Strategic planning annotated Ohio Economic Development Assoc March 2014

Hi.
This is an annotated version of a presentation I gave to OEDA’s Basic Economic
Development Course. I taught the module on Strategic Planning.
Since my slides tend to have few words, they work well for a talk but not so well as a stand
alone presentation. As a result, I have taken to doing these annotated versions that give a
little more explanation of what I said – or what I would have said if I had been more clever
that day…
OK? Here we go.
1

The point of this pile was to introduce my perspective – I grew up in the Rust belt, spent my
early career in education, and then morphed into an urban planner and an economic
developer. I still carry both the planning and the economic development certifications,
which makes me an odd bird.
2

I asked the class how many people were planning to take the CEcD exam or were thinking
about it. A lot raised their hands. I emphasized that the test is NOT based on any
presentation you hear or cute slides you see… the exam comes 100% out of the IEDC book,
and there is absolutely nothing in the way the test and the grading is structured to allow
you to pass by winging it or relying on your skills in bs’ing your way around stuff you don’t
know. You might have gotten away with that in Introduction to Poetry (I know I did), but
the way the grading process is structured for the IEDC exam, it’s literally not possible. So,
as the instructor, I feel like there’s a critical responsibility to teach what the book says.
At the same time, though, what the book says… in some places I think it’s kind of dumb, or
outdated, or too simplistic. And since you have to do this work in real life, it would be a
disservice to just parrot what the book says. So I have to strike a balance here – making
sure that the participants have every chance to learn what they need for the test, but also
providing what I can to help them do their real life jobs.
3

This is a quote from the Strategic Planning chapter of the IEDC Intro to Economic
Development book. I asked the students to note the emphasis in this quote (and in the
chapter) on being Realistic.
4

Also from the book, setting “achievable” goals was also part of being “realistic.”
5

Again, text prettymuch straight from the book (test-taking lesson #1: When the IEDC
books give you a list of bullet points, learn the list).
6

Again, from the list of strategic plan purposes in the book. I pictured it as being like
pouring a slimy shapeless mess into a mold and ending up with something pretty, but I’m
not sure that’s what the author intended.
7

Again, on the list from the book. We emphasized this one, and I’ll give my own take on why
the defining of the organization’s purpose is so important from a self-preservation
platform, if nothing else, shortly.
8

The book. Again, “Realistic”
9

And the last point in the list from the book.
10

OK, that’s what the book says. Why do _you_ think you need a strategic plan?
11

This isn’t in the book – this is me for the next few slides. I work with big and small local
governments and nonprofits all over the country, and there’s one thing that’s clear: almost
no one doing any kind of economic development-related work has enough money, people,
or time. Everyone I know in this field, if they are truly trying to do their job, is
overextended.
12

At the same time as our resources shrink, more and more people and organizations and
governments and everything else have decided that your economic development work is
part of their bailiwick. Everyone seems to be watching what you do, how you land it, what
you spend money on… and, of course, everyone is an expert at your job. You might have
one official boss, or you report to a Board of Directors or a city council or some such body.
All of them, and dozens beside, end up squarely on your back.
13

Those two factors make decision – making, which is almost always tough, even tougher.
With a hundred turtles shouting different instructions, and with the resources you have to
work with generally doing something other than growing, it’s easy to become paralyzed, or
chase off in a hundred different directions and find it impossible to demonstrate a
meaningful impact.
14

I dissed the book before, but I liked this quote. I think the page number is actually 29. But
I’d put this in your head – both for the test and for your work.
15

My Cliff Notes version of that last quote. We could all use a bouncer sometimes.
A good strategic plan keeps you from being pulled in a dozen different directions, and it
helps you figure out how to get the best use of your resources. And it gives you a basis
when you need to say no – “We developed a plan (in partnership with our
agencies/citizens/business leaders), and in that we identified the community’s greatest
needs and how we can best use our resources. If we take on your (great/crazy) idea, we
need to understand how it would reinforce our larger goals, where the resources would
come from, and what from our existing strategic plan would need to give way. It’s all about
setting priorities and working intelligently on behalf of the community.”
16

