Are You Clear What You Are Planning For?

For many organisations, Autumn is a time when attention turns to planning and budgeting. Failing to plan is planning to fail – but are you clear what you’re planning towards?

Are you clear as an organisation on …
  • What you want to achieve and by when? And what your key stakeholders are expecting of you?
  • What that means for how you operate as a business – your products and services, your processes and systems, and your people? And who you need to engage with, and about what to deliver successfully?
  • How the actions fit together into a plan for delivery? And how you need to organise yourself to deliver it?

You may have agreed that clarity and focus as a Board in the last year or so, but in an ever-changing world, does it all still hang together? Or do you need to test and re-assess parts or all of it? For example…

  • Does your significant growth agenda mean you need to look at how you’re going to scale how you operate?
  • Are your customers changing how they browse and buy so you need to rethink your offer and customer journeys to compete?
  • Is your market being disrupted by competitors, regulation or legislation so you need to respond?

Unless your market and operations are very stable with no real change expected, simply rolling forward your plans and budgets for another 12 months is not going to deliver the outcomes and the success you’re looking for.

In our experience, not getting clear and aligned as a team up front leads to a disjointed plan and budget, which doesn’t get you to where you want to be.  

Save time and effort (and pain!) in the long run

Time spent up front to ensure your strategic intent and priorities as an organisation remain valid – or getting clear on what you want to achieve, and the key activities needed to get you there if you weren’t previously – are key to framing the plan and setting yourself up to deliver successfully. And will save you time and effort (and pain!) in the long-run.

It can be as little as a quick check-in exercise to test that your intent and plans remain valid in your operating context – highlighting any areas where adjustment might be needed, or risks to watch out for. Or it may be, there’s a need for a fuller reset of parts or all of your strategy and plans, where there’s a more significant shift in your internal and/or external situation.

Hedgehog can rapidly help you test and reassess your strategic intent and plans and get the clarity and focus you need

We recently supported a CEO and his Leadership Team and Board to reset their strategic intent and plans. Having had a relatively stable operating environment for a number of years, they recognised the enormous scale of change they were facing into – an intent to significantly increase the size of their service offering, coupled with a change from private to public ownership and a more actively involved shareholder – all whilst meeting the expectations of their external stakeholders.

They needed to reset how they were operating and set up to deliver the new services, and asked if we could help them quickly get clear on what they needed to do to achieve their Ambition and Goals with their external stakeholders, and with short timeframes within which new services needed to be ready, to have a roadmap and delivery approach to swiftly move from strategy into action.

After an initial Strategy Check-In, where we identified the big questions and choices they needed to work through, we worked with the CEO and team to

  • get the clarity they needed to frame their Ambition, Goals and Actions, and
  • develop a roadmap and plan to deliver and set themselves up for success

From an overwhelming agenda, they now have a clear plan of action which they are progressing against at pace.

We’re currently offering a free 1 day Strategy Check-In
to help you step back and test that you are in the best shape you can be to achieve your Ambition and Goals, and deliver with success

If we can help you think about your agenda and get the clarity you want to move forward we’d love to chat to you. Please contact alyson@hedgehogstrategy.com or rod@hedgehogstrategy.com to start the conversation.

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