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Turning Intentions into Results5 Ways to Keep Your Plan from Gathering DustBy Peter Christian • Published October 2010 #5: The Only Constant is Change Strategic Plans are guidelines, not hard fast rules carved in stone. Just as your operations need to adapt to market conditions, your Plan will need to evolve, too. It’s easy to lose sight of that when you are in the trenches working on the daily operations. 86% of business owners and managers spend less than one hour a month discussing strategy Create a calendar for monthly updates, quarterly reviews and the annual planning session. Every 2 years, it’s time to evaluate and build the Plan all over again. But don’t think of it as new construction. If you made the hard decisions on your initial Plan, the annual planning sessions are more like remodeling projects. Strategic Planning is not a straight line from point “A” to “B”. It’s a perpetual circle. And the one thing I can guarantee is that things will happen that force the company to change course. But if you have - and maintain - a Strategic Plan, you have the map to plot an alternate route. Compass Point, one of our Strategic Partners, refers to it as “ensurance”.
Strategic Success Tip #5: Part of the Strategic Planning process is anticipating change, identifying risks and analyzing “what if” scenarios. So when the change happens, you’ve eliminated costly “trial and error” and instead have created an effective Action Plan, allowing your organization to meet change head-on and be positioned to excel. Recap...
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