Promising Postures For Strategic Planning in Teams

Have you ever found strategic planning with your team frustrating or unproductive? Collaborative planning is more effective and enjoyable when participants have the right point-of-view or perspective for the endeavor. Here are some characteristics that comprise the best strategic mental posture.
 
Untethered From the Moment
A strategic posture depends on your ability to untether yourself from the immediate moment. Transport your perspective up and out of the daily doings so that you can look at the big picture objectively. Adopt a point of view that is unencumbered by immediate details or demands and can consider the past present and future. Pick the time and place of your planning to support an appropriate separation from “business as usual”. Make the effort to insulate them and the conversation from the noise of “daily doings.”
 
Future-Focused
A strategic posture is aware of the whole picture but unmistakably leans forward. It is biased to motion and is always extrapolating trajectories or plotting the implications of choices and conditions to identify where they will end up. Your planning discussions will include consideration of the past and present, but make sure they don’t get stuck there. Call the conversation forward and look to the future together.
                 
Relationship Sensitive (System Oriented)
A strategic posture is often demonstrated by a sensitivity to the relationship between things even more than by clarity about the things themselves. Strategy lives in the link between antecedents and consequences. Keep the conversation pointed at how specific conditions or behaviors are instrumental to outcomes and how immediate choices or behaviors may conspire to influence future ones.
 
Brutally Honest
A strategic posture courageously embraces the truth. The best planning environment is a spin-free zone because taboo topics and privileged perspectives can quickly pollute planning with self-marketing. Square your shoulders and determine to see things as they really are. The packaging or marketing of that truth can take place later if necessary. Set and model the expectation for "straight talk" throughout your discussion.

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