I love strategic planning.

When done well, at the right time, it’s useful and clarifying.

When done poorly, or at the wrong time, it’s soul-sucking. Instead of accelerating your business, it can grind it to a halt.

A quick web search will turn up many strategic planning resources, all describing the same elephant. Thankfully there is a general consensus about what a strategic plan is and does.

Some of those readily-available frameworks are quite detailed, and in certain contexts, those details can be valuable. My tools however tend to be simple.

Here is a format and conceptual process for strategic planning that I’ve found works well for businesses of all kinds.

The why

A strategic plan helps an organization optimize its efficiency and impact.

The when

It’s usually created when:

• You realize your business does not have a strategic plan.
• You are reaching the end of the previous strategic plan.
• You must react to major external or internal shifts.
• You are choosing proactively to grow or change the business.

The what

Here is what a final strategic plan includes, and how the pieces knit together:

It can be shared on a wall, in a Google Doc, or via a sophisticated online dashboard or task management system. It might have deeper details, but the basic template is the same for all organizations, in any situation.

Step 1—Start with Vision

Vision is where most organizations lose the way.

Vision tells everybody internally where you’re headed.

Vision is not a lofty and vague aspiration or a pleasant fantasy about the future.

It is either:

• An ambitious, measurable, time-delimited goal
• A short description of the disruptive innovation you intend to create
• An honest answer to the question: “What do you want?”

If a vision is not articulated, then a secret one is at work. Examples: “Preserve the internal culture at all costs” or “Just get through the year.”

If your vision is primarily about your internal systems, not your external impact, then you have a hobby, not a business.

Step 2—Define Objectives

Choose 4-7 objectives—really, no more—that support your vision, capturing all the major functions of your organization: current services, operations, marketing, culture, experiments, etc.

Make sure each objective is measurable, meaningful, and doable. The time horizon will vary depending on your unique situation.

Then, assign a clear owner for each objective. This usually provokes some epiphanies regarding your organizational structure.

Step 3—Choose Strategies

Identify 1-5 strategies that you will use to accomplish each objective.

Strategies ideally are not simple tasks that can be accomplished in an afternoon. They should be complex initiatives that will last for at least a few months.

Examples: “Hire the agency Walk into Mordor to design and implement our PR campaign,” or “Launch a new app-based version of our proprietary content, targeted at golfers aged 45-65,” or “Overhaul our board and advisory board composition to match our new long-term vision.”

Assign an owner to each strategy. And then:

For each strategy you must define not only how you will know if the strategy was executed but also how you will know if it was successful.

If you skip this very important step, your strategic plan turns into an endless list of to-dos. Some strategies will fail, and those failures will be educational. If all of your strategies are sure to succeed, you are likely being too naive or too conservative about your business growth.

Step 4—Develop the Plan

Identify the key activities and milestones needed to accomplish and assess the strategies. The plan can be to whatever level of detail and in whatever format makes sense for your business. Typically, it’s a Gannt chart.

The how

The shell above is the one I would use and populate for all organizations. Larger organizations will require deeper and more sophisticated content—for example, calling out critical success factors for each objective—but the template is the same regardless.

Most of the important variations you see between different strategic planning approaches are not about the outline, but the process used to populate it. One reason for this is that many organizations use strategic planning as a mechanism to align people and generate insights.

Here it’s important not to a follow someone else’s methodology blindly. Enrolling and aligning people and coming up with great new ideas can take place as part of strategic planning, or separately. I’ve seen highly successful strategic plans that were imposed by a CEO with little input or collaboration, and ones built iteratively through complex, multi-stakeholder engagement models that completely failed.

Generally speaking, there is no process that will compensate for a weak leader, a shortage of good ideas, a lack of useful and actionable information, or a failure to implement usable management tools.

The “how” can vary not only based on organization’s size and maturity but also its type. The Wikimedia Foundation has modeled how to do strategic planning with large networks, with a resulting direction that’s both “bottom-up and outside-in.” The Transition Town movement has articulated a great process for strategic planning with communities. I’ve written about these different organization types before: they allocate and optimize power in ways that are very different from traditional, closed organizations. And a growing number of organizations these days are hybrids—e.g., a private company that is porous to a network that it incubates, or a public institution that is inter-dependent with a larger community.

Optimizing your strategic planning process for efficiency, inclusiveness, consensus, or emergence might make sense or it might not depending on your circumstances.

When in doubt, look for an experienced facilitator who is aware of multiple different methods who can make a custom and context-appropriate recommendation.

Daily meditation is part of my self-care and personal and professional development.

Several people have asked me recently about the particular tapes and programs I use. Below are some of my favorites, which I’ve also added to the Next Us resources page.

