Listen now to learn how MyStrategicPlan:

• Brings all the elements of an effective strategic plan together in one place
• Allows for dynamic planning
• Helps organizations sustain a living strategic plan
• Creates alignment by cascading the plan throughout your organization
• Provides individuals with consistent reports they need to execute the plan
• Improves accountability by tracking performance numbers

Download PDF (slide deck)

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Creating momentum in your life, just like in business, takes increasing the things that move you forward on decreasing those that hold you back. Sounds like a snap, but we all know that living the life we desire is not always easy to achieve. We have habits and cycles to overcome. But by creating momentum, we can move past those and toward the life we want. Momentum, by its nature, requires a lot of upfront push to get the ball rolling.

Here are ten tips to jumpstart the momentum in your life and strategic plan.

Create Your Picture of Success and Make it a Reality

It’s true—if you can’t see your vision of success, you’ll never get there. As you begin working through your planning process, ask yourself the following questions:

• So what does success look like for you day to day?
• How do you want to spend your time?
• How do you want to define success for yourself this year?
• Write your vision down and post it somewhere you will see it every day.

Pick a BHAG

You ask what a BHAG is? In case you missed it in previous chapters, it’s a big, hairy audacious goal you want to achieve this year that will help you step into your vision of success. So what is your BHAG? Write it down along with the one thing you can do today to make it happen. Here is an example of the power of a written goal: A study was conducted among a graduating class at Harvard to see how many had concrete goals around how much money they wanted to make. Only 3 percent had written their goals down. Ten years later, that same 3 percent were making more than the other 97% combined. Now that is power! Before another minute goes by, put some thought into your BHAG and get it down on paper.

Eliminate Your Energy Drains and Recharge Yourself

Energy drains are those things that drag you down. And when you’re dragged down, you’re probably not putting too much effort into your planning process, now are you? Recharge your energy with anything that inspires you and puts you in a good mood, like an organized desk, an afternoon off to enjoy family or good weather (or both together for that matter), or lunch with a colleague. Spend time doing the things that give you energy and stick a post-it note next to each drain you identify with an idea for getting rid of it. You’ll find you have more spring in your step and can focus a little more clearly on those action items that will help you reach those strategic priorities.

Conquer Your Fears—Concentrate and Be Brave

The greatest source of procrastination is often a deep-seeded fear—fear of success, change, failure, ridicule, or even just the unknown. Take a daily step to remove your fears by asking yourself every day, “What would I do today if I was really brave?” Consider Brian Tracy’s book, “Eat That Frog,” which provides the 21 most effective methods for conquering procrastination and getting more done in less time. Success comes by identifying that single most important task, or frog, that needs to be accomplished, concentrating on it to do it well and finishing it completely. As Tracy points out, “Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.” So go ahead, be brave and eat that frog!

Take Control of Your Finances

Do you feel like you’re on a treadmill, working more to pay for ever increasing bills? It seems like although the more we work, we don’t always have increased revenue. Instead, trim the fat and spend a little less here and there. You’ll soon free up some budget dollars that you can utilize on securing needed resources that will help you in managing a successful strategic plan. Or, if there’s enough savings, start an employee incentive program if you don’t have one already. Start by running a P&L report to see exactly how you are spending your money. Then adjust your budget, making sure what you purchase is in line with your business. Obviously a business with a big focus on sales would incur more expenses for client lunches than one without. Consider decreasing every category (except maybe your rent and payroll) by 10%? Use the money saved to fuel your dreams instead of feeding the treadmill.

Create a Braintrust

Identify a handful of people in your life who you trust to help you move your life forward. Consider pulling from a wide range of backgrounds, ages, experiences, and opinions. Mentors are a great source of guidance, often being the most critical and providing you the best insights. Call on them together or individually to help you move past any roadblocks and keep the momentum going. Even if there are no pending issues or questions that need immediate attention, continue to meet with them and maybe spend some time focusing on those tabled items that always come up in discussion but haven’t been addressed. Or meet without an agenda. You might have an enlightened conversation giving new thought and energy to your plan.

Find the Time

One of the biggest challenges to having the life we want is finding the time to do all we want to do whether it’s at the office or at home. But let’s admit it, each affect the other. Track how you spend your time for a week. At the end, tally up the time spent on each thing – such as meetings, paying bills, preparing reports, checking e-mail, running errands, etc. Look at each category. What things can you do to cut time in each area? Maybe if you struggle with preparing meeting agendas or keeping up the books, pass the task off to someone who is better suited for the job. Or set up your spam filter or organize your inbox to make it easier to sift through the e-mails. Be creative and you’ll soon free up time that will allow you to focus on what’s most important, like your planning and execution process.

