Is strategic planning more successful if it is facilitator lead?
We've been asked this question quite often by companies and organizations both large and small who are working on strategic planning. The fact of the matter is that strategic planning is a lot of work and requires a big time commitment from someone to bring together the people, facilitate the process and get down to the actions required to implement a strategic plan.
What most people are really asking though is do I need an "outside" vs. "inside" facilitator to help me with this process?
Checking on the Web the response to this question is pretty varied and includes interesting comments such as "Boulder City Council debates paying consultants for strategic plan", which suggested it may not be affordable or may be too disruptive to the culture, to a myriad of Twitter posts and business networking comments praising the job of facilitators who had a marked effect on the strategic planning process within an organization.
Now we didn't create a comprehensive survey or study but overall and by a fairly wide margin (via a Web and keyword searching) most companies and organizations seem to have much more effective strategic planning activities when they are lead by an outside facilitator and the number of companies and individuals offering these types of services would suggest that there is plenty of demand.
The following is a list of the most common reasons and considerations given for using an outside facilitator:
- Your organization has never engaged in strategic planning - this is probably the classic reason to engage a facilitator, simply because you need the outside expertise to guide you through the process, it's one thing to have read a book on strategic planning it's a completely different thing to have lead 100s of hours of strategic planning sessions
- Previous strategic planning was not felt to be successful - this can be true because of the lack of experience when the planning process was initiated and is often an indication that more experience is needed to get the plan together
- There are a number of ideas or concerns among organization members that will keep an inside facilitator from being objective enough and ending up without important concerns being fully vetted in the proccess - this is often true in organizations that are stagnating or that require big strategic changes, there will likely be people in the organization who like things just as they are and others in the organization may feel uncomfortable in challenging them in an open forum
- There is no one in the organization whom members feel has sufficient facilitation skills or time to manage the process - sometimes people are just plain busy and given that the strategic planning process can't be successfully completed at half-speed it often times makes sense to outsource the mechanics of the planning process to ensure that it gets done quickly and efficiently.
So the next question is how do you find an outside facilitator? A simple search of the web brings back a myriad of possibilities both in terms of individual companies as well as the NFDB, which is a database of independent facilitators:
- National Facilitation Database - http://www.nfdb.com
- Meeting Facilitators International - http://www.facilitators.com/index.html
As well, you can ask people from your own business networks who have gone through the process to see how it went for them and ask them for the name of the facilitator who assisted them in their strategic planning process.
In the end the strategic planning process requires organization, impartiality, experience and effort. It is possible to find those things within an organization but it is probably more likely that one or more of those will be missing such that you will get a better result with your strategic plan if the process is managed by an experienced outside facilitator.
Ed Loessi
