Strategic Planning the Genuine Contact Way was developed to help organizations address commonly faced strategic planning challenges while setting up the organization to be poised to implement the plan once it is finalized. The Genuine Contact approach to strategic planning intends to help organizations develop a strategy-focused organization, including a strategy-focused culture. Anna Caroline and Rachel – your facilitators – have been teaching and working with this strategic planning approach for more than a decade in organizations in Europe, North America, and India.
Strategic planning the Genuine Contact Way is rooted in what works. This approach:
- Keeps strategic plan implementation at the core of the strategic planning process rather than limiting the work to just creating a strategic plan
- Engages people without leaving them exhausted
- Involves people throughout the organization, developing an understanding of what is in the plan and why, as the plan develops so there is no need to expend energy to get people to buy in to a plan
- Opens up for other stakeholders, ranging from suppliers to customers, to get the whole system involved and tap into the wisdom of the whole system
- Innovation is built into the plan as an essential part of the functioning of the organization
- Monitoring for the purpose of timely adjustment is built in
- Periodic strategic plan refresh is built into the planning to keep the plan alive, viable, and relevant to the environment
We keep it simple, with simple tools to handle complexity. We recognize that change is constant and any planning needs to take into account a changing performance environment. We recognize the value of conversations and collective wisdom gathered in participatory meeting processes to come up with the best plans, the best way of closing the gap between potential and results.