Highlight Small Wins

Overlooking the short-term successes because you’re looking at the mid-term or long-term horizon is an easy trap to fall into.  Because strategic management is a process and an organizational journey, help your staff members stay motivated by acknowledging their progress along the way.  The obvious time to highlight progress is when you’re reviewing your plan during your monthly or quarterly strategy reviews.  Call out the small wins by specifically identifying what was accomplished, why it’s important tp the strategic direction, and how the success was achieved.  Additionally, point out small wins as they occur so everyone can feel the continued momentum.

Let Things Evolve

When the flywheel of momentum starts to turn, pay attention to clues, connections and opportunities that are presented. Be aware of environmental shifts and market changes that will affect your organization. With a little agility, allow your future to unfold and change in ways you might not have been able to imagine when you started your planning process. Remember, your strategic plan is a work in progress. Have a goal in mind but be flexible on the process of getting there. It will make the process much easier.

Be Committed

No matter what your organizational goals are, or how difficult they’ll be to achieve, creating momentum to reach them starts with commitment. Be committed to the strategic management process by starting with at least one of the ideas above and you’ll begin to move closer to your dreams. Then take on the next idea, and then maybe another one. Borrow some encouragement from that famous shoe slogan, and just do it! You’ll be happier in the end and will be glad you did it.

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• Question 2: Following the MyStrategicPlan methodology, can you better explain the difference between organization wide strategies and strategic objectives? Ultimately, why is this (organization wide) needed?

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Note: We will reference MyStrategicPlan throughout this post, but in doing so also acknowledge our great customers using MyNonprofitPlan and MyChurchPlan.

Before	After

Let’s dig into what this means.

Much thought and collaboration has been invested in each aspect of the new design. We are confident that MyStrategicPlan is now more efficient and intuitive than it was before, which is what you want from a business process tool. There are several new changes and based on initial response to our new design, we know that you will like it.

Throughout the redesign of MyStrategicPlan.com, we kept four criteria in mind; including:

1. Improving the look and feel of MyStrategicPlan with a new, fresh and very professional facelift.
2. Streamlining the user interface to reduce clutter and complexity.
3. Accessing high priority actions/tasks with fewer clicks thereby improving the efficiency of the system and our users.
4. Increasing our customers’ success rate through the strategic planning activities into the execution stage. The customer feedback from our annual survey helped us understand the need to simplify the strategic planning process. We want you to be successful!

You may experience a very short “re-familiarizing” period with the new design! We assure you that with a little “re-acquaintance” time, you will be more efficient and productive. We encourage you to give yourself some time to acquaint yourself with the new workflow and within a short time, you will also find benefit in the improved and efficient transition to operationalizing strategy.

Later in this post, I will highlight the changes in greater detail. As we move you through the design keep in mind the many resources that are available to you to improve your ease of use and application, provide you with guidance through the process and to keep each of you current with all system updates.

We are very happy to finally have MyStrategicPlan updated in response to requests. This redesign touches every single page. There is still more work to do over the coming months to improve the design and functionality of secondary pages so we aren’t completely done, but we are well on our way. We hope you will fully optimize the new design to fully engage your team and grow your company by converting strategy into action.

Thank you,

Erica Olsen

Learn more about the redesign in the short 5-minute video.

For a complete review of the changes, please read further.

Guided Home Page: The new home page redesign not only offers our users a new, fresh and professional feel, it offers a system by which to implement and execute your strategies. This new landing page does a better job of providing you with both information and next steps. The home page now implements a level of intelligence in two stages:

• Increased guidance through the process. The “tiles” will help guide users through the key “strategic process” steps (intelligence based). This provides more of a “system guide.” As the system monitors your activity, it will propose your next actions. It will also provide direct resources to the respective item.

• Assistance through the performance management phase offers our users constant updates to navigate through their plan. Quicker access to execution tools and reports improves the effectiveness of using a management tool. For example, using the scorecard approach provides quick access to the number of actions/goals you have that are on target vs. off target. This perspective offers the busy executive, as well as all managers and team members, a “60,000 ft.” level view of plan accomplishments. The home page also offers Tips box that provides general strategic planning tips, thought provoking questions, jokes, and more; a view of upcoming free trainings; and best practices from the M3 team.

