How to Run a Productive Strategic Planning Meeting

Strategy is a vital first step on the path to improving performance of your business. Strategy sessions, consequently, are the basis for any successful strategy. During strategic planning sessions, you:

• Define what you want your organization to reach in the years to come
• Determine overarching business Objectives (Goals) and KPIs (Key Results) to evaluate the progress towards them
• Appoint employees in charge of meeting the Objectives
• Engage employees and ensure they understand the Goals and accept them
• Review your existing strategy to make sure that you’re still on the right track, and that the strategy remains relevant

Join Goals by KeepSolid team as we explore the meaning, intricacies, tools, and agendas of strategic planning sessions. 

What is a strategy, and what is a strategy session

We’ll start with the basics, as they are sometimes misunderstood, and yet are important for conducting an efficient business strategy meeting. First of all, strategy and planning are NOT the same. Strategy is an integrated set of choices aimed at positioning the company in its area of business so as to create sustainable advantage and reach its long-term goals.

By extension, a strategy session is the time for you and other stakeholders to decide on how exactly you’re going to win as a business. How you organize a strategy planning meeting will vary from company to company, but some components are universal: strategic decisions should be data-driven, and the meetings should be scheduled regularly. 

Brainstorming as part of strategy meeting

Brainstorming is easily the best way to perform a strategy session. It allows teams and individual stakeholders to engage in the strategic planning process. This approach will also result in realistic objectives that are accepted by the whole team, not just handed down by senior officers.

Brainstorming is a bottom-up methodology, which means that employees take part in the strategic session. Thus, they will come away with three vital understandings:

• They will understand what needs to be done as part of the strategy
• They will understand why it needs to be done, and that it’s a realistic task 
• They will understand how to do this

Tools for brainstorming and strategy

Now, a successful brainstorming session takes a proper approach. As an ultimate tool for strategic meeting and brainstorming sessions, let’s take a look at Goals by KeepSolid. This web-based app for strategy planning and project management has all the features you need for a successful brainstorming session:

• Mind map - allows you to decompose your major Objective into smaller related Key Results by building a Goal Tree
• Roadmap - lets you align your tasks on a timeline (both horizontally and vertically) to see the scope of works and evaluate the overall workload
• Kanban and task management - designate individuals responsible for carrying out tasks and meeting Key Results

How to run a business strategic planning meeting

In a few simple steps, you can prepare a great strategy meeting. The trick is to first answer the following questions yourself, and then bring them up during the strategic meeting and discuss them as a team:

1. What is your purpose, your aspiration?
2. What are your SWOTs?
3. Where will you compete?
4. How will you compete?
5. What are your KPIs?

Answering these yourself first will allow you to check your own understanding of your business and predict obvious questions that will follow. And then bring up these points at the strategic meeting, so everyone can align their understanding of your business goals and plans. Let’s take a closer look at the questions for strategy planning sessions.

1. What is your purpose, your aspiration?

Think about the ideal future of your organization. This will motivate you and frame all your planning decisions. You also want to connect this to concrete benchmarks that will allow you to measure whether you’re moving towards the ideal future.

The aspirations should be improved and revised over time, but not too often. This step will define the scope of your activities in broad strokes, and then the following steps will help specify the activities.

2. What are your SWOTs?

SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is rightfully considered a cornerstone of strategic planning. It allows businesses to identify what they’re good at (and should probably capitalize on), and bad at (and should either avoid or negate). SWOTs show you how you’re going to excel on the competitive battlefield that you’ll choose on the next stage. 

3. Where will you compete?

This question resides at the heart of your strategy. Narrow the competitive field, search for new niches to conquer. You can’t, and shouldn’t try to, be wanted by everyone - just find a sustainable audience that needs you. And obviously, a place where you compete should be the place where your core strengths and opportunities lie.

4. How will you compete?

Now that you know where you’ll take your stand, it’s time to go over the tactics. How exactly will you create unique value for your customers? How will you deliver it to them? During your strategic meeting, you’ll have to make this decision; it will depend on your business context, but it should always answer the question of how you’re going to delight your clients in a unique way.

5. What are your KPIs?

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), aka Key Results, is a necessity if you want to make sure that all the hard work you’ve done in the previous steps doesn’t go in vain. They help fortify your strategic planning decisions, ensure that the objectives you set will indeed be pursued and fully realized. KPIs will sustain the system that you’ve built over the course of the last four steps.

Strategic planning session agenda

Finally, a strategy planning meeting should always have a concrete agenda that you communicate to all stakeholders. It will ensure that everyone comes at the session aware of the questions that will be discussed, and will have time to prepare any needed data or materials. Here’s what a strategic planning session agenda should include, along with some examples:

1. The purpose of the meeting (example: evolve the business to stay competitive)
2. The objective of the meeting (example: identify new business opportunities)
3. List of attendees
4. Location
5. Date and time
6. List of topics with the corresponding attendees / speakers