Whether you’re doing a strategic plan, a comprehensive plan, a work plan, a development
plan, whatever, the basic three parts are the same.
17

When you plan for your retirement (if you’re lucky enough to think that you will be able to
retire), you start by identifying your existing resources and how those may be projected to
grow. Then you identify what you’re likely to need to be able to retire the way you want to.
If you want to retire to a sailboat in Aruba, that’s going to play a big role in determining
what you’ll need (and it’ll be different than if you had planned on a trailer park in central
Florida). Then you figure out what you need to do to get from here to there. And you set
priorities. And sometimes you decide that the trailer park doesn’t look so bad after all, and
you adjust the plan. Plans set direction and frame decision-making, but plans become
historical trivia when they get set in stone.
18

This isn’t in the book. From my perspective, your strategic plan can be focused on anything
from your region to your neighborhood to your organization. At the same time, it might
make sense to do a strategic plan to address all of the issues that will impact your area, or
you might find that you need to focus specifically on one type of issue, like growing your
entrepreneurship. That second approach can be particularly important if you have an issue
that you need to organize a range of organizations around. But the risk of focusing on a
specific issue is that you might all march off in that direction, only to find down the road
that another issue should have gotten your attention. Ideally, a more comprehensive
approach, at least initially, is likely to be more beneficial to the community and to you.
19

BUT… We all know that you don’t get to create your lovely new strategic plan in a vacuum.
Even if you are planning for a brand new organization, you have to account for existing
programs, both local and state or national, that have their own rules and regs and histories.
20

You also have to deal with existing organizations – your own and others that relate to what
you do (and increasingly, just about everything seems to relate to what you do). The fun
thing about organizations is that they tend to have this thing called Institutional Memory…
and that often sets up expectations about “what we/you/they are supposed to do” that
can be hard to overturn without some significant leadership. Sometimes in that strategic
planning process, it becomes necessary to pick your battles, and that’s OK. See the empty
pockets slide above.
21

Since organizations are made up of people, and since individual people sometimes equal
their organization, de facto, you often have to deal with their baggage, too.
22

And your businesses….man, some of them have plenty of history and baggage.
23

And, as much as I hate to say it, you yourself are part of what you have to deal with in your
plan. You might have your own history and baggage – you are a human and part of an
institution after all – but perhaps you think you are the objective one. Maybe you are new
to the community and don’t have the same set of baggage as everyone else, maybe you
are just highly professional and rational. Good for you.
Here’s the risk, and it comes from the footnote of an economics text that my professor in a
grad school planning class related to us (with something as close to glee as an economics
professor can muster):
Scratch a planner, find a dictator underneath.
When you are leading the creation of a plan, you are closer to it than anyone else. You
probably care more about the issues, you digest more of the information, you are more
committed to the outcomes than anyone else. That’s as true for strategic plan developers
as for the comp planning guys drawing circles on maps down the hall from you.
There’s two basic problems: first, dictators are often wrong. Second, dictators often end up
dead. Neither is the outcome you are looking for. So you have to be very conscious, very
careful, to be aware of the risks of you or others morphing into dictators.
24

So if the key elements are
Where are we (knowing our constraints)?
Where do we want to go (together, not me as a dictator)?
What do we have to do to get there?
Then these are the key questions that we build a strategic plan around.
25

And this is what the plan has to try to do, ultimately. It’s not a perfect process – you’re not
going to have a lot of straight edges on your pegs, and a lot of the pieces are going to fit
less than ideally. Urban planners sometimes hang themselves up because they can’t
overcome their urge to want to make everything fit perfectly. The elements of your
strategic plan are not going to all fit perfectly, and that has to be OK, or you will give up
before you get started.
26

We need to plan, but we need to recognize that our plans can’t be perfect. In the words of
the old pop song, you have to hold on loosely without letting go. That’s why plans have to
be regularly examined and changed.
27

