Innovative Planning

Several years ago, the chair of an organisation and its CEO came to meet me to inquire into how they were going to effect significant change in the organisation and how they were going to plan strategically for this. They had heard of the change process I had managed in the school of which I was principal. I told them that I did not have a strategic plan in place when I started and over the years had done very little strategic planning.   Instead I had focussed on every single interaction that occurred in the organisation . I had used every interaction to join up the dots between their personal purpose and the purpose of the organisation, to get them to account for the gaps between what they were doing and what I needed them to do, to get them to account for why they were acting in the ways they were acting and to develop their thinking about the organisation, so that I could be assured that in their particular roles they exercised their judgement in alignment with the purposes of the organisation. This is what led to the transformation of the school. All the strategic planning in the world will not effect change unless managers pay attention in this way. Innovative planning is about attention to detail, to the possibilities that every interaction offers and it is about developing the capacities and skills of managers so that they can develop practices amongst the members that will endure.