Strategic planning – creating the future today.

I’m not sure what b-grade movie I was watching but the phrase “peeling rubber and chucking bits of real estate around” has stuck in my head as a description for someone in a tearing hurry. The start of 2007 felt like that to me. Chilling one minute, the next, feeling like a border-collie on uppers, chasing my colleagues toward deadline after deadline.

Every year around this time, Cape Town and the Boland are hit with a heat wave. The sun fires up the turbo-booster and the Cape Doctor, the trusty South-Easter fails us. The mercury bubbled up to 48° Celsius in Paarl last week. My specs misted over as I climbed out of my car at 6pm on Thursday – last time that happened I was in Dubai in July! Not the kind of weather to get your grey cells racing.

But race them we did... 

Last week found Storm’s Board, Exco and Senior Management team drawn together for a 2 day strategic workshop in Cape Town. We have one every year, about this time, just before budgets are drawn up for the next financial year. Each year, we bemoan how little time we have to cover so much ground. This year we played it differently. In November I started having conversations with senior managers and product managers and harassing them to start drafting strategic and tactical plans. Some made time to step aside from the end of year hustle and bustle and focus on long term issues (Stephen Covey’s Quadrant 2, where capacity is built). Others were caught in Quadrant 1, stamping out fires.

So the 2^nd week in January found the team jump-starting suntanned brains into action. We ran regional “stop/start/continue” staff workshops a week before the main event, inviting the current top performers and regional managers. My mailbox became a revolving door for draft copies of plans and summary slides from each department. MSN conversations were often in holding patterns while I juggled the phone from ear to ear.

Late Thursday night I collated & printed off the final copy of the info pack and left it with various PA’s to have copied, bound and hand delivered before the weekend so everyone could read over each other’s plans *before* the first workshop session. I left the CEO’s to threaten and cajole the team to work through an inch of paper and charged off to join the CSI Team Leaders at their Strat Planning workshop.

Day 1, 6pm found us running way over schedule with thorny issues popping up like weeds and seemingly little clarity and cohesion. Day 2, despite a late start and crises drawing team members away from the room, things started to come together and by the end of the day, we had a clearer view of Storm in 2011, specific, realistic goals for 2007/2008 set down and priorities of each division agreed. Now for budgets to be drawn up and the ongoing conversation that is called “strategy” to roll forward.

Part of the challenge now is to ensure that the strategy becomes “real” and “alive” for each and every Storm employee – more conversations. An exhausting month past. An exciting year ahead.

That’s me. In need of a decent night’s sleep.

btw. I can recommend Stephen Wetmore from RAINN (Resources for African Innovations), based in Stellenbosch, to assist you in shaping and managing the process of developing company strategy. I can also recommend Belmont Square Conference Centre in Rondebosch, Cape Town for a good value-for-money facility for a workshop. I can’t recommend Zucca on a hot summer’s night, but then I should have asked if they had aircon before I booked – the food was pretty good.