Strategic planning has many purposes. It provides the opportunity and impetus to examine your market environment, your customers, and your competitors and to think about the past and the future in each of these areas. Strategic planning provides the opportunity to examine and refine your organization’s mission, vision, goals, and objectives. The strategic planning process provides an opportunity to refine your strategy – to define again where and how you will compete to best meet the organization’s goals and objectives. Strategic planning asks the organization to plan the specific tactics and actions that will implement the strategy and lead to achieving those goals and objectives.

But perhaps the most important purpose of a strategic plan is to focus the organization and all of its resources on the most important activities and investments that will lead to achieving the plan. The plan is both a communication tool and a sieve to keep the organization’s actions and investments pure. Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I often say that a mediocre strategy well executed is likely to create more value than the best strategy poorly implemented. Both of these statements are based on the fact that any strategic plan is only as good as the organization’s ability to rally around the plan and to work as a tight-knit, collaborative unit in pursuing the implementation without distraction. This is what we refer to as strategic focus.

Strategic focus means that the organization is diligent in examining every action and every investment to assure that they move us down the road to become what the plan defines. No one in the organization has a sacred cow, or a pet project, or an interesting opportunity that diverts any attention or resource from the strategic plan.

To achieve strategic focus, the plan needs to be clearly laid out and defined so that all parties understand and so that there are no open ends. To achieve focus, the plan needs to be communicated frequently and clearly so that all understand and buy in. There is another saying, “When you are tired of saying it, people are beginning to understand it.” The plan needs to be visible and present in every discussion that might lead to activity or allocation of resources that could possibly be relevant to the plan. Each person must see their role in achieving the plan.

There are many reasons why organizations fail to achieve focus, and therefore fail to implement or achieve their plan. Most of the time it is because they don’t see the importance of day-to-day reminding of what they hope to achieve. Too often the planning process is a sterile, one-time process of development. Sometimes it is introduced to the organization in a single meeting, where it is presented in summary without making each person’s role and the importance of achieving the plan clear. Often the plan is put on the shelf or stuffed in a drawer, never to be seen again until the next year, when we wonder why it never happened.

If you want to develop a strategic plan, it ought to be one that actually defines a plan of action and that plan of action needs to be part of the organization’s daily activities. It requires strategic focus.

Does your organization seek to implement a strategic plan that really affects the way that you compete? Do you develop strategic focus that drives your implementation?