Before	After

Navigation changes: Besides the design changes, you will find some of the most noticeable changes are in the navigation at the top of each page. These changes provide you with tools that will most noticeably increase efficiency and productivity. Take your time exploring during your “re-acquaintance” period! We have streamlined the process and removed a number of clicks to get to key pages. Please note: Some of the top navigation tabs will have drop down links. Once on a section the secondary navigation will be moved to “side” navigation. This workflow more closely follows a typical strategic planning process and meets the request that many users wanted to see incorporated.

Before
After

Site-wide Appearance: We have taken the new design and incorporated it throughout the rest of the website. The space is better positioned taking advantage of white space to make the system easier on the eyes. It also provides more room for data entry, as well as more information to help you on the specific topic. The changes speak for themselves. Here are a few additional changes applied to many of the “interior pages” that we want to highlight:

• Tips box: Process pages will include a new “Tips” box to provide specific and important information to the task on that page.
• More Info box: Process pages will include a new “More Info” link to dig deeper into information on the section including examples and videos. More details on this below.

Before	After

More Info Link: Many of you will notice the iFrame box is no longer there. We have given our users full control of assessing the information and tips they individually need! This change provides you with greater control of available resources and allows you to decide if you want more details. If you do want more information and assistance, we offer many more examples + direct link to Virtual Strategy Guide via one quick click! You decide. We are also implementing organizational specific resources. To start, the examples provided will be different depending upon whether you have a MyStrategicPlan, MyNonprofitPlan or MyChurchPlan account. We will continue to build this out over the next year, but this is a great start. These “More Info” tabs will also link you directly to the Virtual Strategy Guide if you want to dig deeper. We have built out this resource further so it is a full blown strategic planning process.

Before	After

Reports: We are breaking away from the “highly technical” look and feel! The new reports page allows you to quickly see the listing of available reports and access them more effectively. You have two more clicks but the total time savings should be well worth it. Quick Access drop down menus allow you to navigate through departments to individual team members much more rapidly.

Before	After

Accounts Page: The plan administrator will notice the layout of the account page is more streamlined. The new page offers a department listing in a drop down menu, while team members are also displayed in a drop-down at a level lower than the department listing. Click through this new feature, it helps expedite user management workflow.

Future Development: MyStrategicPlan is not just a web application (or point solution with planned output). It is an end-to-end business process application. We are dedicated to enhancing the system to meet your business needs. Customer feedback drove these changes and if you want to have a voice in the next round, we welcome your feedback. We have a list a mile long. With your continued support and recommendations to friends and colleagues we are committed to making your job easier. As recommendations are submitted, we evaluate them and commit resources to those most mission critical. Here are some items scheduled for the next 6 months:

• API: The first pass at an API has been developed and is ready in write form. We look to connect to an industry leading application for testing. If your organization needs to connect MyStrategicPlan to a 3rd party application, please let us know.
• Mobile application: We know you want a mobile app and we do too!
• Powerpoint Report: Accelerate your strategy reviews by automating the production of a PowerPoint presentation that will pull in the information from your Track Goals and Actions page.

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• 95% of a typical workforce doesn’t understand its organization’s strategy
• 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully
• 86% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy
• 60% of organizations don’t link strategy to budgeting

So what’s the upshot of these surprising revelations? Strategic planning matters to the life of your business.  So get out there and start planning strategically!

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You will learn:

• How and why having a strategic plan is critical to your organization’s sustainability
• The key elements of a strategic plan
• The top five most important guidelines in your planning efforts
• A schedule and process to develop your plan
• Tips and tricks to using MyStrategicPlan

Download PDF (slide deck)

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Developing a strategy that can actually be implemented rises and falls on how you set up the structure of your plan from the beginning. Don’t fall into the trap of creating a plan that sits on the shelf because no one understands how to move it to action. The correct strategic objective and goal structure will allow you to avoid these pitfalls. During this phase of planning, this is literally where rubber meets the road. Listen to this important webinar to “Move from Big Ideas to Action.”

You will learn:

• How to create a holistic, balanced strategic plan
• The best practices to establishing strategic objectives and goals
• Setting organizational goals that are SMART
• Cascading organizational goals to departments and then to individuals
• Creating action plans that have ownership

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I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum. - Frances Willard

To this order, educating your team about the strategic planning process itself can create an understanding of how the process culminates into a final plan (i.e. how a SWOT is used for determining potential areas of priority, which are then developed into strategic themes). A simple flow chart may be all that is needed to make sure everyone knows the general development route your strategic plan will take.

