Business Strategy 13: Step 10 Reassess Strategies & the Strategic Planning Process

This continues our series on John M. Bryson’s strategic change cycle for your business

Bryson wrote Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations in which he wrote “Once the implementation process has been under way for some time, the organization should review the strategies and the strategic planning process, as a prelude to a new round of strategic planning. Much of the work of this phase may occur as part of the ongoing implementation process.” (p51)

Purpose of Reassessing Strategies & Planning Processes

Bryson continues “The organization should focus on

• Successful strategies, asking whether they should be maintained, replaced  by other strategies, or terminated.
• Unsuccessful strategies should be replaced or terminated.
• The strategic planning process also should be examined, its strengths and weaknesses noted, and modifications suggested to improve the next round of strategic planning.” (p51)

Process of Reassessing Strategies

General Guidelines

• Stay focused on what is important
• Focus on signs of indicators of success and failure
• Review the issue framings used to guide strategy formulation in the first place
• Use existing review opportunities, or create new ones
• Create a review group
• Challenge institutional and organizational rules that favor undesirable inertia
• Remember that organizations usually have greater staying power than their strategies
• Stay fresh

Strategy Change or Succession Guidelines

The following steps will help you establish a strategic change or succession:

• Alter existing arrangements to facilitate a move to new strategies
• Challenge existing meanings and estrange people from them to create new meanings
• Strategy succession may be more difficult than the adoption of the existing strategy because the existing strategy is now likely to have a coalition of supporters
• Implementers and beneficiaries of existing strategies are likely to be more concerned with implementing strategy than with innovating it
• Rely on key decision makers, implementers and beneficiaries to make major strategy changes
• Consider a move either to split aspects of the strategy or to consolidate strategies in order to achieve strategy succession
• Consider building a new system without dismantling the old system
• Invest in relevant competencies and build new competencies

Thursday we summarize and pull the entire strategic planning process together