Mr.Khay

Why Strategy Formulation also needs an Objective and Action Plan?

Strategy Formulation is the first primary stage of strategy management. It is argued to be one of the most important stages for strategy execution. Despite being argued to be agile in executing the strategies, strategy formulation is undeniably essential to avoid undesired wastes and ineffectiveness (failure to deliver the results as planned) in implementing the strategies. Before setting the objectives for strategy formulation, it needs to define the articulate meaning of strategy for executives to converge their mental model, goals and critical inputs for designing the strategies and strategic modeling. Strategy can be shortened in a way to win which varies by the types of organization. For Business organization, profit gain is the winning over their rival companies. For school, excellent quality of student’s learning outcome is a win for educators or school leaders. For Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), critical and tangible impact on key beneficiaries and community at large is a win for NGO leaders to build trusts from donors and sponsors through their efficient and effective strategy implementation. Therefore, designing a strategy is defining what the strategy is to be agreed by all key executives / boards in your organization.

The essence of strategy formulation is the capability of leaders to synthesize their key organizational competencies to deter the threats and to overcome the weaknesses for winning. Since weaknesses are usually hidden and leaders are hesitant to determine the weaknesses of their own department, units or team, it is strongly argued for transparent and open analysis of internal weakness. Moreover, it is critically imperative for the organization to dig deeper into their internal strength and weakness through using the Congruence Model with 5 organizational building blocks to align with one another, Mckinsey’s 7 S framework which composes of Shared Values, System, Structure, Staff, Style, Skills and Strategy and the Baldrige Excellent Framework. Although It is time consuming to conduct analysis of internal strength and weakness, organizations will gain invaluable data to inform their strategies. Since the synthesized data is highly valuable, it is strongly argued to well maintain the data for multiple time using in the entire strategic management process and as the baseline indicators for the next strategic planning cycle. 

Why formulating the strategies? It is answered with the objective and the action plan during the strategy formulation phase. Setting the key objectives is strongly encouraged to converge all actions to achieve the results. Moreover, having a clear objective for the strategy formulation process can hold executives accountable for the results on top of their core responsibilities. It also explicitly informs them that the task is mandatory which they can integrate into their work plan to achieve the objectives. Forming a committee or team to work on formulating the strategies is advisable. In addition, they must create an interactive and comprehensive work plan or action plan form to define, assign, monitor and evaluate the work progress and results to the deadline. Using the Web-based task management platform like ASANA is also encouraged to build a consistent platform for managing the data and for ensuring the tasks to be completed by the deadline or not for corrective actions to be inserted. Finally, using the Google Calendar to schedule the meeting based on the agreed interval timeline to follow up the progress and to tackle with any issues or barriers for achieving the objectives.