As long as we are being philosophical, let’s go back to that “Be Realistic!” message that we
kept hitting from the book in the first group of slides. Here, again, what the book says.
When you do the part of the test about strategic planning, remember how important being
realistic was.
28

In your real life, though, keep in mind that it’s not so simple. In many of your communities,
a critical part of your mandate is to facilitate your local economy’s transition from an old
structure that hasn’t been working well to something else. If you put too much emphasis
on “Being Realistic,” you will be basically planning for a continuation of the past into the
future. If everything is hunky dory and you have no problems or challenges, that’s fine –
plan to hold the course. But if your responsibility is to facilitate change, to make
improvement, fear of a reasonable stretching will prevent you from making that change.
My clients get sick of hearing me say this: if it were easy, you would have done it already.
29

This is Daniel Burnham. He was a big-deal architect in the late 19th century. He was
responsible for creating a master plan of the City of Chicago, and urban planners all know
his famous line (You have to read this out loud to yourself in a deep and self-important
voice):
Make no little plans, for they have no power to stir men’s souls.
I fight with urban planners over this a lot. It goes back to that scratch a planner issue…
there’s a tendency in that field sometimes to shoot too big, to over look the complexities
of a situation in favor of the Grand Statement, and then create messes like urban renewal
that we get to live with for generations.
For economic developers, I think the problem is the opposite. Economic development
planning may tend to lean too heavily on the strategic – emphasizing too much the need to
“Be Realistic!” Many organizations and communities that I have dealt with, particularly in
the struggling areas of the Midwest, might benefit from making their little plans a little less
little.
Here ends our brief sojourn into philosophy. We now return you to more practical stuff.
30

Regardless of how much you are stretching or not stretching, regardless of whether it’s a
neighborhood plan or a regional initiative, you need help. You need participants – and lots
of them. This is not closed-door work, like striking a real estate deal. If you do your
strategic planning among your own staff, or with a small circle of your best buds, you’re
wasting your time. You might end up with a nice-looking plan, but it won’t have your back
because it won’t carry any weight with anyone except for you all who worked on it.
Ideally, your champions will come from the ranks of your participants – those champions
will believe in and support your plan because they helped make it. But they can also come
from outside the process if they trust the people that you have involved and can
understand how you came to your conclusions. Transparency in any kind of planning –
allowing someone who wasn’t part of the process to see through the eyes of the
participants as much as possible, from the beginning to the end – more and more makes
the difference between plans that guide and facilitate forward momentum, and those that
end up as trivia.
31

The book talks in several places about the importance of being realistic and public
participation in economic development strategic planning, but when it lays out a
recommended process…
Ugh. If you are going to take the test, learn this process. If there’s a question on the test
about the process for strategic planning, this will be where the right answer comes from.
But don’t do it this way.
And if you are not taking the test….make a paper airplane. Feed that half page to your
parakeet. Whatever.
32

There’s a practical problem and a bigger problem with the approach that’s laid out. The
practical problem is the length of time – and especially the length of time when you’re
doing analysis. A yearlong strategic planning process will probably mean that the plan
needs to be revised before it’s done. And you will certainly lose the interest and
meaningful involvement of those participants you need – people just don’t expect
processes like this to go on that long anymore.
My theory is that this time frame was written down pre-internet, when doing the existing
conditions research required sending a phalanx of junior staffers. Given that you can get
75% of the data you need to do a basic comprehensive strategic plan for a community with
a Google search and a handful of web sites, that’s irrelevant now (and don’t let a
consultant tell you that they need that kind of time/money to do it for you – they use the
same stuff). If you’re doing something more targeted, like a neighborhood or a cutting-edge
industry issue, you might need more research time. In that case, make sure you
scope the research you need – and don’t need – with an expert.
33

The bigger problem with the book’s process outline is the fact that it only include
participants/stakeholders at the beginning and the end. As we discussed before, that
won’t work… and is likely to blow up in your face.
34

