A strategic plan is only as good as the information upon which it is based. The Baldrige Criteria specify some of the key factors that need to be considered as you develop your plan:

• Potential blind spots
• Your core competencies, strategic challenges, and strategic advantages
• Your organizations strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
• (SWOT analysis)
• Early indications of major shifts in technology, products, customer
• preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment
• Long-term organizational sustainability, including core competencies you need
• Your ability to execute the strategic plan

Considering these factors is not a cursory exercise. Baldrige Award winners have processes in place to identify who will gather information about each and how it will be presented and discussed.

One area that can be hard to nail down is the potential impact of disruptive change. Technology companies are particularly sensitive to this because technology is changing at such a rapid rate. When Ray Ozzie joined Microsoft five years ago as its chief software architect, he laid out his vision for the future and how Microsoft should respond. His vision came to reality with Microsoft Office 365, the “cloud” software you may have seen commercials for. Ozzie recently released a memo outlining his vision for the next five years. In “5 Lessons from Outgoing Microsoft Software Architect Ray Ozzie” (FastCompany, October 25, 2010), E.B. Boyd summarizes the key takeaways from that memo:

1. Take time to paint a vision of the future. Senior leaders need to write, in narrative form, their vision for the future, starting with the big trends in their industry.
2. Put past successes in perspective. It’s easy to keep doing what you’ve always done well, but what you do well may no longer serve a new environment. “Not shifting to a product line better suited to the new landscape…will put you at a disadvantage against competitors who do adapt, not to mention new entrants who have designed themselves with the new needs front of mind,” writes Boyd.
3. Recognize what’s inevitable in your industry. Boyd cites the example of how the news industry fought the Web and digital news when it could have focused that energy on embracing it.
4. “Inevitable” is not the same as “imminent.” If you can recognize what trends are inevitable in your industry, you can use your strategic planning process to prepare for and take advantage of them. “Even changes that are inevitable take time to materialize,” notes Boyd.
5. Real transformation has to come from within. In his memo, Ozzie writes, “The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must emerge from within.”

To read more about strategic planning, click on these articles:

• Challenge Your Assumptions
• Identifying Potential Blind Spots
• Revolutionary Thinking
• Where to Play and How to Win
• Sustainability Forces Wheel
• Be Prepared

There is a movement afoot to “bring together people, institutions, and businesses in a ‘creation space’ to turn this idea into a reality and test it out in the field.” Before you dismiss it, check out the Web site devoted to the concept by clicking here.

A lot has been written lately about serving customers at the bottom of the pyramid. Grameen Bank has been doing this since 1976 when Muhammad Yunus pioneered the idea of microfinancing with the goal of helping to eradicate poverty. Today, the bank has more than 7.5 million customers.

That’s the promise of the bottom of the pyramid: millions to billions of potential customers. When you factor in the opportunity to do well by doing good, this market is appealing to many companies.

Whether or not it appeals to you, you will want to consider the impact it may have on your organization. To figure out a way to make low-cost, low-tech, green houses that homeowners can build themselves out of local materials, innovation must take place. Breakthrough processes must emerge. New ways of thinking must take root. How will they reshape the construction industry? What will they mean to the companies that supply that industry? How will they challenge governments and education?

A lot of companies are busy devising ways to serve the bottom of the pyramid through banking, cell phones, computers, energy, clean water, transportation, food, and other essentials. They are hotbeds of innovation, and the ripples of that innovation will be felt worldwide.

To read more about disruptive technologies, click on these articles:

• Challenge Your Assumptions
• Managing for Innovation
• Revolutionary Thinking
• Be Prepared
• Where to Play and How to Win

According to economists, the recession has ended. Business is looking up for many companies even if they are slow to rebuild their workforces. So what does mean for your future?

