What Good is Strategic Planning Without Ensuring Follow-Through?

Develop Your Facilitator Skills: The Action Plan Troubleshooting Process

In our Facilitating Strategic Planning workshop, we consistently hear concerns regarding the risk around enthusiastic but potentially over-ambitious action plans that can be produced during strategic or operational planning sessions. Most participants truly intend to fulfill their obligations during the planning session – but following the session can be another matter entirely!

Day-to-day operations, putting out fires, organizational and competitive pressures, and shareholder requirements overtly and covertly stop us from even initiating our action plan.

The questions remain; ‘how do we proactively ensure that these pressures are taken into consideration?’ As well, ‘How do we create prescriptions for action planning that make sense and have a better likelihood of being achieved?’

The answer is troubleshooting, and this can easily be done before the planning session ends. If you are seeking to expand your facilitator skills in strategic planning, explore the action plan troubleshooting process below.

Remember that troubleshooting, just like the planning process itself, always has better follow-through when participants feel a part of the process and see themselves reflected in the outcome