Too often, companies hire professional facilitators to support their strategic planning meetings but get nothing more than fluff. Many of these facilitators (under the claim of being a certified and master facilitator) have only a superficial understanding of strategy. They help the meeting produce something – but that something is definitely not strategy. Instead they help expensive executives and managers facilitate the production of fluff statements.

This article is not an attack on the idea of facilitation of meetings. Indeed, many meetings are wasteful and frustrating; and to be clear, a facilitator can be helpful.  However, experience shows that many facilitators push their technique at the expense of strategic thinking.

Mission, Vision, and Values: Is This Simply “Polishing the Doorknobs?”

Statements of mission, vision, and values are important; especially to small businesses. It is a good idea to have written something on paper about mission, vision, and values.  JUST DON”T TELL YOURSELF THAT YOU ARE PRODUCING STRATEGY!

• A mission tells the organization its purpose
• A vision establishes a verifiable future
• A statement of values expresses those aspirations thought to be important.

If you already have a reasonably good statement, don’t let a facilitator waste your time on refreshing or rewriting them. It’s just an exercise in wordsmithing.  This activity is “doorknob polishing;” the doorknob is functional (the statement has been written), but there is not need to make it gleam and impress others.

And, while we’re at it…..

Strategic Plans are Documents – Let’s Hope that We Can Find a Strategy

In the last 3 weeks, I have reviewed three statements of strategy.  Only 1 of the 3 documents actually had something that I would recognize as a strategy.  The other two were just statements of goals and aspirations.  The one good strategy document clearly showed the nature of the business situation and constructed a focused set of guiding actions that would address the business situation. The good strategy was the result of insights that came from thinking strategically.e

Interestingly, the “strategic plan” that was produced by a professional facilitator looked great. However, I could find no strategy. It was attractive and concise, but an exemplar of fluff.  It probably worked fine to for internal alignment, but INTERNAL ALIGNMENT DOES NOT MAKE A DOCUMENT A STRATEGY!

How do I know? If I gave this document to a competitor of the company they would just yawn. If it were truly a good strategy, the reaction would be to mount a counter-response to avoid loss of advantage.  One of the acid tests of a good strategy is simply this: would your competitors be worried if they saw your strategy?

Facilitators and the Myth of High-Energy Meetings

Granted (again) that meetings are frustrating, boring, and wasteful; most of us would prefer entertainment and energy – even fun.  A facilitator that knows lots of good facilitation techniques can create the illusion of progress.  But it is really a dulling of the pain.

Your goal should NOT be to have a high-energy strategic planning meeting. It should be to design a good strategy….one that provides the organizational focus, leverage, investment guidance, and policy guidance.  As I wrote in a prior article, any written statements might be as straightforward as describing the objectives, scope, and advantages.

If you are really interested in creating a strategy that provides your organization a competitive advantage, you need to do the hard work of strategic thinking.

Hard Work – Nice Guys Finish Last

The truth is that strategy (in general) strategic thinking (in particular) is hard work.  Strategic thinking produces insights. This insight generation can be creatively fulfilling and powerful.  In my experience, this requires these essentials:

• Quiet and undistracted time for individual reflection
• Facts and data, not just gut feeling and aspirations
• Listening to others, even if we have to patiently work with those who “think out loud”
• A tolerance of ambiguity
• A framework for taking strategic insights and putting them into a strategy

My own experience in facilitating strategy is this: you have to be clear in your own mind what good strategy looks like, and be able to discern it from doorknob polishing fluff.  You have to help your client find insights and knit those insights into a coherent set of activities that positions the organization’s resources in a logical way to meet serious and proximate competitive challenges.

There are thousands of charismatic facilitators who have a confused understanding of strategy as mission, visions, values, goals and the like. Facilitation fluff is common.

Do you agree that facilitation fluff is common and a problem? How have you seen it in practice? Do you agree that strategic thinking and insights needs a subtle and nuanced approach to finding insights and applying them?