Strategic Thinking & Strategic Action

Fostering strategic thinking and strategic action by organizational leaders since 2007.

Archive
What’s coming at you?
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

What’s coming at you?

Every strategic plan rests on assumptions about the world outside your organization: what customers will want, what competitors will do, what the economy will allow. Most of those assumptions are never written down. They're simply taken for granted, until something changes.

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What if your strategy could talk back?
Strategy Lee Crumbaugh Strategy Lee Crumbaugh

What if your strategy could talk back?

Good strategic thinking needs more than answers. It needs good questions. Over time.

What are you assuming? What might you be missing? Does your strategy really address the goal? What would have to be true for this to work?

Many strategies never get questioned. They are written, approved, and then left alone, as if putting them down settled the matter.

A strategy that could actually talk back, that continued to push on your assumptions instead of sitting quietly where you left it, would catch what a perfectly written plan never will: the moment it stopped being right.

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The one job nobody else has
Leadership Lee Crumbaugh Leadership Lee Crumbaugh

The one job nobody else has

If you lead a business or nonprofit, you're responsible for something no one else in the organization is responsible for.

The whole thing. And where it's going.

Customers. Finances. Operations. People. Opportunities. Risks. The future. All of it lands on your desk eventually, and only your desk.

A customer needs something right now. An employee has a problem that can't wait until tomorrow. An opportunity shows up out of nowhere and has to be chased before it closes. The numbers need attention. Something unexpected happens, because something always does.

None of this is optional. It's the job. And most days, it's a full job on its own.

But while you're handling all of it, somebody still has to be thinking about where the organization is going. Not next week. Not this quarter's fire drill. Three years out. Five years out. The direction, not just the day. How to innovate. New products or services that will win you customers and revenue. How to stay relevant and profitable, or, if you are a nonprofit, how to deliver more on your mission

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Navigating a time of seismic change
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Navigating a time of seismic change

For a strategic planner, this has been an intense season. Not just because it’s the time of year when clients are working to get their plans in place, but even more so because extraordinary things are afoot in the external environment that leaders need to factor into their plans.

In considering these trends, we are called on to do multidimensional analysis. We must move beyond simple "awareness" and understand how these drivers collide and their subsequent effects. If you don’t look for interconnections and knock-on effects - how shifts interact, accelerate, and bring on others - you are playing checkers when the game really is three-dimensional chess.

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No matter the uncertainty, plan we must
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

No matter the uncertainty, plan we must

It was what I knew about macro economics from my schooling and experience that stopped me in my tracks when economist Daraius Irani of Towson University displayed a chart in a recent presentation on the state of the U.S. economy. Dr. Irani showed us the historical trend of the so-called economic policy uncertainty index, which he said now was at record highs, surpassing where it stood after 9/11, in the 2009 recession, and even during the COVID 19 Pandemic.

After that revelation, I started connecting the dots. Digging deeper, it became clear that not only is uncertainty off the rails, but consumer confidence is at record low levels. Yet, despite the great uncertainty and low confidence, stock market indexes have been breaking records.

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Why strategy fails… and how to make it succeed
Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh Strategic planning Lee Crumbaugh

Why strategy fails… and how to make it succeed

In the quest to achieve our vision, “Every organization and business leader has a strategic plan and they are executing their plan for greater success,” we have cataloged 16 causes of planning failure and suggested remedies. Here's our "watch out for it and what to do about it" list, designed to help leaders, owners, and professionals involved in strategic plan implementation assure that their efforts take the organization to the next level.

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