Facilitating Strategic Planning – Helping UK Businesses Navigate Change
The scale and pace of change in the last few years has been unprecedented. Businesses have had to fundamentally change the way they operate post-pandemic and continue to navigate the rising costs, whilst the war in Ukraine continues to rage on.
It’s no wonder that much remains uncertain for UK businesses. The biggest challenges facing UK businesses right now include:
- Increased costs
- Retention and recruitment
- Maintaining quality customer relationships.
- Meeting customer needs.
- Sustainability
- Digitalisation
Latest results from the ONS (Office of National Statistics) suggest business conditions remain challenging, but estimates show small signs of positive improvement for some measures; examples include, a smaller proportion of businesses reporting lower turnover and reporting higher prices for goods or services bought, however, it is too early to know if this is the start of a longer-term change in conditions.
Its no wonder that organisations are in a state of constant change, needing to adapt their strategic plans and re-structure their operations.
But making predictions isn’t easy whilst uncertainty still remains.
Strategic plans are typically 3-5 years, however we have seen many organisations looking more towards 2-3 years as a result of their current industry environment. Some even plan just 12-months ahead. However, whilst short-term challenges are a priority, we urge businesses to select the time frame based on the changes they want to make. So asking “What time frame should we have for our strategy?” is the wrong question. The better question is, “What changes does our strategy need, and how much time do we need to implement them?”
We all know the challenges that come with organisational change. Depending on the source of change, it’s well documented that 70-85% of all change initiatives fail because the focus is on the process of change and the people side of change is not addressed. Essentially, the unaccounted cost of poorly facilitating change is far greater than the direct cost.
People get frustrated and burned out and begin to adopt change resistant behaviours that thwart future initiatives. This resistance is rarely understood and hardly ever assessed. Worse yet, the best employees tend to leave first, and then customers. Scanning the horizon regularly to establishing competitive advantages and harnessing chances to grow opportunities is at the heart of strategic planning.
As a leader, you are asked to help your staff move successfully through change.
So how do you navigate through change that is increasingly complex and against seemingly impossible odds?
First, you need to know a little about the nature of change and have a basic understanding of change management practices. In addition, and more importantly – you need to know that there is a better way to navigate the challenges of change and move yourself and your staff through change faster and more effectively. That secret is facilitation.
A facilitator brings structure and process so that teams are able to function effectively and make high quality decisions to successfully change and evolve.
The facilitator’s job is to support everyone to do their best thinking and practice. To do this, the facilitator encourages full participation, promotes mutual understanding and cultivates shared responsibility. By supporting everyone to do their best thinking, a facilitator enables participants to search for inclusive solutions and build sustainable agreements.
The word facilitation means to make easy. That is, make it easy for all group members to be fully involved and participate in meaningful ways. It takes a tremendous amount of energy, focus, quick thinking and patience to facilitate effectively. Such workshops/ meetings don’t happen by accident. They happen because the facilitator is committed to THINKING through the purpose and outcome, PLANNING all the details in advance, and DOING the challenging work of running the meeting/workshop.
Sure, you can run such sessions yourself, but using a neutral, experienced facilitator can help generate the highest return on investment. Having a ‘content neutral’ party can advocate for fair, open, and inclusive procedures to help the members achieve the desired outcomes.
If you’ve never run a strategic planning workshop, it is too valuable to try on your own. Think of the cost of taking your key people away from their “day job”. It’s critical to maximise collaboration to get the desired outputs.
Adalta actively support organisations in strategy formulation, operational planning and aligning people with process to set the foundation for successful delivery through clarity of focus and accountability.
Our skilled facilitators use clever techniques to help get the best outcomes and decisions whilst creating engagement and accountability through creative collaboration. Our ability to coach and facilitate specific content and methodology during on-site sessions is one of the main reasons senior leaders/CEOs choose to bring us in to run their meetings, workshops, events or support conferences.
Here’s a sample of feedback from our sessions:
“It can be isolating as a senior leader, so being challenged – in a good way – by someone outside the organisation was both beneficial and refreshing.”
“We achieved more in one day than we had in the last four months, thank you!”
“I thoroughly enjoyed just being a participant instead of wearing two hats. I felt it helped me connect better with my team.”
“The techniques used by the facilitator really worked in generating new ideas and also helped us work together more effectively.”
“Got exactly what I wanted from this workshop, thank you!”