This is the list of steps in the strategic planning process as identified by the book…with the
exception of the last bullet point, which is implied but not stated on this list.
35

Any kind of pre-planning process can be structured around the basic journalism
questions…and if you don’t like steak, you can substitute tofu. Fine with me.
36

First, you need to define the fundamental objectives of the strategic planning process. This
is OK for you and your leadership to do…it sets out the framework, the overarching
objectives, and it allows your participants to go into it with some idea of what they are
signing up for. In particular, if you are going for a more paradigm-changing purpose – if you
are trying to fundamentally reposition the local economy or trying to foster some kind of
Big Change – you need to make certain that you make that clear going in. Otherwise you
can end up with the wrong participants.
37

In the same way, you need to be clear about what’s included and what’s not proposed to
be included. Participants need a map of the terrain. In general, we tend to draw that map
too narrowly – we say we will only look at our jurisdiction, when most of our residents
commute to work somewhere else, or we decide to focus on only two neighborhoods and
then get surprised when another demands to be included. We have to make sure that our
understanding of geographic focus allows for the fact that people live and work at a larger
scale than we can probably take on in this process.
38

This goes back to participation again. You will never be able to include everyone, so the
next best thing is to make the involvement in different roles as transparent as possible.
39

For economic developers, the public engagement piece of this process probably sits the
most uncomfortably. Given that, I present to you Della’s Rules of Public Engagement.
First, the excluded person is more likely to have bones with your results than anyone who
was involved, even if they didn’t agree with everything. The person who is most likely to
challenge you, to differ from your opinion, that’s the first person you should recruit to the
committee. You want to understand their perspective from the beginning, and you want to
give them the ability to be part of crafting the solution. It’s much harder to oppose
something that you helped make.
Second, telling people stuff, and then letting them tell you stuff that you may or may not be
listening to, is not public engagement. It may be grandstanding, it may be theater, it may
be a outlet for anger, it may be a lot of things, but it’s not public engagement. Don’t let the
fact that this is what you see at council and planning commission hearings fool you. If you
want something constructive, something useful to the strategic planning process,
something that means something, you have to structure what they are doing so that they
are helping to build what you need help building. They are taking time away from their
own busy lives to take part in what you are doing, so honor that. Don’t give them
busywork or expect them to wait around. Give them an opportunity to contribute
something valuable.
Finally, if people don’t initially seem to support what you think they should, don’t talk over
them. Listen. Ask questions. Dig deeper. Understand. That’s the only way that you’re
40

going to get their support. And when you add what they know to what you know, you might
end up with something a whole lot more valuable.
40

I touched on that first point a while back. If for no other reason than strict self-preservation
pragmatism, we have got to ditch the assumption in economic development
(or any government or nonprofit work) that we can hide any part of what we are doing
from the public. In an internet, open data, social media, grassroots-self-organizing world,
anyone can find out almost anything if they are persistent and know where to look. And
more and more people are catching on to that… and perhaps more importantly, almost
anyone now can become their own news outlet and organize their own supporters to
address the issues they care about. You might not think anyone outside of your inner circle
cares what your organization does, but remember that economic development has
become everyone’s favorite issue… and that means more and more turtles are probably
coming toward your back.
Which leads to the second and third point. Just like you got in bigger trouble with your
mom for lying about breaking the vase than about the actual damage, the same holds for
that public. And if you aren’t transparent and truthful, you will shatter than fragile
relationship, which probably has had very little care and nurturing to begin with. Since you
don’t have enough time and people and money to do everything yourself, you need strong
relationships – with everybody, including the general public that at some point will be
asked to support something that you need.
41