In the development and execution of the plan, there will be dialogue. To optimize these exchanges and keep them constructive, the entire team needs to recognize the balance needed between informing, recommending and deciding in order to have a true collective outcome. In the delivery of this dialogue, we can’t stress enough the importance of language symmetry. For example, are your organization milestones considered “objectives” or “goals”? Do these terms change at different stratums, for say a department or an individual? There is no right or wrong answer; the point is that whatever resonates best with your organization should be identified and incorporated. Language must name the key features of your strategy landscape with rigorous consistency so that any adaptations toward a common direction can be achieved without confusion.

After you are finished ironing out any contentions of what a strategic plan is or is not, just remember it is your job as a driver of strategy to continually develop those common nodes of understanding (process, roles, communication) as they relate to the strategic execution cycle that your organization should have in place. Commit to a shared language standard, and find ways to incorporate repetition into the sharing of ideas and concepts. Make it ritualistic throughout your strategic development and execution cycles. Remember, it takes courage and discipline to practice an art that is never fully mastered.

STRATEGY CHECK: Does everyone in your strategy voyage understand the flight plan?

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• Where are we now?
• Where are we going?
• How will we get there?

Each part has certain elements to show you how and where things fit it.

Where are we now?

As you think about where your organization is now, you want to look at your foundational elements (mission and value) to make sure there has not been a change. More than likely, you will not revise these two areas very often. Then you want to look at your current position or your strategic position. This is where you look at what is happening internally and externally to determine how you need to shift and change You should review your strategic position regularly through the use of a SWOT. These elements are as follows:

• Mission statement: The mission describes your organization’s purpose — the purpose for which you were founded and why you exist. Some mission statements include the business of the organization. Others explain what products or services they produce or customers they serve. Does your mission statement say what you do? Why does your organization exist?
• Values and/or guiding principles: This clarifies what you stand for and believe in. Values guide the organization in its daily business. What are the core values and beliefs of your company? What values and beliefs guide your daily interactions? What are you and your people really committed to?
• SWOT: SWOT is an acronym that stand for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These elements are crucial in assessing your strategic position with your organization. You want to build on your company’s strengths; shore up the weaknesses; capitalize on the opportunities; and recognize the threats.

Where are we going?

The elements of the question Where are we going? help you answer other questions such as What will my organization look like in the future? Where are we headed? What is the future I want to create for my company? Because the future is hard to predict, you can have fun imagining what it may look like. The following elements help you define the future for your business:

• Sustainable competitive advantage: Sustainable competitive advantage explains what your are best at compared to your competitors. Each company strives to create an advantage that continues to be competitive over the time. What can you be best at? What is your uniqueness? What can your organization potentially do better than any other organization?
• Vision statement: Your vision is formulating a picture of what your organization’s future makeup will be and where the organization is headed. What will your organization look like in 5 to 10 years from now?

How will we get there?

Knowing how you’ll reach your vision is the meat of your strategic plan, but it’s also the most time consuming. The reason it takes so much time to develop is because there are a number of routes from your current position to your vision. Picking the right one determines how quickly or slowly you get to your final destination.
The parts of your plan that layout your roadmap are listed below:

• Strategic objectives: Strategic objectives are long-term, continuous strategic areas that help you connect your mission to your vision. Holistic objectives encompass four areas: financial, customer, operational, and people. What are the key activities that you need to perform in order to achieve your vision?
• Strategy: Strategy establishes a way to match your organization’s strengths with market opportunities so that your organization comes to mind when your customer has a need. This section explains how you travel to your final destination. Does your strategy match your strengths in a way that provides value to your customers? Does it build an organizational reputation and recognizable industry position?
• Short-term goals/priorities/initiatives: Short-term goals convert your the strategic objectives into specific performance targets. You can use goals, priorities, initiatives interchangeably. In this book, I use goals to define short-term action. Effective goals clearly state what you want to accomplish, when you want to accomplish it, how you’re going to do it, and who’s going to be responsible. Each goal should be specific and measurable. What are the 1- to 3-year-goals you’re trying to achieve to reach your vision? What are your specific, measurable, and realistic targets of accomplishment?
• Action items: Action items are plans that set specific actions that lead to implementing your goals. They include start and end dates and appointing a person responsible Are your action items comprehensive enough to achieve your goals?
• Scorecard: A scorecard measures and manages your strategic plan. What are the key performance indicators you need to track to monitor whether you’re achieving your mission? Pick 5 to 10 goal related measures you can use to track the progress of your plan and plug them into your scorecard.
• Execution: In executing the plan, identify issues that surround who manages and monitors the plan and how the plan is communicated and supported. How committed are you to implementing the plan to move your organization forward? Will you commit money, resources, and time to support the plan.

Use our plan

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