recommend that you do is you have a plan to get a plan. That's where you design out the design of the process.

So you're able to put in the right capability, tools and techniques from the get-go. The first thing I tend to think about is stakeholders. So one of the first decisions will be who do you involve throughout the process? I tend to have a core group of stakeholders that I use to develop the strategy and plan.

And then I work through who are the key stakeholders that I'm going to need in terms of their views? Or who are the key stakeholders I'm going to need to get on board to help with the success of the eventual strategy or plan? And then who are the stakeholders I'm going to need for final endorsement? Now I tend to have a core group of stakeholders and then I work through each of the phase and then work through what are the additional views that I'm going to need? It's really important in the understand phase. So you're getting multiple views. It's also really important for some key stakeholders that they're part of the futuring exercise where you're jointly deriving what does success look like? The second part of deriving your plan to plan is working through what's the right information and analysis that will support the process? You know, this provides the key foundation for the planning process and articulates what are the key choices? What are the key problems that we need to address as part of the planning process? You know, similar to a pilot's dashboard you're going to have a whole lot of different dials which has a whole lot of different information on it and this is similar with a planning process.

You want to understand what is the key information that you need throughout the process to help articulate what are the key elements? What are the key decisions that you should make? And then what does that mean moving forward? The third and final element that I tend to think about when I'm building my plan to plan is time, headspace and capability.

Now, planning conversations can take time. So it's not just the time and headspace for the stakeholders that you're involving but you as a facilitator of the process you want to make sure that you've got enough time and headspace as part of these conversations you're going to be running ahead you're going to be trying to anticipate what is the next conversation how do I get them on board and you know we're dealing with humans we're dealing with human conversations and these conversations don't always go to plan so you need to be thinking ahead and planning ahead in terms of what are the tools what are the techniques what's the information that you're going to need to bring the conversation to a head so that everyone's on the same page you also want to make sure that you're getting the right capability for each phase now as we've gone through the end-to-end process you'll see that we've used different tools different techniques different approaches for each phase and so you want to make sure that you've got the right support around that you know one of the things about this is that the planning process needs to add value so it puts a bit of weight back on you to design a process which is engaging and actually robust and valid you know stakeholders are not going to commit the time to this process if they don't see value in it so taking the time to really design out and facilitate the process well is really key that comes to the end of our content I hope you found it enjoyable it's quite a large topic as you can see and I've tried to condense it as much as possible if I was to leave you with one key outtake it would be to put the effort into creating a really engaging planning process you know one that stimulates quite a robust conversation you know one that will drive the organisation forward if you get that right it's going to add value

Kia ora everyone we recently re-ran this webinar and we had some really great questions come through you might have similar questions so we thought we'd add them to this video the first question is from Grant who raised a question around the issues in the planning process when this has been delegated to low level employees with limited connections to decision makers and how do you deal with this so planning at the end of the day is all about choice ensuring that you have the right work programme that supports you both today and tomorrow and as part of your design of the planning process you need to be really deliberate around who is involved and how and this includes key decision makers if you have limited time and you are not a decision maker consider how you include key decision makers and key parts of the process so that they too can understand the context the trade-offs before they have to make a decision around the plan or the strategy there's nothing worse as a decision maker when you haven't been part of the process and yet you're having to sign off a strategy or a plan so actually build it as part of the planning process

Andre also raised a question so how might you localise a national strategy so you want to explore how the goals and the objectives that are set out in the national strategy how does your region or your local area contribute to them or what do these goals and objectives mean for you locally the key is that there's line of sight between the national objectives and goals that are articulated and how the activities that you do every day are going to contribute to them one of the things you might want to do is derive some goals and objectives for your region that actually feed into those goals so you're able to see it might be too hard to have a strategy to line up your activities to the national goals so you might want to have and derive local goals and objectives that then feed into the national ones like I said the key is that there's line of sight Irene asked a question can we develop an ecosystem of stakeholders and then develop multiple empathy maps and any examples this is a really good question so an empathy map if you don't know is a way to understand and to derive some key insights around either your key users or your regulated parties or your key stakeholders and what this entails is that you are trying to understand the party that you're looking at what do they think what do they feel what are they going to be doing what are they going to be saying I actually use it quite a bit when I'm deriving strategies I used it a couple of months ago as part of a strategy reset day so an all staff event and we actually explored who were their key stakeholders and then all the staff went through an exercise of exploring those four quadrants so what would these stakeholders see, feel, say and do and how it related to the organisation so it gives you a really good understanding of the value that your organisation provides it also gives you that outside in perspective of what your key stakeholders think about your organisation how they interact with it so it's really good context setting so yes I'd be I'd be fully recommending developing an ecosystem of stakeholders as part of this process

Maureen asked a question how do you keep the different levels of an organisation aligned with the high level strategic aspirations during planning and implementation so the key and I've said it earlier is around line of sight some people also call it the golden thread and that's where from the strategy right through to people's performance objectives on the front line you're able to track how do the activities do those front line staff and how are they rewarded and how they define good performance how does that line up and how does that translate so you can see line of sight between this is where we're heading and this is how me today as a staff member is contributing to that so one of the other things is you want to have an assurance around how are the activities what's the performance metrics how are you monitoring it how do they all line up to those strategic to the strategic outcomes that you're looking to achieve and then

