Political leaders, Chairs, CEO’s and private business owners are acting on high accountability and transparency, because the workforce, consumer and communicator is calling for it. So how do we infiltrate high accountability and high transparency within our strategic planning? We form an executable strategic plan. Executable strategic plans have replaced aspirational strategic plans over the last five years. The difference is in how they are written.
An aspirational plan tends to be written in ‘we are going to’ language, whereas executable plans are ‘we have done or delivered’. The latter and more contemporary plan appears like a list of promises that are being struck amongst each other, or in other words, what will be delivered. Executable plans are written in a tense as though you are at the last day of the strategic phase. You’ll see language such as ‘we have’ rather than ‘we are going to’. And the ‘we have’ is typically very tangible. We are helping the readers visualise the end-state, which is the same end-state another reader will see.
The art to these executable plans is promising ‘what’ the result will look like. Oversight and workforce members are given the opportunity to agree to the ‘what’ during the strategic planning phase. But, in contrast to the more aspirational planning process of yesteryear, there is no agreement on ‘how’ the result will be formed. The ‘how’ is up to the workforce to determine, at the right time, with an empowered approach, over the full length of the strategic phase. Of course, the ‘how’ will have some parameters, such as to budget and on time, but the rest will be up for grabs under the circumstances of that date and time. Flexibility and agility exist within the ‘how’ element of executable plans.
By having an executable strategic plan the oversight team, the workforce, consumer or communicator can track progress towards that promised end result. Each promise, or piece of that jigsaw, must have one single-point-of-accountability committed to delivery – like a project manager delivering on that promise. Therefore, this process is highly transparent and highly accountable. Workforce team members use consistent executable language, can refer to the promises or jigsaw pieces by numbers and succinctly present back on progress.
Sally Carbon
Founder, Director and Principal Consultant
Sally Carbon is the founder of G11 Teams – setting up the business late in 2011 in response to serving a distribution company based in Melbourne which designed high fashion clothes in Paris – it was a fun way to kick start her own business. Her diverse client list grew, covering all sectors, and various organisational sizes and scales. Sally is a business strategist, helping companies to grow, finding their competitive advantage, and driving high organisational performance through leading-practice strategy. Sally has consulted for 15 years, specialises in strategic growth, across all sectors from financial services, not for profit, resources, agriculture, education, and private sector. She was formerly the Director of Docklands Authority in Melbourne, a large scale urban renewal the size of Melbourne’s CBD. Sally is also a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and was first placed on a government board when she was 22 years of age. She is an Olympic and World Cup gold medallist, and has released nine books. Sally loves to work with like-minded high performance thinkers who enjoy feeling ‘uncomfortable’