I made the point about the importance of keeping the initiative as compact as possible
before. That’s especially important if you are dealing with entrepreneurs or tech people. A
month of gestation on a piece of software is practically an eternity in that world.
On meetings: we tend to schedule whatever in-person meetings we need for our strategic
plan when it’s convenient for us. That probably means during the work day – we all have
other stuff to do after hours, and no one wants another evening meeting. But you may
need to find a different time frame to get the participation you need. Again, be
transparent – you’ll never make everyone happy, but they will appreciate it if you try. And
you might find that a 7 AM breakfast gets you more of the participation you need than a 1
PM boardroom meeting.
42

Any kind of planning process needs to be, well, planned. How will people learn and digest
the existing conditions and trends information? How will the group working on the plan
come to decisions and set priorities? If you don’t figure this out in advance, you’re likely to
end up with a mess.
I use the phrase “lesson plan” anymore to differentiate between planning the process and
the Plan. Make sure you have figured out for this meeting not only what you are going to
do, but the methods and steps. And set time frames. If you are using a facilitator, make
sure that person has done this and is not just flying by the seat of their pants. Some
“facilitators” think that they can do that, and it might work fine for one relatively simple
discussion with a small group of insiders, like setting a work plan for a small department.
But chances are what you are doing has a lot more moving parts than that.
Having said that, though, what you’re doing is more like a dance than a lecture. The others
participating on any given day may have different needs, they may raise different issues,
they might need more time to do something than your lesson plan anticipated. Good
teachers expect that their lesson plan for a day will be a guide, and they have contingencies
in mind if things don’t go as envisioned. You have to be ready to do that, too.
43

In some communities, people seem to understand the importance of a plan for setting
direction and underpinning decisions and all of that stuff we talked about early on in this
presentation. In other places, particularly those that have a sense of being in crisis for
some reason or another, you may encounter pushback to the idea of doing a plan. You
might need to articulate, or prep someone to articulate, the purpose of the plan and the
value to the community. In most places, you probably should at least have these talking
points or media materials worked out before your start the plan. Again, it’s much safer to
get this all out in front than to wait until someone starts to complain.
44

The lists that came out of these groups included some unusual suspects, like the local K-12
school district and the historical society. There is no right answer – rather, the right answer
depends on the specifics of your community. But remember Della’s Rule: when in doubt,
include. If they are truly irrelevant to your objectives, they will probably decline or drop
out. If they don’t, then they are relevant – whether you would have defined them as such
or not.
45

People had clearly thought a lot about this – and the range of issues ran the gamut from
workforce development to entrepreneurship to simply getting all the players on the same
page.
46

Again, good arguments. And lots of them.
47

In this training, this part got a little weird. Given the structure of the IEDC book, I assumed
that the class would have had a session on data and analysis before I got to them. It turned
out that I was their first instructor. Whups.
OK, I thought…Chances are most of these guys have been exposed to economic analysis
and economic information data sources before. Maybe they were all falling asleep by this
point, but based on the raised hands… nope.
Double whups.
I leveled with the class about my assumptions and the fact that I wasn’t prepared to teach
“how to research your local economy” on the fly in the time I had left. I told them that
when I did this annotation, I would provide them with some resources. So the next slide is
inserted – it was not part of the presentation – to at least point folks in the right direction.
48

The first chapter in the IEDC Introduction to Economic Development book has an overview
of information and analysis. Again, if you are planning to take the CEcD test, study that
chapter closely.
If you really want to get into a full-bore analysis of your local economy, the best publication
for non-data geeks that I have found is http://www.epa.gov/greenkit/pdfs/howto.pdf. This
is based on work that the University of Wisconsin-Extension program developed to help
small communities do economic analysis back in the 80s and 90s, and it’s still the best on
the methods. I think it says a lot that there hasn’t been a good, accessible update that I
know of – probably because most communities don’t bother to do this anymore.
Chances are that someone has done an economic analysis relevant to you – if not for your
town specifically, then for the county or region you’re in, which may well be a more
accurate representation of your economic structure anyways, since you’re not an island.
Look around for a regional or county economic development agency, a regional chamber of
commerce, a university or college economics or business program. Chances are someone
has done something that can help you understand or verify your understanding of what’s
going on in your community.
For much of the basic information you need to get at the issues you have hopefully
identified already as What you need to address (see the What slide, previously),
www.census.gov is probably on of the best places to start. The Census has a bad habit of
changing the site’s interface every few months, but there is a function called Quickfacts –
49

