Strategic Planning for Focused Sustainability Improvement

• Author: William R. Blackburn
• Pages: 189-223

Chapter 6

Strategic Planning for Focused Sustainability

Improvement

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”1

—Sun Tzu

Purpose and Benefits of Strategic Planning by Functional Groups

Why do companies prepare strategic plans? The simple answer is that a

failure to plan is planning to fail. Without a strategic plan, business man-

agers allocate resources to whatever priorities they think appropriate. For

a large company, this means a thousand different managers directing

their teams in a thousand different directions. Strategic planning enables

a business to do what management consultant Stephen Covey recom-

mends: “Put first things first.” As Covey observes in his national

bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “I am personally per-

suaded that the essence of the best thinking in the area of time manage-

ment can be captured in a single phrase: Organize and execute around

priorities.”2Strategic planning enables an organization to do just that. It

brings an organizational cohesion and focus of resources to high-priority

objectives, improving the chances of accomplishing them with the least

time, effort, and money. As noted in Figure 6.1, such planning has other

merits as well.

Business people often concede that strategic planning at the top levels

of a company makes good sense. Yet many think it a waste of time for

functions like human resources, purchasing, EHS, or business practices.

For some reason, they believe this tool for improving organizational ef-

fectiveness and efficiency would be of little benefit within smaller, more

focused parts of the company. They are mistaken. In a 2001-2003 study,

Proudfoot Consulting, a U.K.-based firm specializing in operational im-

provement, analyzed 1,440 projects in Australia, France, Germany,

South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States and

spent 10,000 hours observing how people worked. They found that an

average of 87 working days per person were lost each year through ineffi-

189

ciency, with the main cause—present in over 40% of the cases—being

poor management planning or inadequate monitoring of how plans were

executed.3Good planning pays, even within departments, functions, or

other subunits of an organization.

Many corporate functional groups avoid strategic planning because

they don’t know how to do it and they see it as some high-level, arcane

science. Or they may fail to appreciate its benefits and see no reason to do

it. Most are simply overwhelmed with work. As the saying goes, it’s hard

to think about draining the swamp when you are up to your (ears) in alli-

gators. Department leaders may find it too awkward to ask their internal

customers to lower expectations about department performance for a pe-

riod so resources can be diverted to drain the swamp. Occasionally lead-

ers see merit in planning but try to avoid the time commitment by dele-

gating most of the plan preparation to a team of subordinates. That can be

a problem. While some supportive tasks can be done by others, and teams

can be used to generate ideas, the job of envisioning and debating final

strategies and goals cannot be handed over. Decisionmaking on how re-

sources will be applied to priorities is the primary role of management,

and thus it requires their personal involvement. The answer for leaders is

to just do it: do the planning as efficiently as possible. Ask your custom-

ers to be understanding of the time you are taking to improve your opera-

190 THE SUSTAINABILITY HANDBOOK

Figure 6.1

The Purposes and Benefits of Good Strategic Planning

1. Raises awareness about threats and opportunities; helps the organization

confront the brutal reality

2. Aligns the organization around a common direction and set of priorities;

improves teamwork and job satisfaction

3. Eliminates low-value work

4. Improves organizational efficiency and productivity

5. Provides a basis for allocating resources

6. Defines a baseline and direction for measuring progress

7. Helps instill confidence in the leadership ability of top managers

8. Enables subordinates to understand the importance of their role in achieving

the organization’s major objectives

9. Brings new ideas and creativity to the surface for the benefit of the

organization

10. Establishes accountability for performance

tions. It may help to solicit input from them for use in the planning. At

least it will show you are trying to improve for their benefit, too.

General Process for Sustainability Planning

Indeed, if a company is committed to exploring the risks and opportuni-

ties associated with sustainability,then strategic planning is a critical tool

for bringing focus to that effort. That is why it is included as Section 4 of

the Model Sustainability Operating System Standards (Figure 5.3) and is

featured prominently in the Model Sustainability Process Schedule (Fig-

ure 5.7). This planning may be done in different ways. The best ways in-

volve a process that is both bottom-up—with various functional special-

ties providing recommended objectives and goals in their areas—as well

as top-down—with the CEO and executive team laying out the broad di-

rection for the business and incorporating the specialists’ recommenda-

tions as appropriate.

Using our model approach, for example, which is diagrammed in Fig-

ure 6.3, the sustainability leader and core team would kick off the plan-

ning with some guidance to each member of the deployment team (DT).

DT members would then identify with their own respective groups (DT

member groups) the issues or topics under the company’s sustainability

policy that are within the responsibility of their function and that mem-

bers of their function believe are most important to the organization. (See

the lists of topics in Figures 2.3 to 2.5. See also Appendix 6 for a sampling

of issues that might arise for the functional groups listed in Figure 6.2.)

Each DT member group would also develop a list of prioritized risks and

a set of recommended sustainability objectives and goals within their

scope of responsibility. Once each group completes its prioritization, the

core team—or committee drawn from it—would examine the results and

collectively identify those sustainability objectives and goals of highest

priority across the company and recommend them to the executive plan-

ning team for inclusion in the companywide strategic plan. After the

companywide strategic plan is finalized, the core team would help guide

the DT member groups in preparing their own strategic and tactical plans

to implement the agreed-upon strategies. DT member groups would also

work with functions and business units that may not have been involved

in the process earlier to assure sustainability issues of special importance

to those functions and units are properly addressed in their plans.

STRATEGIC PLANNING 191