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.

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.

• 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.

1. You don’t know how to filter the multiple good opportunities before you.
2. You don’t know what big risk to take next.
3. Your top priority is preserving the existing system.

Vision is a goal. It is not a story, an idea, or plan. It is not a means to an end—it is the end itself.

All systems are dynamic, so visions once achieved can’t be maintained forever without new risks, new goals—in other words, new vision.

Is vision really that important?

There are many excellent articles about the tension between vision and execution and which of the two matters most. The question is a good one, but like all really great questions there is no universal black-and-white answer. Vision and execution are both always necessary, but visions tend to look a little different depending on the size and maturity of an organization:

• Large-scale enterprises tend to have visions that are formal, with clear metrics and time horizons (often 3-5 years) that can align efforts across many diverse constituencies.
• Startups can usually get by with a short statement of the disruptive innovation they’re trying to create, and then a rigorous focus on the 90-day plan.
• A small business‘s vision is often implicitly linked to the life vision of the founder, so the two must be looked at together and either merged or de-coupled.

For more thoughts on vision, see my earlier post “What do you want?”

If you still don’t believe that vision’s important, just ask a giant robot dinosaur.

For most big choices, there is no objective right answer, a single definition of success. To move forward in business and life, you must know what you want.

Having a vision

In business, knowing what you want is usually called “having a vision.”

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last describe in detail how some successful global companies in the 20th century used vision to create long-term advantage. It’s an excellent starting point for thinking about vision. That said, it’s hard to apply the Built to Last formula in every circumstance—e.g., in the social or public sectors, in a startup environment, or in 21st century organizations that don’t resemble traditional institutions.

If you’re a smaller company or startup, or simply need more practical advice about how to set vision and use it to drive decision-making, David Binetti, CEO of Votizen, is your guy. I’ve shared his talk from the Startup Lessons Learned conference with many of my clients. (Binetti digs into vision at the 10:30 mark, but the whole talk is worth watching.) For more advice in this vein, I also recommend Alan Weiss’s recent piece “When You Can’t Win Enough.”

IDKWIW

Outside of work, we don’t tend to ask people about their vision; we simply say: what do you want?

But asking someone what they want can often seem impolite, even aggressive. There are also many situations where people rightly assess that it’s neither safe nor wise to reveal their agenda. Yet even when we’re in a trusted relationship, or alone, we often still don’t want to admit what we want, to examine our own thinking. When this happens, we miss out on life.

The last step before a big leap is often “I don’t know what I want.”

For example, in dating and romantic relationships, IDKWIWs are frequent, and in a sense, they’re truthful and considerate. But with a bit of exploration, they evolve:

• “I don’t know what I want… so I’d like to play the field for a bit and not make any long-term commitments until I have a better sense of what I like and don’t like.”
• “I don’t know what I want… but I know I enjoy romantic relationships and would like very much to be in one, so my m.o. will be to throw myself passionately into each new person who sparks my interest to see if that makes me happy.”
• “I want to be in a relationship, but my current partner has habits that make me uncomfortable. So I’m biding my time hoping that they change. I don’t want to bring up these issues directly and risk losing the relationship I do have. Instead I’ll withdraw a bit and claim that I’m no longer sure what I want—hopefully they’ll take the hint.”

Notice that each of these people knows exactly what he or she wants.

Admitting what you want takes some courage and vulnerability. You might identify humbling errors in your thinking. You might face rejection. But when you can get to a place where you can tell people succinctly what it is you truly want, you’ll be much more able to enroll others in helping you get there. Savvy daters share what they want and screen for compatibility. Savvy networkers are clear in their positioning so people know which referrals to send their way.

And of course, it’s okay to change what you want. Life is dynamic, and we learn by doing. Corporate visions are meant to be achieved and then re-set. Serendipity can be a great teacher. And most of us need a hobby, a practice we engage in for its own sake. This might be salsa dancing or kite surfing, or it could be a separate business… many successful entrepreneurs have one. (Think Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his spaceship project.) When an an entrepreneur creates a second business, they’re usually following their intuition, creating a place where they can learn things they don’t already know.

