Effective Strategic Planning

An area that I’ve been really focused on in my life and business is strategy. As I understand it, your strategy is the best approach you know to achieve a desired result. The better the approach, the more likely you’ll achieve what you want.

I’ve found the most effective way to incorporate strategy into my life is through strategic planning sessions. This involves on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis reviewing how things are going and understanding what’s working and what’s not. When you step away from execution to observe your performance, you can gain insights that improve your efforts.

In attempting to maximize the impact of my strategy and strategic planning sessions, two main roadblocks have come up.

The first is related to actually completing the session itself. When you carve out time in your calendar for it, it often gets deprioritized because long-term strategic planning isn’t as urgent as short-term task completion. Especially when compared to the projects that you’re behind on, people you need to get back to, and the things that broke that you need to fix. So we naturally feel a pressure to compromise our commitment to complete a strategic planning session and fill the block with more time-sensitive things.

The second is on the opposite side of the spectrum where you reconsider your strategy too often. When you execute a strategy for a while and don’t see results yet, it can get discouraging. And given the flood of information and ideas we’re surrounded by these days, there’s no shortage of new things to try that might work. It’s a version of shiny-object syndrome where you jump from strategy to strategy in an effort to find what works. But when you’re not committed enough to a single strategy, nothing will work.

That’s why you need to find that sweet spot: You protect a strategic planning session so that you can determine the best strategy to meet your goals, and then you stay committed to that strategy and execute until it’s time to revisit it.

Underlying successful strategic planning are systems of measuring performance, organizing your tasks, organizing your schedule, and taking consistent action. If you want to see the systems I use on a daily basis to help me with all of those things, I’ve got videos overviewing all of them. Click here to check out some of my high performance systems.

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