It's All about the Research

Think about the strategic planning brainstorming sessions you have with your management team, maybe even including the board or other managers. The facilitator poses the question: "Where do you want to be in 5 years?" For the next hour everyone offers their gut feelings and the ideas get written on the flipcharts. After a break the team comes back and as a group decides what the future should look like.

This is all by gut feel with no empirical data to support these conclusions, which is why most companies are fearful of taking bold steps. They don't trust the process, and frankly, they shouldn't.

Let's say for example you wanted to invest $100,000 of your retirement funds, and you decided to make this decision without any research or expert input. You just decided one day watching television you liked the ads for Burger King and you felt in your gut that with the new ads, their stock will rise and you would be making a good investment. How sound a decision is that? How comfortable are you with that decision-making process when $100,000 of your own money is on the line?

Strategic planning maps out the process of how an organization can go from Point A to Point B. Simply a gut feel on a Saturday morning at a retreat center just isn’t enough information to be planning that navigation to the next point.

When using the Fast Forward process everyone involved in the planning must do their share of research on the specifics they have been assigned before the actual planning steps happen. Good information gathering makes for better choices, and better choices make for a smoother ride through difficult transitions. Companies failing to properly research the necessary information are gambling with their future and their customers. Today is a completely different era than even only two years ago. Now is the time to focus like never before.