The Root of Strategic Planning–

–Makes an ASS of U and ME.

When I mentioned strategic planning in the Working Hard Ground workshop a couple weeks ago, about half the participants groaned.  I’ve been there –blinking through the onslaught of virtual meetings that results in a document that is less a strategy than a work-plan tainted by hope. More on how to make that process more engaging and effective some other time.  

Before we can even begin effective strategic planning, we need to take an honest look at our assumptions –the ideas or potentialities that we accept as true based on experience, prevailing patterns, or (wait for it) bias.  

We have to make assumptions in order to plan.  I hustled down to Illinois two weeks ago to plant cover crops assuming that the rain forecasted for later in the week was the right timing to plant. (The rain didn’t come, but seed is in the ground.) We save for retirement, assuming that the financial system will remain intact enough to pay us back when we’re ready to retire.  Those actions are based on assumptions from experiences that the weather forecast is more right than wrong and that the stock market has continued to grow and provide returns for over a century despite ups and downs..

Developing or assessing our strategy inside change-focused organizations requires us to ask several questions:

1. What assumptions are we making about the target audience? 

2. What assumptions are we making about ourselves? 

3.  What assumptions are we making about the current situation?

4.  How do we know our assumptions are correct?  

Sometimes, our assumptions are wrong. If we assume that most people follow the law, then the result should be that changing the law will change behavior.  The 18th Amendment banned the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” with the intention to reduce the social issues of alcohol abuse and improve public health.  Instead, prohibition spurred a significant rise in organized crime around the exact activities it outlawed.  

On the darker side, assumptions can emerge from a deep bias that blinds us to other possibilities.  World War Two’s Pacific theater included significant racism on both sides.  The Japanese navy believed that Americans were too fat and too coddled to withstand the rigors of submarine service several thousand miles from Pearl Harbor.  They put little emphasis on anti-submarine warfare.  U.S Navy subs made up 2% of U.S Navy ships but sank 54.6% of all Japanese shipping during the war.  The Japanese realized their error too late.

We have to make assumptions in order to make plans for the future.  But we often make plans without naming or questioning the assumptions.  

The antidote is curiosity.  

If you went to your organization’s strategic plan, what assumptions do you see behind it?  Why were those assumptions made?  Are they true?