One of the critical elements of effective strategic planning is the quality of the information that feeds the process. You can develop the most elegant and comprehensive plan on the planet and deploy it to everybody in your organization but it will fail if the plan is based on faulty or incomplete information. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you collect and analyze information about your opportunities and threats, major shifts in relevant areas, and your long-term sustainability. The point in the process when you collect and analyze this information and discuss it as a planning team is the best time to challenge your assumptions.

One such assumption is that the end of the recession means that the economy will get back on track and business will return to whatever was normal before the bottom fell out. That’s an important assumption to challenge because it’s probably wrong. Sure, there may be some pent-up demand for consumer goods from people who were cautious about their spending during the recession, but that’s a short-term blip. The data show that for all but the top earners in the country, compensation has been flat for decades. People just don’t have much disposable income to spend and their penchant for charging everything is waning, too. Less demand is not the remedy for a weakened economy.

So what does that possibility mean for your organization? Where will your customers come from? Are you in the right markets? What will get them to buy your products or services? Where will your competition come from? Are their disruptive technologies on the horizon that could affect your performance? If demand has permanently changed, what does that mean to the way you operate? What opportunities for innovation does it raise and how can your organization seize them?

To be worthwhile, strategic planning should enable leaders to see the entire battlefield and understand what needs to be done and who needs to do it. That requires collecting all relevant information, analyzing it to identify current status and trends, discussing it to determine what it means to the short- and longer-term plans of the organization, and figuring out the best path for your organization moving forward.

And it means challenging your assumptions.

To read more about strategic planning, click on these articles:

• Sustainability Forces Wheel
• The Most Important Question in Strategy
• Revolutionary Thinking
• Planning for 2035
• Be Prepared
• Identifying Potential Blind Spots

Like a lot of organizations, it used the state award process first, receiving a bronze award from Quality New Jersey in 2001. It first applied for the Baldrige Award in 2006 but did not get a site visit. That came in 2007, and again in 2008, before the site visit in 2009 led to the Award. In the article, AtlantiCare’s president and CEO, David Tilton, said, “You don’t know how much work you have to do, but we knew we were not Baldrige worthy when we had our first site visit. We knew we could be better.” (“Jersey Score,” Brett Krzykowski, Quality Progress, September 2010).

Organizations that are new to the Baldrige Criteria often struggle with identifying their strategic challenges. It’s been my experience that most healthcare organizations have very similar challenges. With that in mind, here are AtlantiCare’s:

1. Engaging physicians in new models of collaboration and partnership.
2. Creating sustainable growth outside of the primary service area.
3. Identifying and prioritizing healthcare service opportunities for investment and recruitment.
4. Developing new business and care models to support and grow primary care.
5. Identifying and improving critical success factors for community health and wellness.
6. Increasing quality of care through clinical communication and transparency.
7. Using technology to improve patient safety and clinical quality.
8. Recruiting, training, and retaining a highly skilled workforce.
9. Succeeding in an environment of decreasing reimbursement and access to capital, and a growing uninsured population.

AtlantiCare calls its performance excellence framework the 5 Bs, which means making it the best in quality, customer service, people and workplace, growth, and financial performance. A table in the article lists the organization’s key goals and action plans for each of the 5 Bs along with the key measures for each, current benchmarks, short- and longer-term goals, and which strategic challenges they address.

Like other Baldrige Award winners, the hard work it did to integrate Baldrige and address its opportunities for improvement produced results including being in the top 10% for CMS measures of congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and pneumonia, and being one of just 19 health systems selected to participate in an accountable care collaborative.

If you want to get a first-hand look at how AtlantiCare did it, consider spending $750 on a Baldrige Sharing Day. You can find out more by clicking here. You can read AtlantiCare’s Baldrige Award-winning application by clicking here (pdf).

To read more about Baldrige and healthcare, click on these articles:

• Catholic Healthcare Systems Excel
• Great, Not Perfect
• Baldrige Saves Lives
• Why Baldrige? Saint Luke’s Makes the Case
• Strategic Challenges for Hospitals

In strategic planning, the quality of the plan depends on the quality of the information collected and analyzed to guide the plan. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you collect and analyze information about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; early indications of major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; long-term organizational sustainability; and your ability to execute your strategic plan.

