Adaptive + Human-Centered Strategic Planning
The Group Forward’s approach to any team or organization planning process is responsive, adaptive and human-centered. Our experience shows this is the best way to build a shared vision for the future.
We energize the teams and stakeholders doing the work now, next week, and in the changing future—together.
Does your organization or team need to create a strategic plan or decide on strategic directions to focus on?
We can help you with that, but here’s what you need to know: We don’t like traditional strategic planning processes.
They are slow to draft, the stakeholders involved are drained from planning meetings, and organizations are left with static plans that quickly become outdated and collect dust on a shelf (or collect digital dust somewhere in a shared file system).
As facilitators, we’ve seen promising strategic planning visions fall prey to outmoded processes.
What’s Broken About Traditional Strategic Planning Processes?
In our experience, more traditional strategic planning activities have organizations focus the majority of their time and resources on WHAT the future of the organization will be. The day you complete your plan, your context or environment inevitably changes, but your plan wasn’t set up to change along with it.
How Our Approach Is Different: “Equal Parts WHAT + HOW.”
We design for flexible planning processes that embrace human-centered design, adaptive, and lean principles—all while focused on HOW people will do the strategic work.
Teams need the authority to respond, adapt, and change to meet strategic planning priorities, and as priorities change (because they always do) the plan needs to be designed to change with them.
Teams need the authority to respond, adapt, and change to meet strategic planning priorities, and as priorities change (because they always do) the plan needs to be designed to change with them.
Our Strategic Planning Process
Working Agreements: Establishing the right kind of partnership for the project
Discovery: We study where we’ve been and clarify our current realities.
Build a Shared Vision: What does the future state look like? What are the barriers we will need to design around?
Adaptive Action Planning: A collaborative, team-based process to creating a dynamic strategic plan that is as nimble as your organization needs to be
We can adapt this outline to meet your needs, timelines, stakeholder involvement, and budget.
We have done condensed versions of this work in 2-day staff retreats / off-sites and we have engaged in multi-month projects with the same strategic planning processes being used.
Want to talk more with us about strategic planning? Get in touch!
How We've Helped
Prioritizing Organizational Culture
Blonde & Co
Organizational culture change doesn’t just happen over night—and certainly won’t happen with a one-off training. To create systemic change, you have to invest in building the mechanisms, changing behaviors and developing a shared understanding of what that culture looks like. Read More
Partnering with Leading Consultancies
The Design Gym, General Assembly
Here at The Group Forward, we truly believe that when thoughtful and committed individuals effectively work together towards a common goal, their team has the potential to do amazing things. And it’s no different for organizations—if anything, the stakes are higher and the outcomes that much more impactful. Read More
Designing Meaningful Employee Engagement Programs
Universal McCann, Initiative Media, BPN Media
Defining a commitment is the easy part. Designing and rolling out a program to deliver on that commitment requires a bit of work. Read More