Still, it’s a kind of not-knowing that has clarity to it: “I want to follow my intuition here. I want to explore this further and see what there is to learn.”

• Billy Polson, Mike Clausen, and Gina Gutierrez (DIAKADI Body)
• Adam Dole (Mayo Clinic)
• Tiphani Palmer (Conscious Embodiment)

I’ve made it a point in the past year to pay more attention to my body as a source of wisdom… and I had a gut sense that these speakers, individually and together, would have a lot to share. I wasn’t disappointed. Thank you to all who participated in a rich discussion and a memorable evening.

DIAKADI Body:

Adam Dole:

Tiphani Palmer:

I did not appreciate the perspective.

Normally, I like to think my life is pretty exciting. I live in the city of my dreams. I have a job that brings me great satisfaction, loved ones close to me, and hobbies that fuel me creatively. I’ve traveled the world and leaned into my growth areas. I’ve taken to heart the Helen Keller quote: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

My life is not dull.

But his words stuck with me for several days afterwards… a sure sign, I knew, that they were right in some important way that I couldn’t see. So after a few days of avoidance, I gave the thought its full due:

“Life can be pretty dull sometimes… is that true?” (I channeled my inner Byron Katie.)

The answers hit me immediately. Well, yes, in business, of course it’s true. The Lean Startup community has pointed out convincingly that the difference between a successful venture and a failed one is the willingness to do painstaking, intellectually honest, data-driven work. Michael Gerber in The E-Myth Revisted describes how many small business owners throw their heart and soul into service delivery, while ignoring the more challenging aspects of their business. Getting to Carnegie Hall—or the equivalent in any field—requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. Many people find long-term financial planning enormously dull until it’s quite late.

First Lesson: If you’re not actively doing things you find dull, you might be avoiding your real work.

There’s a second lesson. If you strip away your story, your accomplishments, your setting, your goals, your cultivated community, your online persona: who are you? Who are you when you are alone with yourself… with the messy, unfinished you that Yeats called the “rag and bone shop of the heart”?

Many people find this more terrifying than they’d like to admit. So they fill their lives with things and experiences. Never able to be fully present with themselves, they end up always lonely.

It’s a shame, because the emptiness most people feel behind their provisional, social self can be a source of enormous creativity. The actress Thandie Newton describes this eloquently in a recent TED video: “Let’s not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness.”

Madeline Levine also touches on this topic in The Price of Privilege, exploring how children of affluent, overly involved parents are increasingly the most at risk of psychological and emotional maladjustment. She writes of one teenager:

“Allison’s whole life had been defined by well-meaning parents, relatives, and teachers, robbing Allison of the opportunity to think about what she wanted for herself… She stormed out of therapy one day, declaring the whole endeavor ‘boring.’ What was really boring to Allison was Allison herself. She had evaded growing into a complex, robust, conflicted, normal adolescent.”

The Second Lesson is to know yourself, deeply—it’s never too late. For most people, that looks like some kind of regular meditation practice or other deep check-in… a place where you can witness and be present for what arises for its own sake. In our go-go-go, entertainment-on-demand culture, that may seem dull, challenging, or scary, but it pays enormous dividends.

In the play Our Town, the Stage Manager says at the end that perhaps only “poets and saints” realize their lives as they live them. But that richness of experience is actually available to all of us.

We just need to first embrace the dull.

The years 2000-2001 saw some particularly powerful images: the turning of the century clock, the fall of the World Trade Center, the slow-motion crash of the stock market as the dot-com bubble burst. And there have been other collapses since, including an escalating series of environmental disasters and the debt-driven meltdown of the Great Recession.

But the flickers of renewal are just as real, and the world we are re-making together is in some ways more energizing and promising than any we’ve ever seen.