The goal is to build a sustainable organization that can survive change in whatever form it takes. Andrew Winston has created a tool to help navigate the forces that may affect your organization’s survival. He calls it the Sustainability Forces Wheel.

In “A New Tool for Understanding Sustainability Drivers” (HBR, July 13, 2010), Winston describes the three rings that make up his wheel and his idea to “spin” the wheel to line up different forces on each ring, which could then spur discussion among leaders about what that combination might mean for their organization. For example, he looks at the issues that currently line up at 9:00: “Consumers increasingly want to know what’s in products and where they come from; technology is enabling more data on a product’s origins; and there’s no denying the rising concerns about chemicals and toxics in our bodies and our children’s bodies. If your company operates in the consumer products world, how are you handling this trifecta of concerns?”

From a Baldrige standpoint, your strategic planning process should include a systematic approach to identifying the factors that are likely to impact your short-term and long-range plans. Only then can you confidently develop plans that will help build a sustainable organization.

To read more about strategic planning, click on these articles:

• The Most Important Question in Strategy
• Revolutionary Thinking
• Planning for 2035
• Be Prepared
• Identifying Potential Blind Spots

Having systematic processes in place to answer these questions may help you spot a disruptive change in time to counteract it but none of the questions really explores your processes for developing your own disruptive change. A recent post by Umair Haque on HBR provides an interesting perspective on this subject, using Apple as an example, by explaining “How to Challenge Your Industry Dogma”:

• Challenge products. Offer an alternative that gets people to rethink what such a product can be used for, as Apple has done with the iPad.
• Challenge strategy: Find an area that your competitors are ignoring and become the best at it, as Apple has done with the design of electronic gadgets.
• Challenge distribution. Look for innovative new ways to distribute your products or services, as Apple did with iTunes.
• Challenge business models. Companies protected how their products are used until Apple introduced a new business model: The App Store gives software developers a huge market for their new products, making Apple’s products more valuable as a result.
• Challenge sales and service. At the Apple Store, “the act of exchange became personal, passionate, and interesting.”
• Challenge production. Apple hasn’t figured this one out yet. How do you develop an empowered and engaged workforce to produce high-quality products in the shortest possible time and at the lowest cost? A good place to start is with a Baldrige assessment.

To read more about disruptive thinking, click on these articles:

• Anticipating Disruptive Change
• Be Prepared
• Where to Play and How to Win
• Making Your Organization Adaptable
• Making Innovation Part of Your Culture
• The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise
• Innovation in the U.S.: The Bigger Picture

Where is that energy going to come from? Who will control the sources? How much will it cost? How will it affect your organization? How will it affect consumer needs, governments, healthcare, and education? Since the increase will be steady for the next 25 years, the impact will be felt along the way and not just in 2035. Your strategic planning process should consider that impact.

Of course, any increase in energy usage means an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, which is a key cause of global warming. The EIA predicts such emissions will jump by 43%.

How will global warming affect your organization? How will it affect your customers, employees, and suppliers? Your strategic planning process should consider this, too.

The EIA’s report is based on the assumption that current policies are unchanged. That seems to be a safe bet, at least until we’re faced with an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario. Based on its recent history, the U.S. government will drag its heels until other countries are using more energy than we are and spewing out more pollution that we are and then it will suddenly want to address the issues. That probably won’t take 25 years but you should still make sure your organization is as prepared as possible for energy shortages and global warming.

You can read a synopsis of the EIA report here.

To read more about how to develop an effective strategic plan, click on these articles:

• Be Prepared
• Identifying Potential Blind Spots
• Developing Agility on 3 Fronts
• Making Your Organization Adaptable
• Anticipating Disruptive Change