Implementing our strategic plan - 5 principles to guide our way
With the ink still drying on our five-year strategic plan (2022 - 2027) we are now shifting gears to implementation. For many organisations, operationalising their strategic plan can be a daunting process. For us, we are keeping things as simple as humanly possible and being guided by 5 principles to help us get out of the blocks.
1: Quarterly steering — plan for strategy execution in line with current tensions and organisational bandwidth.
Following a strategic planning process, many organisations over-commit to ‘new’ activity. We are taking a pragmatic approach to implementing our strategic plan and taking it a quarter at a time. Plan for the coming quarter, review progress at quarter’s end and readjust our implementation roadmap for the quarter after. We’re currently in the process of establishing employee experience and customer experience mechanisms to ensure that our effort is guided by feedback from key points (our people and our customers!). We are mindful of our organisational bandwidth and want to put our effort where it matters.
2: Annual reporting — we’re committed to transparency and will tell the story both internally and externally.
We are committed to taking a pause at the end of each calendar year and writing a report regarding what we've achieved and what we haven’t (and that being completely okay). Giving transparency to both our team and our external stakeholders (such as our client partners) we hope will give everyone a sense of where we are at in our journey and hopefully open up some collaborative learning opportunities along the way.
3: Iteration over planning and perfection — we don’t need to over plan, we need to be functional. We’ll focus on documenting what we have and build from there.
We don't need the Rolls Royce and complete perfection right off the bat. This is a five-year strategic plan so it will be more like a marathon than a sprint. Many organisations make the mistake of binning their reality in light of chasing a pipedream ‘future state’. In our case, we are currently doing a lot of good work that is yet to be written down and formalised. An important initial step for us will be getting to a zero draft (or making existing documentation more easily accessible) and documenting what is currently working with the view to keep improving in the future.
4: Consultation with the team — the team will be involved at every step (ranging from being informed through to leading actions - and everything in between).
The vast majority of our team are occupied with meaningful work for most of the week. We won’t have time for everyone to be involved in every decision or have intensive involvement in the development of every one of our policies or processes. We are however aiming to ensure we involve all members of our team throughout the process, lower barriers to participation and genuinely consult with them about our ideal ‘future state’.
5: One Beacon Strategies — activities will be inclusive of both our Cairns and Brisbane based folk to build the “one team.”
We are a small team, spread across two sites. No doubt other organisations feel this tension when they span different suburbs, regions and states but it is incredibly important to build an organisation with the ‘one’ culture. In our situation, we have offices in both Brisbane and Cairns and we are purposefully going to put effort toward making sure that the geographic proximity feels as tight as possible. There is immense value in sharing our work and learning from each other across our teams and everything contained within our strategic plan should be equally benefiting both of our sites.
We hope that by sharing with you the principles that guide our strategic plan you can learn more about how we operate as an organisation. We also hope that you can use these principles as inspiration for the implementation of your own strategic plan.
