January signals strategy-planning time in many companies, or the moment the December budget gets "put into action." Either way the event is over and everyone is relieved not to schedule it again until next year. If that is your company, or your team is about to hold its annual retreat, pause before you book the room.
Over six weeks I met more than 60 CEOs and presidents in London, New York and Hong Kong, companies from $10 million to over $400 million in revenue, every kind of industry. I asked each the same question: how do you create your strategy, and do you use it through the year? At least 70% said they hold some kind of event, and then get on with business. Most admitted they do not use the output during the year, or that it is too vague to guide the course corrections the year demands.
Why an event cannot work
Business changes too fast. In the months around that survey, oil swung more than 125% between its 52-week high and low. Any strategy that depended on oil, directly or indirectly, needed its implications rewritten within a quarter of being approved. An event-driven plan has no mechanism to do that. A process does.
What a process looks like
Assumptions written down and tested against live data. A one-page strategy that is a model, not a deck, so a change in one assumption shows what else must change. Five Strategic Numbers with owners. A monthly review that asks what went red, why, and what changes this month. The annual offsite becomes one review among twelve, not the only one.
Then and now
Written in 2015. The survey would be worse today, not because CEOs have got lazier but because the gap between the speed of the market and the speed of an annual process has widened. The MOVE® system was built to close it: weeks to the page, then a monthly cadence that keeps it true.
Monday
Find the strategy document your team approved last. Check the date. Then list what has changed in your market since. If the list is longer than the document's revisions, you have an event, not a process.