right not it’s on the left hand side of the page. Select your state on that page, and it will give
you a variety of census data for the state as a whole. It will then allow you to select either a
county or a city, and then it will give you the data for your place and Ohio as a whole. A
simple comparison of your demographics to Ohio or the US will help you get started with
information like average age, education level, etc. This chart will give you some business
information as well. There is an economic census done every five years – the last was done
in 2012 but has not been released yet, so the data you see today may be quite out of date.
You will have to assess whether you think it’s still relevant. You can get a lot more
information from the Economic Census via the Data tab at the top of the screen. For small
communities or industries that have a small number of businesses in them, data sometimes
gets suppressed as a way to protect the business’s private information.
I also wouldn’t hesitate to grab data from sources like www.city-data.com,
www.zoomprospector.com and www.SizeUp.com. Some of this information will be the same
as the census, but they all do a good job pulling in other sources. City-data, for example, will
also give you the number of police officers, building permits, unemployment trends and a
host of others that might be valuable. Zoomprospector provides a somewhat different and
more economics-focused range of data and more flexibility in how you search, and SizeUp is
great for investigating current conditions of specific business types in your community, if you
know that you are specifically interested in particular types of establishments.
Go play with these and see what you can learn from them.
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So, they hadn’t learned anything about information yesterday, unless they had their own
amazing experiences before coming to the Basic class. But as a little bit of time in the sites
on the last slide indicates, most people who are doing a comprehensive type of strategic
plan find that they can get swamped with data pretty quickly. A good strategy is to develop
a list of questions that you need to answer before launching into the research, and try to
focus on finding answers to your questions (and avoid chasing down too many temptingly
interesting looking rabbit holes). And bookmark everything you use, because you’ll
probably need to go back and follow up on something.
If you’re trying to plan for an area smaller than the city, or you’re dealing with emerging
business types or something that isn’t captured by older data sets, you may need to do
some targeted original research. In that case, get help from a university, an extension
office, the regional economic development agency, or a consultant.
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Along with existing conditions data, you will probably find or develop some sense of trends
– growth in various industries, changes in population, planned transportation projects, etc.
Most of the time, trends get presented to us as thought the future is always a straight line
extension of past trends. Don’t buy that. Of any trend given to you, ask: what assumptions
is this trend based on? What happens to the projection if those assumptions change?
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We live in an uncertain world, and we need to stop thinking about the future as something
that we can know with confidence as a straight line extension of the past. We need to
make sure our planning process takes into account a range of multiple possible futures, and
that we deal in ranges of future numbers instead of some magic Number.
An easy way to do this is a simple statistical method called a Sensitivity Analysis. When you
do a sensitivity analysis, you vary those assumptions – like a population growth rate or the
number of people employed in an industry – and you see what that does to the
projections. If Factor A comes in a lot higher or lower than the projection assumed, does
that change the projection a lot or a little? When you find a factor that changes the
outcome a lot, pay attention to that one. It will have a big impact on your community’s
future.
I should also add that not all useful information is numbers. Far from it. A few key
interviews with community leaders or focus groups with business members may give you
more and better information about the issues and opportunities facing the community
than a hundred web sites. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just ask questions. My
only caveat: make sure you have documentation of what you are told. If someone down
the road disagrees, you want to be able to demonstrate where you got that from.
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OK, now this starts to sound more like planning something.
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People who have been through Six Sigma or some kind of professional strategic planning
will have particular definitions of these terms, and a strategic planning process can get
hung up, either at the beginning or down the road, because people don’t come to it with
the same definitions of these terms.
So don’t let that happen. Establish a shared, strategic-plan-specific set of definitions. You
might say that a goal is a primary change that the plan should create, objectives are major
ways to achieve that primary change, and strategies are programs or initiatives that allow
us to act on these objectives. Or use some other set of definitions. There’s a lot of good
strategic plans that don’t use all three terms.
Use whatever makes sense for your organization and your plan’s purpose. And don’t get
hung up on this. Define it, agree to it, and move on.
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Everyone knows basically what goals and objectives-type statements look like. They’re lists
of Big Issues, generally written in relatively broad, general language. They look really easy.
But they can be incredibly hard to develop – especially when you are not just doing it in
your own head.
Given that, this slide lists three primary considerations that will help set a good
groundwork for this process, and the next slide identifies some tactics for getting a group
through this.
