SBDC for Enterprise Excellence

Visionary Planning - “a vision without a plan is just a hallucination!”

Abraham Lincoln said ‘the essence of leadership is vision’ and Will Rogers said ‘a vision without a plan is just a hallucination’.  Does your management team share a common, well defined vision?  If so, is there time spent actually defining the roadmap to get there?

Today we have a guest blogger - one of our partner facilitators!  Mark Sessumes of TMAC has 15 years of progressive operations management experience in diverse manufacturing and production environments.  Mark has worked in fabrication, assembly, remanufacturing, refurbishment, and processing plants for small companies and branch locations of large, multi-division firms.  Since joining TMAC, Mark has worked with companies ranging in size from 3 to over 3000 employees.  They include operations in all types of manufacturing environments.  He is a certified Shingo Prize Examiner, Texas Award for Performance Excellence Examiner, Lean/Six Sigma Master Black Belt, and Training Within Industry (TWI) Certified Instructor.  Mark received his Master of Business Administration at The University of Dallas and his BBA in Production / Operations Management from North Texas State University in Denton, Texas.

If the management team doesn’t know its destination and the exact route to get there, then how can the each worker know?  Perhaps your management team goes through the motions of planning but do they actually use it to manage?  The paragraphs below outline how to improve your company using effective planning and policy deployment.

It is not unusual for me to find managers who are simply caught up in the day to day activities of operations and never take the time to LEAD.  Leadership is different than management.  Leadership requires one to mentally picture a defined future state, and aggressively seek to reach that future state.  In other words, forward thinking.  Management, on the other hand, deals with implementing systems that define expectations, issue cohesive policies and procedures, grant power, verify performance, and guide and influence behaviors.  Both leadership and management are critical to overall long-term success and vital for effective planning.

Some companies think they are too small for the rigor of visionary planning but company size has little to do with the necessity of leadership.  What is misunderstood is that planning is a skill just like golf, swimming, or driving a car.  They way to perfect a skill is by practice.  You can read about swimming, watch someone else swim, and listen to lectures on swimming but none of those will develop the skill of swimming.  You must get in the water and splash around to develop the necessary skills.  The same is true for planning. There are many, many planning processes that exist in the market place.  In fact, I did a quick search on Google for ‘management planning’ and got over 52 million hits!  For the most part, I think most of the planning methodologies are appropriate for companies today.  Let’s take a look at some common characteristics of effective visionary planning.

Establish the strategic purpose – vision, mission, and values.  Vision determines the ultimate destination relative to competitors, markets, community or other considerations.  For example, footwear manufacturer Adidas once had the vision to ‘Kill Nike’.  Mission then elaborates on how the company will accomplish its vision in terms of products, markets, employees, etc.  Values are the basic underpinnings of the company’s social system or culture and elaborate on the customs and ideals embraced by the people.  What’s important about each of these is the process by which they are established by the management team.  While usually resulting in statements, to arrive at each statement is a visceral process which then makes each statement take on special meaning by the management team.  The strategic purpose should be communicated consistently and often, and how day to day decisions are tied to it.

Once the strategic purpose has been defined, then a specific roadmap must be created that will provide focus and enable progress towards it.  The universal approach to accomplishing this is Plan, Do, Check, Adjust (PDCA).  But before the team can plan, it must ‘grasp the situation’ which for some may be the most difficult part.  To grasp the situation, the management team must evaluate their business.  Many times, this evaluation is improved when an outsider is invited to participate.  Because an outsider brings no pre-conceived notions or mental models, their input can direct the team to see issues they may be blind to seeing.  This process of ‘grasping the situation’ should not be short-changed.  Management may think they know exactly what is taking place in the office or shop floor, but reality is often different than perception. 

One thing all businesses have in common is limited resources.  So the skill of focus is essential in planning.  Of all the possible ways we can bring resources to bear to solve problems, the management team must narrow its focus to a vital few that will enable the company to meet its ‘hard’ business goals.  Hard business goals are often annual results of revenues, profits, EBITDA or other key business indicators.  Once the hard business goals are defined, then the ‘organizational strategies’ needed to fulfill the hard business goals are established.  The organizational strategies often focus on developing core business fundamentals such as cost, market penetration, innovation, speed, quality, safety or other over-arching issues discovered in the ‘grasp the situation’ step.  Perfecting the skill of focus happens over time, not over night.  Identifying the 3 or 4 essential organizational level strategies is where planning begins.

Once the organizational strategies are defined, then each functional manager should then go to where the action happens in their respective areas, talk to their folks and establish exactly how their function will contribute to each organizational strategy.  In other words, if cost, speed, and productivity are deemed vital to fulfilling the hard business goals and identified as organizational strategies, then each manager should evaluate their own areas and determine exactly their contribution towards their area improving cost, speed, and productivity and the specific tactics to improve each one.  This then results in measurement systems by which improvement can be gauged and specific improvement action plans of who will do what, when and the predicted results.  When done properly, this planning approach integrates and aligns planned improvement activities across the company to target the organizational level strategies which, in turn, are needed to reach the hard business goals.

Doing, Checking, and Adjusting complete the PDCA format.  Simply putting a plan together and putting it on the shelf is waste.  The plan should be reviewed at least monthly thus resulting in ‘Check’.  Are the tactics executed?  Are they having the predicted impact?  If not, what will you do differently?  When you adjust, you create a new plan and the cycle begins again.  PDCA is a behavioral based system requiring the management team to embrace the necessary practices.  At the end of the day, there is no substitute for discipline.  The PDCA cycle lives or dies by the interest level of the management team.

When companies are aligned in their strategic purpose, goals, and strategies and tactics, great synergy happens.  To move any organization in the right direction, it requires the attention and focus of the entire workforce.  Using effective visionary planning is critical to enlisting the hearts and minds of the entire workforce and is at the center of policy deployment.  Leaders must define direction.  Managers must establish roadmaps and ways to effectively govern operations.  Each worker must be enticed to participate and making the company better, faster, and of greater value.  Visionary planning is the cornerstone to each of these and PDCA forms the foundation to effective visionary planning.