Ah…you can smell it in the air…or maybe not, but I can
certainly feel it my bones; it the time of year that that I love and hate. It’s
strategic planning time! Every year around this time the conference calls
ratchet up and the new slide deck and white paper outlines get their final
touch ups and the schedule of planning sessions gets laid out. Then with the
blast of the starting gun we are off to the races spending countless hours
researching, meeting, thinking, spitballing on the white board dozens of ideas
and just when you think things will get completely out of hand, you manage to
loop a lasso around then whole mess and pull together your strategic plan for
next year.
In my day job as the director of business development
for a health care organization, I relish the opportunity to take the keys and
drive the bus when it comes to strategic planning; leading the various teams
developing our road map for the next twelve months is something I love to do…I
could however do without out the blinding spread sheets and 16 hour days. Every
year I try to bring something new to the table to keep things interesting and
to see if we can deliver a more focused, achievable plan.
This year that something new comes in the form of Think to Win – Unleashing the Power of
Strategic Thinking by Paul Butler, John Manfredi and Peter Klein. It didn’t
take me long to have an A HA! moment when I delved into the book. The trio
spell out the five principles that drive the Think To Win (TTW) approach:
1.
Challenge assumptions
2.
Scope the issue
3.
Rely on facts and data
4.
Focus on the vital few
5.
Connect the dots
It was challenge the assumptions that strikes the first
chord for me. After a quick but thorough wipe down, I took to the white board
and started to scratch out a list of all of the assumptions that people had
about our organization. It didn’t take long before the light bulb went off and
I knew that we had to start the planning process, not by leaving those
assumptions that had driven our planning for so long in place; you know the
perpetual problems and issues that had held us back from achieving our goals,
but by challenging the assumptions and looking for strategies to tackle them.
A HA! This was a good starting point and something I
could work with. And that is what makes Think
to Win great; it offers up a guide for those with a bias for action to move
from the thinking stage to the execute stage with greater agility.
The series of case studies in the book give it a real
world finishing touch; an exclamation point that takes things from theory to
practice. TTW offers up the useful tools to institute and effect a culture
change that will have every member of your team working like a strategic
thinker and may even offer up a solution for avoiding the dreaded “that’s how
we’ve always done things” mindset.
