Quit Your Once Per Year Strategic Planning Retreat

Is one of your year-end tasks to set-up a strategic retreat for your board? If so, take the one-time-per-year get strategic-planning event off the list. Instead, plan a retreat plus eleven months worth of strategic thinking conversations to help your board and organization be more strategic.

Why?

-Good and regular strategy thinking eases decision-making. Henry Mintzberg writes that strategic thinking is seeing beyond, it constructs the future itself and it invents a world that would not otherwise be.

-Boards who dig deep into strategy and help you to do deep thinking, spend less time digging into management details. When you serve boards their main course, the strategy, they have less time in feasting on staff responsibilities.

Here is one idea to use in stimulating a strategic conversation:

Hand out a photo of your organization from Google Earth to your board members. Ask them what happens when we look at our work big picture? What relationships of ours do you see differently from this perspective? How might others see us?

My December 15 newsletter (available to newsletter subscribers only; email me at info@kedconsult.com to receive a copy of it, subject line: “strategic.”) shares a month-by-month plan of strategic conversation topics suitable for your board.