Strategic Planning: Lead Yourself Through Growth

Last week I posted a blog on Strategic Thinking and Habit Change. In this blog, I looked at how an imaginary person, Aoife, could apply Strategic Thinking to support her to grow and change.

This concept is particularly relevant to us here at Adaptas because in Oct 2021, Adaptas launched the Skills for Growth programme. Designed to develop self-leadership through habit change, this programme was built from Celine’s books Our Learning Brain and Developing Learning Habits. Check it out HERE, to find out more or register for the next programme kicking off January 2022.

Read on to discover the second part of how becoming more strategic is the key to leading yourself to successful change.

Strategic Planning and Habit Change:

Last week after thinking strategically about her situation, Aoife decided she wanted to work on the following three steps:

Implementing better planning and distraction management through trying a time-boxed scheduling approach.

Building clearer and stronger boundaries between work and personal life.

Carving out and protecting sixty minutes of personal time each week to re-charge and ground herself.

Now that Aoife has a clearer picture of what she wants to change, she needs to pull from strategic planning to figure out how to implement this change.

Strategic Planning is about translating vision into defined goals, objectives, and a sequence of steps describing how to achieve them. It requires organising, prioritising, focusing, detailing, implementing, charts, timetables, task lists and lots more. Without Strategic Thinking, we risk wasting all the energy of strategic planning because we aren’t channeling it into a specific enough goal. Strategic Planning helps us take action through the inevitable discomfort of habit change by defining a clear set of steps, behaviours, and tasks that will move us closer to vision created by strategic thinking.

As Aoife applies Strategic Planning to her habit change goals she will need to consider the following:

What specifically does she need to do?

Learn about time boxed scheduling (interested? Check it out here) and begin practicing this time management approach.
Discuss boundaries with relevant people in her work and personal life and determine some small changes that will strengthen these boundaries.
Identify her 60 minutes per week of personal time and schedule that for herself.
Consider what might block her from following through on all of these steps (i.e. fear of speaking to her manager about work/life boundaries) and devise a strategy to support herself to handle these obstacles (i.e. taking time to center herself before her conversation and remind herself why this change matters to her.)

How will she stay committed to the process, even when it’s not going well?

By reminding herself of the deeper values and purpose that are driving her decision to change.

How will she challenge the old limiting stories that are likely to pop back up?

First by recognising the old limiting story for what it is, a false narrative that is holding her back from change. “There is never enough time, I can’t manage this, I am failing in all areas of my life, it’s impossible.”
Then choosing to focus on a new narrative instead. “There is enough time. I have the ability to make changes that will change my life. I am in control of managing myself. Improvement is possible.”

How will she track and refine her progress as she goes?

Aoife could choose to implement a weekly progress check by doing a 10 minute review and refine on her progress. This means she takes 10 minutes weekly to look back over the previous seven days and note what went well, and what didn’t. Then, she can tweak her strategic approach for the following week based on this information.

How will she know she has been successful?

It will be important for Aoife to clearly define what success will look like for herself, so that she can recognise when she reaches it. It could be when she is able to end the majority of her days with a sense of calm and optimism, or when she manages to achieve her 60 minutes of personal time in 3 out of 4 weeks. We get to choose what success looks like to us, but unless we define it, we risk not noticing our own progress.

We need BOTH.

Ultimately, strategic thinking and strategic planning need to happen to be successful in habit change. Using one without the other will leave us spinning our wheels. To create real and lasting change we need to gain clarity through open minded, expansive thinking and then translate that vision into tangible actions.

If Aoife implements strategic planning she will identify when and how she will start to build a time-boxed schedule, when she is going to start conversations with colleagues about building better communication boundaries, and she will start experimenting with carving out 60 minutes a week for herself. She will speak to her partner and children about what she is doing and why it’s important to her. She will schedule in some time at the end of every week to look back and check in on her progress so that she can learn from what worked and what didn’t.

At times, she might pause and step back into more strategic thinking as a way of refining her goals further and building on her success.

By Annika McGivern, Learning Programme Designer and Facilitator

Find out more about Annika here.

Are you using strategic thinking and planning to support you in making the change you want to make to reach your goals?

In Skills for Growth, a ten-week programme on self-leadership and habit change, Celine and Annika work directly with you to implement both in your growth process. supports you to learn how to apply both to your personal habit change process. Find out more here!

Being More Strategic: Excuses?

More and more these days, it is important to consider being strategic regardless of our position in an organisation.

I am not a strategy specialist. I am coming at this topic ultimately from the perspective of my role as a psychologist and coach, helping people, teams and organisations to step back a bit and consider; ‘Is there another way I (we) can do life and work?’.

Being strategic can be as simple as an employee stepping back and making decisions about priorities and making time to devote to various tasks rather than just keeping the head down getting through task after task as it is assigned. At the other end of the scale, being strategic might be a CEO or a managing director establishing future plans for the entire organisation.

In a previous blog I discussed the challenges of being strategic and the difference between

‘strategic thinking’ and ‘strategic planning’.

Reflections on Being Strategic

If you read my previous blog on this topic, you’ve hopefully taken some time to consider your own strengths in this area and any challenges you might have in getting both elements – ‘thinking’ and ‘planning’ – of being strategic working for you.

