When organisations engage in strategic planning to define their strategy and direction, the process normally includes decisions on allocating resources — human capital, time and money — to pursue the designated strategy.
In this sense, strategic planning is a vital foundation for every organisation because it is difficult to achieve anything without a good plan.
There are hundreds of business books dedicated to strategic planning and we’ve read most of them. The process normally starts with the C-suite executives gathering for an annual retreat in order to come up with a new plan for the coming year. That approach probably worked in the past as we all agree that the “bosses know best”.
The person running a department, division or company is in that position because he or she not only knows what to do but also knows the best way to do it. In the top-down corporate culture of Thailand, this is widely understood to be true by both leaders and their subordinates. And in the past it often was true. Marketplaces didn’t change nearly as quickly as they do now, and the experience that a person gathered over a career almost always stayed relevant as he or she moved up into management and leadership positions.
However, the reality we’re facing today has shifted dramatically. Strategy is about making choices and, typically, the business strategy of any organisation is primarily driven by the choices it makes based on the stakeholder mandate. But the pace of change and its effects on the political, economic, social and business landscape adds great complexity to making such choices.
This point was reinforced at a recent seminar, titled “Strategic Planning — Business Success — Systemic Approach”, featuring Professor Bruce McKenzie, a director of Australia-based Systemic Development Associates. He told his audience that he is not trying to replace the old method of strategic planning, but that the new systemic approach can be used as an add-on to what you already know. It will help you to navigate the shifting business landscape at a time when changes are happening on so many fronts that it is impossible for an executive to know everything.
“[I]n the past, when an organisation was trying to develop an organisational strategic plan, it would normally involve only a handful of stakeholders for each topic, believing that they were the only people who would know and understand the situation best. It might have been possible in the past but it’s not true anymore” said Prof McKenzie.
In order to have a sustainable long-term plan, we cannot simply try to fix one problem at a time. Instead, we need to involve every possible stakeholder and that is one of the three fundamental features of the systemic approach.
The core elements of the systemic thinking approach are based on the accumulated knowledge that people gather from experiential learning; the ability to make sense of the big data available; and the ability to deal with complex conditions in which people are constantly surprised and sometimes feel overwhelmed by what’s going on.
To elaborate, systemic thinking should be used for planning and formulating a strategy in a complex and volatile business climate because it is based on the belief that “everyone knows something, but no one knows everything”. Therefore, the approach will allow executives to capture all the knowledge available among their stakeholders in order to fully comprehend the situation and plan the appropriate strategy.
The systemic approach will also help the executive to make sense of the large amount of combined data at hand, as data means nothing if we don’t know how to use and reap benefits from it.
As a result, the outcome of the systemic approach to strategic planning is that the organisation can obtain more useful information. As well, it allows all stakeholders and the executors of the plan to feel engaged as their voices are being heard and deemed valuable. A lack of engagement is often the main reason why most organisations face challenges in which there is a gap between strategy planning and execution.
Lastly, strategists — which will comprise a larger group of stakeholders under a systemic approach — need to keep in mind what it actually takes to implement the ideas. At the same time, those responsible for executing the plan need to know the “why” behind the strategy and be involved in the strategy formulation process early. Each group should genuinely care about what the other side is doing. All in all, I’d say that while gaps can never be completely sealed, they can be minimised with everyone’s involvement.
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Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand’s leading Organisation and People Development Consultancy. She can be reached by e-mail at arinya_t@apm.co.th or https://www.linkedin.com/pub/arinya-talerngsri/a/81a/53b
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