Watching the world wake up

It’s been roughly half a millenium since the last Renaissance, which we commonly associate with a rapid evolution in science, the arts, and social organization. During this time, a set of ideas and institutions emerged in Europe that most historians agree were novel and discontinuous. In his masterwork From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, Jacques Barzun describes some of these new governing principles as individualism, self-consciousness, separatism, reductivism, and secularism. As the second half of Barzun’s title implies, these ideas are now all in decline.

As the forward motion of the Renaissance dissipates, over the last century a new set of ideas has been gathering strength. Commenting on several merging trends, David Rock and Linda J. Page write:

“Physics has added its weight to the two related trends of postmodernism and globalization in bringing about a greater acceptance of systemic principles in the human sciences… Globalization has introduced Eastern philosophy to Westerners steeped in individualism. Systems theory stresses how people are connected to one another and how their interactions relate to change. And quantum mechanics provides a scientific basis for the importance of human choice and activity.” (Coaching with the Brain in Mind: Foundations for Practice)

The 21st century is, to an extent, when the the earned learning of the 20th century will blossom and pay off.

The co-evolving environment

Our predicament with regards to ecological systems is perhaps the biggest idea that we individually and globally have yet to metabolize. That’s why I particularly appreciate The Transition Timeline by Shaun Chamberlin.The book lays out in a concise, relatable way the conservative consensus of the global scientific community about climate change, and tells four stories of how we collectively might respond. Three of these scenarios are doomsday, and only one is hopeful, but the major themes are consistent across all four: inter-dependence, re-localization, de-industrialization, and imagination. We know where the puck is heading—our context for taking personal action is the same no matter what heads of government or business do.

Technology of course is also an integral part of our environment. Despite its ills, Kevin Kelly is compellingly optimistic about technology’s ability to expand opportunity. Like our natural systems, technology will continue to co-evolve with us—it may have its own “wants” and energies, but it is part of who we will be.

Our renaissance

There is more than one way to look at any time period. Douglas Ruskhkoff in Life Inc. criticizes the original Renaissance, despite its signature accomplishments, as being a major step back in community happiness and well-being. Rushkoff’s evidence is interesting, and he’s not alone in his assessment—a reminder that what constitutes a collapse versus a renewal depends largely on one’s point of view.

But a positive vision can be helpful, as is a fresh start. I find it promising that the decay of old systems, the energy of human understanding and ingenuity, and the constraints of our ecological and technological systems are all leading us to the same place at the same time: a subtler, more connected world, where individual actions matter.

At a recent Next Us event, Chris Carlsson called history “a collaborative act in the present.”

The future will be created by all of us.

Resilience isn’t a concept you hear mentioned in too many boardrooms yet, but I think it’s a useful frame for conversation across many industries and endeavors.

Resilience refers to a system’s ability to survive major shocks and spontaneously generate new order afterwards—like a forest recovering from a fire. The characteristics of resilient systems include redundancy, modularity, diversity, complexity, and emergence— all poor fits for many of the institutions and infrastructures we’ve been collectively building since WWII.

Resilience can be described as a necessary response to predictable system shocks like peak oil, economic collapse, and the global and local impacts of climate change. Or it can be positioned more cheerfully as a natural evolution in business- and group-building metaphors from machines, to computer networks, to ecological systems. Either way, the major themes are the same.

For smart writing on resilience, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Oponohu valley, Mo'orea, Creative Commons, Tim Waters

Innovation

Innovation is a concept that’s already gone viral, and in business publications, it’s been ubiquitous for some time. There have been downsides to this: many novel value propositions and “pieces of flair” get praised for being innovative, while some healthy businesses and long-term scalable successes go unsung.

