Establishing a productive strategic conversation
In the Mission, Vision, Values stage we explore some of the ways in which technology can now assist in establishing a strategic conversation within your institution. These largely revolved around the power and potential of harnessing social software to help disseminate ideas and suggestions and to facilitate discussion about them across the entire institution.
Blogging
How about encouraging members of your senior management team to maintain their own blogs? This is an approach which is now common in many organisations, particularly in the private sector, where the Chief Executive and other directors publish their thoughts and musings on a range of subjects broadly relevant to their role and the organisation they lead. The style and tone of these blogs is deliberately informal and designed to give the rest of the organisation (and those outside it) a glimpse of the human face of senior management. It is an opportunity to highlight some of the broader pressures and challenges the institution faces and the factors which are influencing strategic decision making at the highest level. As such it can play an important role in establishing some of the background 'mood music' against which decisions must be made.
Most blogs also provide the facility for readers to also submit their own thoughts and comments in relation to posts they have read - thus providing an opportunity for all staff to bring their thoughts and ideas to the attention of management.
Wikis and online collaborative tools
The collaborative nature of the wiki makes it the ideal vehicle for publishing early drafts and allowing a large number of people to comment on them or make changes, all within a secure, controlled environment. Wikis give people the opportunity to not only leave comments, but to actually make changes or additions to the content directly, whilst also preserving audit trails and logs of changes. The content of a wiki and/or editing rights to it can also be restricted to particular groups or individuals making it possible to keep any discussions accessible to members of the institution only.
Alternatively, increasing numbers of institutions are beginning to take advantage of 'free' access to online collaborative environments such as Google Docs which enables individuals to collaborate on the same document and can provide a shared workspace which transcends organisational barriers.
Wakefield College, a leading FE college situated in the north of England helped overcome their previous 'silo mentality' to strategic planning by giving each of their Academy Directors additional responsibility for a cross-College area, for example, enterprise, advanced level programmes etc. This forced them to think about working right across the organisation and to collaborate with colleagues accordingly. GoogleDocs provided the vehicle which would allow that collaboration to take place.
Academy Directors identified their three key priorities for their cross-College area of responsibility and two specific actions under each priority. These were then represented as a grid in Google Docs. Each Academy Director and Service Area Manager then used Google Docs to identify how they would contribute to the achievement of each priority and its associated actions, resulting in a matrix of priorities and specific actions from right across the College. This ensured a shared understanding of where each strategy was aiming to take the organisation and also that actions were formally logged and factored into plans.
This approach was also adopted at a headline level with the College's strategic priorities to enable each Academy/Service Area to easily see how they could best contribute to the achievement of strategic priorities without duplication and without missed opportunities for synergy.
What use of such Web2.0 technology gave the College was an easily accessible method of enabling everyone to access to everyone else's plans to ensure that they were all travelling in the same direction. It's been really well received with staff appreciating how this access to what other areas in College were aiming to achieve enabled them to plan in a more informed way.
Social Networking
Most people are now familiar with popular publicly available services such as Facebook or Linkedin. However, it is also possible to establish your own private social networks which provide most of the functionality of these public sites, but for a closed, invited membership only. Such technology provides another informal and dynamic forum for debate with members either responding to discussion topics started by others or starting their own subjects themselves. Members' profiles can also act as a form of 'expertise index' allowing staff to identify people within the organisation who may have the skills or knowledge they need but who are not known to them personally and informal groupings of staff can be established regardless of their place in the organisation chart to achieve a desired outcome.
Other techniques and approaches
We should not, however, assume that adopting new technology is the only way to establish an effective 'strategic conversation' within your institution. In truth a range of approaches are likely to be required and whilst some will be willing to rush enthusiastically down the IT route others may wish to continue to rely on more traditional approaches.
Workshops, focus groups and senior management 'surgery sessions' are all tried and tested approaches which place a value on personal, face-to-face communication. They are, of course, more resource-intensive and less scalable than some of the more technology-orientated approaches listed above, but do have the merit of producing freer, richer discussion and providing the opportunity to forge personal links and relationships which can be far harder to achieve in an online world.
Our Influencing Others infoKit includes guidance on persuading people to do things when you have no direct control over them - an important management skill and one still very much required, even within the collegiate atmosphere encouraged by the strategic conversation.
Get creative
Our Scenario Planning resource also has a useful section on how to apply creativity to workshops.
Workshops needn't revolve around leaden presentations, 'death by PowerPoint' and illegible flipchart notes. Use the opportunity to get creative and engender some fun and enthusiasm into the proceedings. Explore some of the ideas included within our Creative Thinking resources to encourage fresh new perspectives and to invigorate debate or consider the potential for using metaphors and stories to communicate new visions of what might be possible.
A good framework for innovative ways of thinking and assumption-busting can be found in the work of Michael Michalko. His book, 'Cracking Creativity'1, provides a rich source of approaches to thinking differently and his Thinkpak1 is a practical tool for getting groups to experiment with their ideas. A summary of this approach is available.
Signs of success
So how can you tell when you have succeeded in establishing a vibrant and constructive 'strategic conversation' within your organisation? Well, if you can point to examples of some of the following patterns of behaviour it is likely that you are heading in the right direction:
- active and vibrant discussion within the various online spaces provided
- staff starting their own discussion topics and contributing with their own ideas rather than just responding to others
- discussion within teams (i.e. at team meetings) about elements of the strategic plan
- requests for members of the senior management team to attend team meetings to discuss elements of strategic activity
- discussion about how the process of strategic planning and activity is conducted, not just about the contents of its current iteration
- proposals (for funding, additional staffing etc) clearly demonstrate their relevance to agreed strategic objectives
