Chances are, you’ve survived a strategic planning process, and left it wishing things had gone differently. Retreats. Surveys. Round after round of meetings to gather input, narrow it down, and reach final approval. Somewhere in that process, people were asked what they thought. Their answers were noted, and mostly, the plan came out the way leadership already expected it would.

Getting a plan approved can feel like the hard part is over. It isn’t. What follows – building the capacity to achieve what the plan describes, the real work of strategy execution – is its own kind of undertaking, and it’s often where implementation slows down, stalls, or drifts somewhere the plan didn’t anticipate. Leaders don’t spend months in strategic planning just so they can say they have a plan. There’s real hope built into that work – hope for what the organization could become, for turning that potential into results.

The usual response when implementation slows is to add more structure – tighter timelines, more check-ins, an implementation committee – hoping enough extra effort will finally make the plan succeed. It rarely does, and after everything that went into getting there, it’s fair to wonder what all of it was for.

This is not a sign that you, your team, or the organizations you support did something wrong. Strategy execution fails far more often than it succeeds, and the reason is rarely the quality of the thinking behind the plan.

What if building the plan and building the path to put it into practice weren’t two separate efforts?

Strategic Planning the Genuine Contact Way is a participatory strategic planning process. The same conversations that develop the high-level strategy also define what it will take to put it into practice – who needs to be involved, how that involvement happens, and what capacity the organization needs to build to achieve it. This module teaches you to lead that process yourself, whether you’re the leader responsible for the plan or the consultant guiding one, so you leave with an approach designed for implementation from the start.

That approach is the artful weaving of people, process, and technology – three threads held together deliberately, through every phase of the process. A plan built from data, assumptions, and the collective wisdom and wealth of experience people bring is fuller and stronger. When people help build it, they’re already invested in it succeeding, especially when they see their hopes and concerns are evident in the plan itself. The approach pays attention to both developing the plan and developing the organization in a strategy-focused way so that it is ready to implement the plan. This approach means you don’t just end up with a good plan – you end up with one that people are ready to work towards achieving, and an understanding of what’s in place already and what needs to be developed to achieve it.

The plan and the path to implementing it come together through the same people, in the same room, at the same time – and that’s the process this module teaches you to lead.

This module builds both your understanding and your capability. The objectives below describe what you are working toward – offered not as a checklist but as a compass for the learning ahead.

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Build working definitions of strategy, strategy focused culture, and strategy focused organization, based on your own reflection and experience, and guide the leaders, teams, and stakeholders you work with toward a shared definition of these same concepts.
• Assess an organization’s readiness for strategic planning, and define clearly what is fixed and what is open to change as the process begins.
• Design and lead an approach for engaging the people of an organization throughout strategic planning – giving them real information, real influence over emerging ideas, and a genuine stake in the plan as it develops.
• Guide a group through generating and organizing ideas for an organization’s future direction, and distill the results into a small number of high-level strategies clear enough for everyone in the organization to understand and act on.
• Build the connections between an organization’s high-level strategies and the practical work required to achieve them, producing a plan with clear objectives, measures, and milestones that people can act on.
• Lead a group through a complete strategic planning process, from building shared understanding through to being ready to implement the finished plan, and develop your own repeatable approach to this work.
• Distinguish between performance management and monitoring and adjusting implementation of a strategic plan, and recognize when a plan itself needs to be refreshed.

The six-turn learning journey below is how these outcomes are built – each turn preparing the ground for the next.

Have questions before registering? Reach out.

You arrive with your own experience of strategic planning – plans that worked, plans that didn’t, and a sense of what tends to go missing along the way. This workshop builds on that experience rather than starting from zero. The six turns below are worked through as one continuous journey, using the Evolutionary Spiral – a Genuine Contact tool that maps out a learning path from initial clarity through to a working plan for ongoing adjustment.

This workshop is for organizational leaders responsible for creating and accomplishing a strategic plan, and for the consultants and organizational development practitioners who guide clients through one. It teaches an approach that weaves people, process, and technology together – instead of treating strategy and implementation as two separate efforts – so the plan keeps shaping real decisions long after it’s approved. No prior experience with the Genuine Contact Way is required – what matters is that you have a real stake in seeing strategic planning succeed, whether that’s your own organization’s plan or the plans you help others build.

This is a good fit if you are:

• An executive director or senior leader preparing for or currently leading a strategic planning process
• A manager who will be responsible for translating strategy into operational work
• An organizational development consultant or coach who facilitates strategic planning for clients
• A board member involved in setting or overseeing organizational strategy

Strategic Planning the Genuine Contact Way is co-facilitated by its two originators, who developed this approach together and continue to teach it as partners.