Managers are promoted for competence and then judged on multi-year strategic planning, which nobody trained them for. When this strand of organisational leadership is unclear, people default to protecting their own function. What blocks progress on the organisational leadership capability is usually unclear ownership rather than unclear intent. The teaching approach is deliberately practical: participants build a leadership plan for multi-year strategic planning as they go. The material serves both public bodies and commercial organisations dealing with the wider organisational leadership agenda. They acquire practical criteria for judging when the organisational leadership capability is working and when it is only appearing to. It establishes a shared vocabulary for multi-year strategic planning so that teams can disagree productively about it. Comparative studies of the wider organisational leadership agenda across sectors find the same handful of failure points recurring. It ends with a prioritised list of changes to this strand of organisational leadership that the participant is prepared to defend internally.
Expected Learning Outcomes
✓
Delegate responsibility for multi-year strategic planning without losing sight of the outcome.
✓
Set standards on multi-year strategic planning and apply them consistently regardless of who is involved.
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Establish what evidence would demonstrate that multi-year strategic planning is under control.
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Make decisions on multi-year strategic planning at the right speed for the risk involved.
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Apply a repeatable review cycle to multi-year strategic planning and act on what it produces.
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Handle the trade-offs in multi-year strategic planning between speed, cost and assurance explicitly rather than implicitly.
✓
Judge when to escalate multi-year strategic planning and when to absorb it.
Who Should Attend
✓
Executives leading multi-function programmes involving multi-year strategic planning.
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Those responsible for briefing external stakeholders on multi-year strategic planning.
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Team leaders and supervisors who put multi-year strategic planning into practice day to day.
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Team leaders responsible for daily delivery of multi-year strategic planning.
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Project and programme managers whose success depends on multi-year strategic planning.
✓
Board members and non-executives overseeing multi-year strategic planning.
Course Modules
Open any module to see its sessions and topics.
01
Multi-year strategic planning: conflict, politics and informal power
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1The cost of multi-year strategic planning and how to present it
Build the competence framework that supports multi-year strategic planning.
Check that records of multi-year strategic planning answer the questions likely to be asked.
Set the decision rights on multi-year strategic planning: who decides, who is consulted, who is told.
Recognise publicly one person whose work on multi-year strategic planning went unnoticed.
Session 2Comparing multi-year strategic planning with recognised practice
Distinguish symptoms from causes when multi-year strategic planning underperforms.
Set the review point at which multi-year strategic planning will be reconsidered.
Compare the cost of multi-year strategic planning with the cost of its absence.
Set out how exceptions to multi-year strategic planning are requested and approved.
02
Multi-year strategic planning: building the bench and letting go
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Deciding on multi-year strategic planning when the information will never be complete
Identify which function can quietly block multi-year strategic planning and address it directly.
