November 14, 2023
As part of our Silver Jubilee Celebrations, Kreston Pedabo dedicated a renovated block of 2 classrooms and its appurtenances to the Falomo High School as a contribution to its community of operations.
November 13, 2023
Antoine de Saint- Exupery, once said, “A goal without a plan is just a wish”. He postulated this based on the principle of life being a playing field for making plans designed to provide a tactical advantage and then working to ensure those plans come to fruition.
Goal Setting involves defining specific objectives that an organisation aims to achieve within a certain timeframe. These goals provide clarity, direction, and a sense of purpose for the individual and employees, helping them understand what they are working towards.
Strategic Planning goes beyond goal setting because it involves outlining the broader approach an individual or organisation will take to achieve set goals. It involves analysing the organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; and then formulating tactics to leverage the strengths, address the weaknesses, seize the opportunities, and mitigate the threats. It helps in allocating resources effectively, making informed decisions, and adapting to changes in the business environment. It also ensures that everyone in the organisation is aligned towards a common vision and works together cohesively. In essence, while goal setting sets specific targets, strategic planning defines how the organisation will navigate its journey toward those targets, almost the establishment of operational systems and processes towards the goals to ensure the principle of Kaizen (continuous improvement).
Why is Strategic Planning important?
Businesses need direction and measurable organisational goals to work towards. Strategic Planning offers that type of guidance. It provides a roadmap that propels a business to its set goals. Without such guidance, there is no way to tell whether a business is on track to success or rolling downhill to failure.
The following four aspects of strategy development are worth attention:
What are the steps in the Strategic Planning process?
There is a myriad of different ways to approach strategic planning, and this depends on the type of business and the granularity required. Most strategic planning cycles irrespective of sector and scale can, however, be summarised in these five steps:
Who does the strategic planning in a business?
When driven internally, in practice, a committee would typically be set up to lead the strategic planning process, and it is recommended that this committee include representatives from all areas within the enterprise who will work openly and collaboratively without the biases and personal agenda of own departments. The social side of strategy is a very key part of the strategy planning process and is responsible for the inaction and or failure of over 30% of initiatives across firms.
The committee researches and gathers the information needed to understand the organisation’s current status and factors that will affect it in the future. The committee should solicit input and feedback to validate or challenge its assessment of the information rather than have people emphasise one set of facts while downplaying others for the purpose of validation of personal agendas. One of the most successful methods is to create teams within the committee and force leaders to choose preferred strategic options and contest their validation. It becomes immediately obvious what the real pros and cons of each option is beyond biases as everyone becomes forced to be guided by facts. With this as a great starting point for Choice, leaders can further opt to use one of many methodologies or strategic frameworks, analysis or assessments to further drill into the best line of action toward the organisation’s strategic vision.
The committee creates benchmarks that will enable the organisation to determine how well it is performing against its goals as it implements the strategic plan. The planning process should also identify which executives are accountable for ensuring the benchmarking activities that will take place at planned times and how specific objectives will be met.
How often should strategic planning be done?
There are no uniform requirements to dictate the frequency of a strategic planning cycle. However, there are common approaches –
Timetables are always subject to change; timing should be flexible and tailored to the needs of a company. For example, a startup in a dynamic industry might revisit its strategic plan monthly, while a mature business in a well-established industry might opt to revisit the plan less frequently.
Now, let us look at a hypothetical case study for Goal Setting and Strategic Planning:
Case Study: XYZ Corporation – Goal Setting and Strategic Planning
Background: XYZ Corporation is a mid-sized technology company, specialising in software development. Over the past few years, the company has experienced moderate growth, but the leadership team is eager to accelerate market presence. To accomplish this, they have decided to undertake a comprehensive goal-setting and strategic planning process.
Key Players:
Current Situation:
XYZ Corporation operates primarily in the domestic market with a limited international presence. The Company’s products have received positive feedback, but there is room for improvement in customer retention and expansion into new markets. Financially, the company is stable but not achieving the desired growth rates.
Objectives:
Strategic Planning Process:
Outcome:
XYZ Corporation’s strategic planning and goal-setting process whilst rigorous and time consuming was designed to beat the market and take it to the upper quintile of the power curve. This was able to facilitate its ambitious growth drive and positioned the company as a competitive player in the global market. It is important to highlight that some opportunities can only be identified or invalidated through this thorough process, as you find that some opportunities that seemed obvious are in actual fact, not real bets and would cost more than they are worth. Similarly, some fewer known opportunities can turn out to be the big bet.
Conclusion
Effective Goal Setting and Strategic planning has many benefits; it forces organisations to stay aware of the future state of opportunities and challenges. It also forces them to anticipate risks and understand what resources will be needed to seize opportunities and overcome greater scale issues.
It also gives individuals a sense of direction and marshals them around a common mission, whilst creating standards and accountability. Strategic planning can enhance operational plans and efficiency and helps organisations limit the time spent on crisis management, where they are reacting to unexpected changes that they failed to anticipate and prepare for.
Goal Setting for businesses is typically an activity that occurs towards the start of a financial year following an assessment of the previous period’s performance, so now is a great time to begin to make those assessments and plans towards a new financial year.