Shelley how do you keep the team engaged during the planning process so it all comes down to how are you getting your team involved throughout the planning process the planning process should never be done in isolation it's all about how do you get the right people collaborating around understanding the environment deciding what needs to happen and then collectively activating the strategy or the plan so think about how are you getting your team involved in the different parts of the process there's a reason why it's called planning it's an active word it's not about the document it's actually this is a conversation that you should be having with your team around what's happening in the environment what are we doing what do we need to calibrate are we on the right track so it'd be keeping your team involved whether it's throughout the process or if it's more around implementation what are the comms and the feedback loops around monitoring progress and what activities are happening Victoria's got a question around how you might leverage AI to help in the strategic planning process so AI is a really great tool and you can use it to help gather a whole lot of information and synthesise a whole lot of information for example you might want to have a prompt which goes away and synthesises or collects and synthesises what are the key trends in your industry or for your organisation a couple of key caveats or key tips you would also want to add to that prompt that as part of the output that comes back you'd ask to see all the sources sometimes AI can make up sources and you just want to be really clear around whether they are true or whether the AI tool has made it up and you want to make sure that they're valid the other thing you might want to consider or be really mindful of especially when it comes to open source AI is around not putting commercially sensitive or business information into the AI tool because once it goes into the AI tool it is publicly available and searchable so you want to be really mindful of that and you always want to check what your organisation's AI policy is before you start using it for any work but it's a potentially really good tool and I think it's going to get bigger moving forward, I just think the maturity around it just needs a little bit of caveats right

Nicholas has got a question around how do you assess the effectiveness of your plan great question so every plan should be monitored and have some form of measurement attached to it, so if you're monitoring progress and you're checking your indicators around and you should be checking around your indicators and the measurement you have in place around is what you are doing making a difference, so it's that constant calibration point where's your monitoring, where's your reporting what's your measurement against the goals to make sure that you're making progress you might also want to have a little bit of some other indicators in place to double check that what you thought or to capture any unintended consequences of any activities

Amy's got a question what's your advice around setting quality strategic outcomes and measures so I know our measurement team actually ran a session a couple of weeks ago around mastering measurement so head to our resources page on our website to have a look at that and if Adam is quick enough he might even be able to pop a link into the chat, they're the gurus so they'll be able to put it better than I can

Carolyn has a question, what would you do differently if the strategic plan is not about aspirational objectives or growth, but if your organisation needs a strategic plan that is about shrinking and managing a downturn great question and really pertinent to the current times it's quite valid that you're going to have a strategic plan or a document or a mechanism to cohesively bring the organisation together around what's the what are we going to do differently and what are we going to do collectively to move forward in some ways you need to, while it might not be aspirational, effectively or ensuring that the organisation gets through this phase in a sustainable position that doesn't burn out staff, you can actually add turn that around to actually add make it a little bit more positive because in some ways especially during these times you want to give people hope that their energy and effort and how this is going to work is going to be successful so you don't need to have the kumbaya, we're going to change the world, strategic objectives it's quite valid that you have quite pragmatic objectives that will rally the organisation together, it's how you find the hope in the situation

Adeel what would you do differently if any for a strategic engagement planning, any specifics that differ from business planning really similar but you're focussing the context and the activities on actual engagement, so you want to understand the context you want to understand what are the different kind of stakeholders within your environment what's their influence, what's their interest and then start working it through very similar, you might want to skip through some of the phases that I talked about when you're looking at a broader work programme but it's very similar, it's just the what and the how is quite specific

this is from Mel what is your preferred artefacts for breaking down goals into actions that can be tracked so I'm not quite sure what you mean by artefacts but I'll answer it in a couple of ways so in terms of a technique it's something that I see or I don't think is always done necessarily quite well is how do you break down goals and higher order outcomes into tangible activities and making sure that you've got an assurance that the activities that you're doing will effectively get you to that goal so there's a couple of techniques that you can use that will provide a little bit of help around that process so intervention logic I think we've talked a couple of times in these webinar series around our approach for getting to the moon where you're basically working backwards I think we call it moon theory at ANC where you're stepping backwards what are the milestones, what are the steps, what does it look like so the first thing is you want to make sure that you're being quite thorough in breaking down are you confident that the activities that you've got in place will get you to the outcomes that you want and then in terms of breaking it down and tracking it in terms of the form I actually love a good Excel spreadsheet Excel can be used for many things I think the thing is that you're getting it down on paper, you're being deliberate around the process to monitor progress and having the conversations around are you on track so it's not just the form, it's the conversation and the process that goes around it and then from Barbara how does this strategy align with existing ones and in your opinion what coordination will ensure integrated and effective implementation across all initiatives I'm not quite sure what the first part means how does this strategy align with existing ones if you not quite sure, if you mean the strategic planning process this is very similar to many strategic planning processes but this is the one that I've amended and adopted that will suit various kinds of strategic planning artefacts and actually while not each step is the same in terms of time, I think it's necessary to add value and in your opinion what coordination will ensure integrated and effective implementation across all initiatives so I always think about once you've got the plan, you understand the various work streams that are involved there's the process of what's the governance, what's the reporting, what's the feedback looks back, so you've got various mechanisms what I call integration mechanisms that will help provide an integrated approach moving forward, you can also start to set up communities of practise around joint work approaches you could have different working groups around different work streams, so you're thinking about the governance you've got the accountability reporting, communication and what are the collaboration parts mechanisms or what are the ways you want to support collaboration as part of the implementation, so working groups communities of practise etc etc

Would Charlene be able to suggest any templates or best practise documents samples so we can see how these principles have been put into practise oh boy templates do you mean in terms of what's the output of strategic planning so a strategy or a plan or a strategic plan, is that what you mean? If it is I wouldn't be able to share any client work but I could potentially source as part of the email that comes out of it what I see as some really good strategies or strategic plans if that would help.

Well that's us that's me Ngā mihi nui, thank you for joining and I look forward to seeing you at the next one