Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Bob McCulloch and Chris Ward of Strategic Directions:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Strategic Directions?
A: Our core business is facilitated strategic planning. This involves guiding and coaching clients through the strategic thinking and planning process to have them create a strategy that will work for them. Hence our tagline, “Making Strategy Work.”
Proficient strategic facilitation is a key to unlocking the gold mine of knowledge, wisdom, and insight buried in the heads, hearts, and guts of a leadership team. That proficiency is a combination of art and science. We at Strategic Directions have facilitated 100s of strategic planning processes involving workshops and corporate retreats. We’re proud to say that these have resulted, in all cases, in a set of clear decisions and leaders who are aligned and committed to the decisions that they have made.
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Q: You’ve recently changed your name to Strategic Directions; could you tell us something more?
A: When we launched Strategic Retreats in 2014, our focus was on strategic planning, engaging the leadership team in facilitated workshops most often held in offsite locations. In naming our new company, we wanted to highlight both our facilitation expertise and our broad business experience. And because facilitating team dialogue in a retreat-like setting was an ingredient common to all assignments, we included the word “retreat” in our corporate moniker.
We then found ourselves getting more and more engaged in the execution of the developed strategies. Our involvement ranged from an ongoing advisory role, to facilitating regular strategy reviews and updates of a client’s 90-Day Rolling Action Agenda, to coaching and facilitating implementation teams.
In light of this, we concluded that we needed to change our name to reflect the way our business was evolving. We chose Strategic Directions, a name that tested well with clients and colleagues alike.
Q: Why Strategic Directions? What makes you the best choice?
A: While it might sound a little corny, facilitated strategic planning is more than our business. It’s a passion that inspires us to do great work.
We bring to the table a healthy blend of facilitator, certified coach, energetic educator, and strategic advisor, flavoured with hands-on business experience in many different industries.
As consultants and facilitators, our focus is on helping leaders and their teams deal with change. Our skills in strategic planning, facilitation, market research, and leadership coaching enable us to guide clients through uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity effectively. We never take our eyes off the ultimate goal of building targeted and actionable plans designed to achieve the future they intend to own.
Q: Can you tell us something more about your process? How does it work?
A: It’s an end-to-end process with five distinct and interrelated components: Preparation, Investigation, Conversation, Formulation, and Execution, or PICFE for short.
Preparation – This involves establishing a framework for the entire assignment and ensuring that all participants are aware of and in agreement with their required roles, the overall planning process, and what will be expected of their staff. It also involves reviewing information on the client and industry and providing everyone who will be participating in a facilitated session with an information package that identifies important issues and prepares them to jump right into productive conversations from the beginning of the facilitated session.
Investigation – When we put on our information/data gatherer hat, our goal is to provide decision-makers with insights that will help them identify and prioritize significant opportunities and challenges. These come from several sources, most often from key informant interviews and online surveys.
Conversation – As facilitators, our role is to draw out and record the knowledge, wisdom, and insight of those involved in the strategic dialogue, help them synthesize that knowledge into a rational set of conclusions and decisions, and provide an environment in which key stakeholders can take ownership of and commit to the strategic choices they have made.
Formulation – We distill and synthesize the results of the facilitated dialogue into a concise narrative that presents the strategic direction of the organization and the path the leadership team has chosen to follow.
Execution – Facilitated sessions conclude with participants building an Action Agenda to launch implementation, build momentum, and get some early wins. Our role in this stage ranges from on-request strategic advisor to active facilitator and coach of one or more of the strategic priorities the leadership team has chosen to pursue.
Our process has seven features that combine to deliver a powerful strategic plan:
1. It is DRIVEN BY A SERIES OF QUESTIONS that lead to thoughtful, inventive decisions.
2. It is straightforward and FLOWS LOGICALLY from initiation through completion.
3. It ENGAGES DECISION MAKERS in meaningful dialogue, ensuring support for the ultimate outcome.
4. It is SCALABLE, adaptable to organizations of all sizes.
5. It is CASCADABLE, with results from one or more levels informing the planning process in others.
6. It is THOROUGH and considers all factors that impact an organization’s success.
7. It results in CLEAR, COMPREHENSIVE, COMMUNICABLE strategy that the organization’s stakeholders can easily embrace.
Q: Who are your clients? What are some of the biggest challenges you’re helping them solve?
A: While we have worked with all sizes and types of clients over the past 30+ years, our current focus is on professional service firms, professional and industry associations, and small and medium-sized enterprises. That said, the process we’ve designed is completely scalable. This allows us to work with both small and large organizations – from two or three employees to several thousand employees.
With professional service firms, in addition to working with them to build comprehensive longer-term strategies, our focus is on their mapping out a response to a significant contraction in their client base or a looming recession, or a plan to judiciously ramp up when demand returns.
With associations, the first big question we have them answer is, “Why do we exist in today’s and tomorrow’s world?” and “How are our members better off because we exist?” Our goal is to ensure they have a clear value proposition that they can live, and that it’s well communicated to their members.
And with small and medium-sized enterprises, key challenges include how to prioritize opportunities and challenges and tackle critical issues, all the while increasing their agility and ability to respond to unforeseen circumstances.
In all cases, we have our clients clearly articulate what “success” will look like at some future point, and agree on a manageable set of strategic priorities – the most important issues they will be working on over the next few years. And, of course, we ensure they are focused on what they will be able to accomplish in the next 90 days to eat away at what can be very large and somewhat intimidating strategic initiatives.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: Recently, we launched another business, Strategic Launchpad. From experience, we know many business leaders see value in strategizing yet aren’t ready, for one reason or another, to commit to a full-blown planning project. This distilled approach is a painless – and still rigorous – introduction to the power of strategic thinking and planning.
Also, we are working on an expanded range of video tools and techniques to help clients manage through the planning and execution of strategic priorities while enhancing the engagement of employees and other stakeholders in the process.
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