But I think the fact that we’re talking about innovation, and talking about it so much, is itself poignant. You could read this as a sign that the basic premises for many industries are unraveling—e.g., allowing companies like Google to create zero billion dollar industries overnight—or that the increasing competitiveness and efficiency of business in general is forcing everyone everywhere to search faster for new kinds of value-creation. Both interpretations are correct.

I think that Clayton Christensen has contributed the most clarity to discussions of innovation, and his distinction between sustaining and disruptive innovation is a particularly useful one. The model below illustrates how these two activities differ within a public company:

• Sustaining innovation (the “A” curve) has a predictable and positive ROI. We know how to do this, with over a hundred years of traditional management philosophies, processes like Six Sigma, and expert leaders to steer the course. Every organization of any scale must get good at this to succeed. Sustaining innovation pays good dividends for a while, but over time, incremental improvements to what we’re already doing offer less and less bang for the buck.

• Disruptive innovation (the “B” curve) is different. Because we’re shooting for an end-value that has never been seen before, we don’t know how to get there. The ROI curve at the outset is therefore less promising: we have to experiment and fail, and learn from those failures until we see our way towards something new.

Disruptive innovation requires a different mindset, yet in today’s business climate all organizations that survive more than a few years must excel at both kinds of innovation at the same time. In fact, in every sector, industry, and company today, you can see a yin-yang of sustaining and disruptive innovation happening at every level of scale.

Disruptive innovation is not yet something we know how to do well. In the business world, there have been glimmers of best practices, noteworthy trends, and provocative anecdotes, but until now no real methodology.

Lean startups

Which brings me to The Lean Startup. I’ve been to many conferences where the topic of the event is inevitably described as a “movement.” I recently attended the excellent Startup Lessons Learned Conference in San Francisco, where the “m word” was used, and in this case, I think it’s entirely earned. Eric Ries and others beyond The Lean Startup are onto something big.

Ries defines a startup as “a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” Lean Startup is a school-of-hard-knocks approach to succeeding against that backdrop. It’s not a recipe, but rather a flexible framework for iterative strategic hypothesis testing.

In other words, it’s a methodology for disruptive innovation.

Lean Startup has been growing as a movement in Silicon Valley for several years. It may have started with technologists (with an influx of best practices from previous movements like lean manufacturing), but its language—and I think this is very important—is that of business. It’s neutral enough to be embraced and adapted by designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs in any industry. And its emphasis on experimentation and validated learning is in-line with some of the most forward-thinking educational organizations today.

The videos from the Startup Lessons Learned conference are all online—I love that—and include a mix of broad overviews and fascinating real-world anecdotes from companies like Intuit, Dropbox, Groupon, and others. Also, the book The Lean Startup officially comes out this fall, and is well-worth getting.

We need more resilient systems, and disruptive innovation is, to a large extent, how we’ll get there. Lean Startup therefore is a right idea at the right time. And it’s not just for startups—it’s for everyone.

One book I particularly like for its accessibility and practicality is Raphael Cushnir’s The One Thing Holding You Back. It is full of good exercises and tips, but one line in particular has stuck with me:

“You’re only able to proceed successfully as fast as the slowest part of you can go.”

I think that idea has broad applicability beyond its original context. In your life, your career, your workouts, your relationships, are you reaching automatically for the next victory or milestone, or are you slowing down to address what’s most difficult and unresolved?

I think there are moments when, like Kerri Strug at the 1996 Olympics, we might choose to injure ourselves and tune out the body’s signals in pursuit of a goal. This is particularly easy to do when we are young, and in some situations, of course it’s okay. But as a long-term unconscious pattern, it’s dangerous and unsustainable, not only for our physical health, but for our general well-being. Writes Wendy Palmer of Conscious Embodiment:

‎“If we don’t distinguish between our personality’s desires and the creative urges that come from our centered self, we will end up using our creativity to simply try to survive rather than using it to go beyond our fears and needs to discover our place in the universe – our part of the big picture.”

For other great resources on this topic, check out Johanna Putnoi’s Senses Wide Open or Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living.