Bruce Elkin 

Strategic Business Planning:
Strategic Planning Training and Strategic Planning Consulting for
Co-Creating What Matters Most in Businesses and Organizations

Are you struggling to improve your team's strategic business planning?

Would you like all levels of planning to lead to greater organizational effectiveness, exceptional leadership, and productivity-enhancing creativity?

Conventional planning processes may not get you there!

 

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"Strategic planning is an oxymoron. Most strategic planning is neither."

- Henry Mintzberg

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A design-driven approach to truly strategic business planning and strategic planning, consulting and training can help you and your team soar while your competitors plod.

Is this how it is for you and your organization?

Do your planning process often degenerate into confusing, conflict-filled arguments over what matters and how best to achieve it?

Do big thinkers leave realistic bottom-liners shaking their head in confusion, while action types keep muttering, "Let's do something; anything?"

Are conversations peppered with the idea-killing "Yeah, but...!"?

Does it take way too long to generate plans and then they're out of date within weeks and sit, gathering dust, on a shelf?

Design-driven strategic business planning is different.

This is how it could be:

Imagine excited and committed planning teams -- from senior execs/owners to those on the shop floor--coming together to craft clear, compelling and shared visions of what they most want to create.

Imagine your teams grounding those visions in mutually agreed upon and accurate, objective assessments of current reality.

Imagine the discussion about reality centering on "what already works?" and "what is the best thing we already do?"

Then imagine everyone holding vision and reality in "Yes, and..." frameworks that naturally and easily lead to your best next steps.

Imagine having a solid platform from which to consistently generate the most effective actions needed to help you build the bridge from where you are to where you truly want to be.

If you're not already there, don't worry. You're not alone.
Henry Mintzberg, the world's leading expert on strategic business planning, is right. Most of what is called strategic planning is neither.

Conventional strategic business planning is often just tactical programming. It is low-level, reactive, and out of date as soon as current reality changes.

That's why so many expensive strategic plans sit on shelves, unused, gathering dust, and generating confusion and frustration.

But there is hope!
Truly strategic business planning is preceded by design.

Instead of an energy--sucking focus on problems and how can we fix them, true strategic planning focuses on what do we do well, what to we want to do next, and how best can we do it better than anyone else-and reap the rewards of success?

Truly successful businesses and organizations envision the outcomes --the results-- they most want to create before they assess their current capacity or circumstances, and before they lay out implementation strategies.

Such vision-driven organizations have an energetic and competitive edge over all others. They make more, last longer, and people love to work in them.

Creating and co-creating results that truly matter!

In order for a team to design or co-create outstanding results, individual members must first be able to create results in their own work and lives.

There is no point in adopting an expensive planning approach if individual team members lack the skills to apply the principles and practices on their own.

Without first developing team members' skills for creating results, and without a shared language and framework in which to design and co-create desired results, most team building and strategic business planning processes fail.

The design principles and practices of creating and co-creating what matters most can be applied to all levels of strategic planning consulting and strategic planning training. They create a useful context and a solid platform for continuous strategic business planning and development.

My creating approach (and the skills and structure that comprise it) is the basis for what Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline calls "Personal Mastery." It is the basis of organizational and business mastery.

Creating is the cornerstone of my design-driven strategic business planning approach, as well as my strategic planning consulting and training.

I worked with Senge's personal mastery mentor Robert Fritz for 9 years, two with Innovation Associates, a Boston-based firm co-founded by Fritz and Senge.

What's Involved?

My strategic planning consulting and strategic planning training include Creating What Matters Most workshops to increase personal mastery for individual team members. Such sessions are both training and working sessions that lead to immediate results.

I facilitate Design-Driven Strategic Planning Training sessions for executives, managers, and specific teams to ensure everyone is on the same page, working within the same vision-drive, reality-grounded framework for continuous planning.

I provide follow up strategic planning consulting and coaching to ensure that team members successfully transfer skills and structure they learn in training to their day-to-day jobs.

 

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"The best two days of strategic planning training I have ever attended."

— Glen Farrell, President, Open Learning Agency of BC

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Designing an on-going planning framework

My strategic planning consulting and strategic planning training focus not on "the plan as artifact". Instead, I focus on helping you create and co-create a dynamic framework for continuous and just-in-time planning.

My strategic business planning approach equips team members with skills and structure they need to keep their eyes on what matters most and adjust plans and action to accommodate changes in reality as they occur.

Personal mastery development plus design-driven strategic planning training plus on-going strategic planning consulting (which improves action learning, feedback, and real time application) can ensure that your truly strategic business planning consistently leads to outstanding results--regardless of the problems, circumstances, and adversity you face!

Sounds like common sense, but such an approach is not often seen in conventional planning, which research by experts such as Mintzberg and others is rapidly showing can be expensive wastes of time, energy, and morale.

When team and organizational mastery builds on personal mastery, truly strategic planning and outstanding results become not only possible but also probable.

 

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"It helped us immensely in the strategic business planning process, especially in communication and focus."

- Grant Russel, President, Advanced Gravis Technologies

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How Does it Work?

My Co-Creating What Matters Most workshop is an effective basis for strategic planning training. It provides team members an opportunity to master design-driven strategic business planning skills and framework, and apply them to their own jobs and life.

As they master the skills and process of creating on their own, my strategic planning consultation helps team members extend and apply those skills to co-creating outstanding results together.

Making personal mastery the basis of strategic business planning and strategic planning training leads to more effective working relationships, less stress, better communications, and far greater results.

It also dissolves many of the common problems that plague the conventional strategic business planning done in many businesses and organizations.

 

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"The most valuable program I have seen in terms of all-round communication and strategic planning training. It works!"

- Sandy Carter, V.P., Advanced Gravis Technologies

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