Meditating alone or with a group, guided or unguided, are all different experiences. Each one is worth trying.

Personally, I find for my daily morning meditation that recorded instruction usually helps deepen my practice, leading to more calm and better insights.

1. Meditations to Change your Brain

This is the companion audio CD to the excellent book Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, which I’ve written about before. Half of the tracks explain the neuroscience behind the various meditation techniques, and the rest are guided meditations of 5-20 minutes each. There are some references to Buddhism here and there, but in general the CD uses colloquial language and is meant to be practical for a broad audience.

2. Meditation for Beginners

Jack Kornfield is a teacher famous for bringing ancient insight and mindfulness meditation practices to the West. The frame for this CD is more explicitly Buddhist, with references to concepts like the Four Noble Truths. As with the recording above, half of the the tracks are background teachings; the rest are “listen-along” guided meditations.

3. Appropriate Response

Pamela Weiss is the founder of Appropriate Response, a mindfulness-based leadership development and coaching organization. On the AR website, she offers a number of free .mp3 guided meditations of varying lengths, all very good.

4. Stress-Proof Your Brain: Meditations To Rewire Neural Pathways for Stress Relief and Unconditional Happiness

This is another invaluable CD from Rick Hanson, with an apt title. These meditations are slightly longer, averaging around 15 minutes each.

5. Recover Your Center with Conscious Embodiment: Audio Practices That Develop Presence, Confidence, and Compassion

Tiphani Palmer of Conscious Embodiment spoke at a recent Next Us event and eloquently shared some of the history and benefits of these Aikido-based centering techniques.

6. Guided Mindfulness Meditation

These Jon Kabat-Zinn meditations follow the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program he pioneered. This program requires a more serious time investment, but has scientifically proven effectiveness helping people with chronic pain and several other medical conditions.

Every business at every stage must be able to answer two questions:

• What do you want?
• Who is your customer?

I’ve written about vision recently. Vision is essential because it focuses your attention. Where you focus your attention creates your world.

Knowing your customer is also essential. But surprisingly, in all their day-to-day busyness, companies can easily forget exactly who they are trying to serve.

The art and science of customer segmentation can get a bit complicated, but there’s a simple framework I’ve been using with enterprise, SMB, and startup clients for the past few years that seems to work well to sharpen thinking and provoke new insights.

If you’re an entrepreneur planning a new phase of growth, I suggest using each of the four filters below to identify your current or ideal customers. List the possibilities for each one, taking breaks in between to recharge your mental batteries. Then look at your answers, cluster any groups that naturally go together, and prioritize where to focus your energy.

The Four Filters

1. Demographics
2. Psychographics
3. Occasions
4. Categories

Demographics

Demographics cover basic objective data about your customers, including their gender, location, and economic status.

Almost all enterprises know this information cold. By contrast, many small business owners don’t articulate this precisely for themselves. But it’s useful to get really specific here; it narrows your focus and highlights things you might not otherwise see.

Tip: Everyone at first thinks their customer is “everybody.” Move quickly out of that trap.

Psychographics

Psychographics refer to your customers’ values, wants, and needs.

To be honest, many companies are terrible at this kind of segmentation. Asked to describe their target customers, they respond with some version of: “People with a vague spiritual ache that can only be met by our current offering exactly as it is today.” Their error in other words is projection, seeing others through an overly subjective filter.

Good psychographic profiling requires data—quantitative data—about how your customers experience the world from their point of view. Luckily, many people know how to do this kind of research, and if you’re in a mature category, there are often freely available reports that can help get you started.

If psychographic research is new to you, never fear, simply start with your best assumptions about what your customers value and find smart ways to test those assumptions.

Tip: Avoid projection. Get data.

Occasions

Some situations create their own customer segments, where the usual demographic and psychographic differences between people cease to matter as much. People standing in line at the post office tend to behave like people standing in line at the post office. Planning a wedding, searching for a divorce lawyer, or finding a last-minute table for four with no reservations are all occasions that generate their own set of predictable human behaviors.

If you’ve been running your business for a while, you probably have a good sense of how and when people come to use your services. Write down these different occasions, and try brainstorming some new ones.

Tip: Occasion-based profiling can often unlock some powerful new ideas about how to market your business or extend your product and service offerings.

Categories

And last, most mature categories come with their own built-in expectations. If your business doesn’t meet those expectations, you have to call out those differences and spin them as positives, or else commit to adding the services and features that your customers expect. Example: an urban coffee shop that does not offer wi-fi could market itself as a place for in-person socializing and personal connection, free from digital distraction. Or it could invest in wi-fi.

Tip: Compare your psychographic targets to the expectations for your category. Anything that makes you different must be a plus to the customers you are trying to reach.

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