Business Strategy 10: Step 7 Review & Adopt Strategies or Strategic Plan

This continues our series outlining John M. Bryson’s strategic planning cycle

Strategic Planning for Public or Nonprofit Organizations states “The purpose of step 7 is to gain an official decision to adopt and proceed with the strategies and plan prepared and informally reviewed in step 6. For the proposed plan to be adopted, it must address issues that key decision makers think are important with solutions that appear likely to work.” (p 210)

Purpose of Step 7

Bryson shares characteristics of step 7:

• “Can be quite contentious particularly when formal adoption must take place”
• “Key decision makers & stakeholders must be open to the idea of change”
• “Key decision makers & stakeholders must be offered inducements to gain support”
• “Gear inducements to the decision makers and stakeholders values, interests, and frames of reference
• “They use their own judgment whether or not to support the ideas”
• “Bargaining, negotiation, and invention of items to trade may be necessary to find the right combination of exchanges and inducements”

Process for Reviewing and Adopting Strategies

• “Discuss and evaluate strategies in relation to key stakeholders”
• “Include budgets and budgeting procedures”
• “Verify the best fit among elements of strategies, different strategies, and levels of strategy”
• “Allow for a period of catharsis for the organization to move forward on the change”
• “Recognize completion of the strategy development step as an important decision point”
• “Ensure that key decision makers and planners think carefully about how to manage the adoption process”
• “Provide a sense of closure to the strategic planning process at the end of step 7”
• “Consider the following reasons why a good strategy should not be adopted:
  • The time is not yet right
  • The draft strategies and plans are inadequate or inappropriate
  • The issues the strategies and plans purport to address are simply not real enough or pressing enough
  • The organization cannot handle the magnitude of the proposed changes, and they need to be scaled back
  • The strategies and plans should be taken to some other arena, or the present arena should be redesigned in some way”

Thursday we discuss how to establish an effective organizational vision