Temperature check
The quality of your strategy review meeting discussions are a great indicator of the overall health of your planning process. It can tell you a lot about the quality of the strategy, as well as the effectiveness of the management processes you are using.
If the discussion is marginally productive and people don’t engage well, start by considering the possibility that:
1) People don’t understand the planning process or the role of the strategy review session (education)
2) There might be opportunities to structure the discussion differently (meeting design)
3) You may have some of the wrong people in the room (operational thinkers)
4) Your plan sucks, and it lacks vision.
The reason the strategy review discussions are so telling is because you can’t get a room full of people to pretend something is interesting if it’s not. It’s the best indicator as to what you need to focus on fixing next, because it involves people from all levels of the company.
Once you have narrowed in on the factor, recognize that some of these issues are only corrected by changing the things you’re doing outside the meeting… during the rest of the year. No one is going to get excited about discussing a plan that has no vision or legs. Building an operational plan results in terrible discussions, that’s a motivator to build a stronger plan the next time around.
You can make changes to all of those things fairly easily, the most challenging is if you have folks in leadership positions that don’t think strategically.