First, everyone needs to be clear on how something makes the list. Some groups are fine
with making decisions by consensus (everyone can accept a specific outcome, even if it’s
not what they themselves wanted). Others need to vote on everything. Get clear on
what’s acceptable to this group of people up front.
Second, all that analysis you did in the last phase… that’s the starting point for your Goals
and etc. What were the most important/ urgent/exciting/nerve-wracking issues that
people saw in that information? At the beginning of the goal-setting process, make sure
everyone has spent some time digesting this information. If you start this process with a
group discussion about what people learned from the information and analysis, it will be
much easier to identify the top level of goals, because they will probably have a lot to do
with addressing those key issues.
And again, don’t do this in a closed room with a few of your best buds. If the full range of
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people you need don’t have the ability to buy in and have shared ownership at this
fundamental level, the prettiest plan in the world won’t have the backing to carry it through
the rough debates over money and time.
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So, what if your group doesn’t magically start writing goals and objectives? Here’s an way
to get them going by giving something to work from other than a blank sheet of paper:
1. Go grab a few other communities’ strategic plans off the internet. Find the goals and
objectives sections.
2. Copy out the text of those sections. Separate out the goals from the objectives.
3. Find/Replace the name of the town to yours.
4. Blow all the text up to a big font, and print out a few sets of copies.
5. Divide your strategic plan committee members into a few groups of three to five
people.
6. Give them a set of the printed out Goals pages, a piece of poster board, some markers
and tape.
7. Ask them to create their group’s draft goals. They can use the provided goals, change
them with the markers, or write their own. Then cut them out and paste them on the
board in the order that they think the phrases should go.
8. Compare the different group’s goals, and consolidate the ones that are the same or
very similar. You can have a whole group discussion on the goals that only showed up
on one or a few of the boards if you want to, and add those if the group agrees on it in
the manner that you worked out at the beginning.
9. Divide the copied-out objectives among the new goals, and do the same process again.
Once you get a draft Goals/objectives in place, you will need to wordsmith. As a group. A
lot. It will take a little time. Take it point by point and decide as a group how to edit it.
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One trick that can help is to take one goal-type statement and phrase it several different
ways – “We will….” “The City will…” “Our businesses will find that…” A quick survey to
decide which phrasing style the group wants can help move the word-smithing along a little
faster than if that continues to be part of the debate.
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This would have been a really cool activity… except that we were running out of time. So
we didn’t.
Try it out at your next bat mitzvah or something… I’m sure you’ll have a barrel of laughs.
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Remember, this is from the book again. I was very, very glad the book explicitly says to
Prioritize.
Why? Because we often don’t. We often don’t because we don’t want to.
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Why don’t we want to? Because no one wants to pick favorites. Or be accused of not
picking someone else’s favorites. So sometimes we skip that part. Up front, it’s easier that
way.
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But if we don’t set priorities, we haven’t solved our not-enough-time-money-and-people-to-
do-everything problem. If anything, we have probably just put more flour in our already
overloaded sack. So we have to bite the bullet and set priorities… or not doing so will bite
us later.
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Again, don’t do this alone. You are going to need to be able to show that the priorities are
broadly shared if you expect anyone else to support them… or stick their necks out for
them.
The measuring: Your key issues and goals and objectives should give you some basis for
prioritizing potential projects. For example, if one of your goals was to increase the
number of people with technical training certifications, a project that makes that training
available to high school students would have a higher priority under that goal than one that
recruits manufacturers. And if you have two possible programs that increase the number
of people with that training, the one that can accommodate more people may be the
higher priority… if the quality of the training is the same. Or maybe not. That’s why you
need to build in multiple measures.
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For the priority – setting process, it sometimes makes sense to go back to the goals and
define what success under that goal looks like . Setting a numerical benchmark – number
of jobs added, number of new downtown businesses, number of people who earn that
certification – can make it easier to gauge whether a potential project advances that goal
or not.
Again, though, we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that everything in
the complex places we call communities can be quantified. If you have a goal that cannot
be honestly quantified, that’s ok – assess how a proposed project might advance that goal,
and prioritize accordingly.
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To set priorities with a group, you have to ask them to prioritize. There’s a lot of ways to do
this. The point is to make/facilitate them to make a choice. Any of these methods, or many
others, will work. Except the arm wrestling part. That probably won’t work and might end
up with an ambulance run.
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Nuff said. By this point people are usually ready to start saying how they’re gonna do it.
65