Here’s some of my reflections:

In my role as a coach and facilitator of change in individuals, teams and organisations, I am somebody who wants to support transformation in as many people as I can. I often notice themes coming up again and again across clients. In noticing these themes across people and situations, this gives me clues as to what many more people might be thinking. I give myself time to reflect on these themes by asking more questions, discussing the themes with others and through reading and writing about the topics.

To return to a definition of ‘being strategic’ from the first blog in this series

(What do we mean by ‘Be More Strategic?’ Thinking vs planning. (adaptastraining.com))

Being strategic is taking an outside: in view of how things are, and could be done. It’s making sure that an individual, team or organisation’s core competence or competencies are consistently focusing on directional choices that will best move the individual, team or organisation toward its new future, with the least risk and in the most orderly fashion. It’s being proactive rather than reactive. It’s being committed to a vision and purpose.

However, just because I notice a theme and have done the thinking on it, doesn’t mean that my clients on a macro level are going to recognise the importance of addressing this particular theme. There are going to be other things on their minds, depending on their specific role and objectives. My ability to plan strategically as a business owner means I cannot just make a new set of plans to match this new theme. This will confuse my clients and possibly destroy my business. Therefore I need to sit separately in the ‘thinking’ and ‘planning’ and interweave both in making future plans.

My comfort zone in ‘being strategic’

I find I sit most comfortably in the strategic thinking side of things. I have endless ideas on what could be done and how things could be done. But because I have so many ideas and only a small team and very little time outside of my busy days, I am not great on strategic planning. Notice my excuse ‘only a small team and very little time outside of my busy days’? Having a small team does not mean I cannot be great at strategic planning! I just have to make the time to prioritise.

Many people I have coached are great at strategic planning but do not take the thinking time to consider new ways of doing things. They tell me that changing how things are done would create too much risk and so therefore there is no point in wasting time doing the big picture thinking.

Your ‘be more strategic’ challenge: Part 2

What excuses might you be telling yourself that are holding you back from taking adequate time to ‘be strategic’ NOW ?

What Do We Mean By ‘Be More Strategic?’

“I need to be more strategic”.

“I’ve been given feedback that I need to be more strategic”.

“We want our people to be more strategic”.

These are statements I hear regularly from clients about their employees, and directly from my 1-2-1 and group coaching clients about themselves.

Note, I am not a strategy specialist. I am coming at this topic ultimately from the perspective of my role as a psychologist and coach, helping people, teams and organisations to step back a bit and consider; ‘Is there another way I (we) can do life and work?’.

What do we mean by ‘be more strategic’?

We could say that being strategic is taking an outside: in view of how things are, and could be. Having looked up various descriptions, I think this summarises it well:

It’s making sure that an individual, team or organisation’s core competence or competencies are consistently focusing on directional choices that will best move the person, team or organisation toward its new future, with the least risk and in the most orderly fashion. It’s being proactive rather than reactive. It’s being committed to a vision and purpose.

For many of us, it’s more comfortable to take a “heads down” approach to how we work rather than to “lift up” and ‘be strategic’.

Being strategic comes naturally to some but not to all of us. For those of us that it does not come naturally to, it’s important to get our heads around it. We have not necessarily been taught how to be strategic. Did we explicitly learn about strategy in school? I know I didn’t! It all feels like guess work, and depends on our role models and experiences.

By stepping back and wrapping our heads around the different element of being strategic, I believe we can learn. Having spent some time on this for myself and the business during the recent months of Covid-19 life, I suggest you consider the following in relation to your role, your career – and/ or if you want to go big on it – your purpose.

After moving through the process of self-reflection, you might want to consider it all in relation to your team or organisation depending on where you sit in your role.

I believe for many of us, the first step is to recognise what many specialists in the area define as the two main elements of being strategic:

Strategic Thinking and Strategic Planning.

Strategic thinking Vs. strategic planning:

Most of us have a natural propensity towards one of these, more so than the other. Some of us sit more comfortably in ‘thinking’ but sit less comfortably in ‘planning’, whereas many go straight for the ‘planning’ and don’t do the ‘thinking’. Both ‘thinking’ and ‘planning’ are independent, while also being interdependent.

Strategic thinking is about looking at the big picture and considering new ways of doing things and requires ideating, being open-minded, imagining, seeing alternatives, blue sky thinking, root cause analyses and lots more.

Strategic planning is about translating vision into defined goals, objectives, and a sequence of steps describing how to achieve them and requires organising, prioritising, focusing, detailing, implementing, charts, timetables, task lists and lots more.

If we are naturally pre-disposed towards strategic thinking, we create lots of ideas that don’t always come fully to fruition. If we are naturally pre-disposed towards strategic planning we live in an endless cycle of goal setting and measuring objectives without coming up for air to consider if there might be other ways to do what we are doing.

It can be a challenge for many of us to get it right, possibly because it’s time consuming to first of all take time to do the ‘strategic thinking’ and then also to do the ‘strategic planning’.

Getting both strategic thinking and strategic planning working for us takes some serious commitment.

Your ‘be more strategic’ challenge: Part 1

Where is your comfort zone?: Strategic thinking or Strategic planning or neither?

If you were to do more of the one you are not pre-disposed towards, which one would it be?

What would you need to make this happen? Time, permission, support, or just getting out of your own way?

Let’s revisit ‘being strategic’ in the coming weeks.

First of all I recommend reflecting on the questions above and make a commitment to yourself to carve out some time for ‘strategic thinking’ or ‘strategic planning’, or both.

Strategic Planning: Lead Yourself Through Growth