As you identify your actions, though, tie them back very explicitly to your goals and
objectives and priorities. If the plan has your back, the goals and objectives and priorities
are its skeleton. Your actions are like muscles – if they aren’t connected to the skeleton,
they can’t do anything. For your own sake, make those ties very clear – in the document
and literally any time you or one of your supporters or colleagues talks publically about an
action or initiative. I mean it.
That said, as you craft your plan of action, make sure you have accountability – you know
who is going to lead doing what and when – but don’t pin yourself down so tightly that you
can’t move if things change. For example, setting time benchmarks for completion of an
action is often important, but if you set it for March 15, 2014, you might run some risk that
delivering it on March 20, 2014 gets construed as a failure. You probably need a deadline,
but “March 2014” might be a better tactic.
A matrix is a table that serves as a cheat sheet to the plan. Typically, the matrix is a
spreadsheet that lists all of the plan’s actions in the first column and lays out a summary of
how it’s planned to get done across the rows. The other columns should be set up to fit
the plan, but they might include:
• What goal/objective that action supports
• Its level of priority
• What person, role or organization is going to lead that effort
• Who else is going to help out with it,
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• When it should start/end
• What we expect that it will cost,
• Where the money will come from
And anything else you feel you need to know to get it done.
A matrix like this also helps you when it comes to monitoring, but more on that in a minute.
Wait… don’t spend a lot on printing copies of the strategic plan? Why?
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Because your strategic plan will have a lot shorter shelf life than the paper you print it on.
It’s going to be out of date before you know it. You don’t want to be stuck with the plaid
polyester pants after they’ve outlived their usefulness (and God knows those things were
indestructible…)
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Back to the list. A lot of strategic planning efforts stop at implementing. That’s not a good
idea.
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But why not? Making plans and doing stuff, that’s the fun part. Monitoring? That
sounds…..
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Why don’t we do a good job at monitoring? Well we often say it’s because we’re just too
busy!! We’re doing all that stuff in the plan! Look how much stuff we’re doing!!
That’s true. But you know as well as I that we make time for the stuff that’s the most
important in our lives. Supposedly this monitoring is important.
So why don’t we?
Because a lot of times, we don’t really want to know whether we’re doing well or not. Very
few people are grown-up enough to ask for a report card… or accept a C+ dispassionately
and respond with a nice, rational “Gee. I shall use this experience as a means of helping
me understand how to execute my objectives to a higher level of excellence.” Or, “given
the highly complex and dynamic nature of the situation in which I have found myself, an
expectation of perfection would not be reasonable, and this evaluation is a reasonable
reflection of my performance within this difficult context.”
If we think we’re going to get a C+, or worse, most of us would rather not be graded.
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But the fact that we don’t want to be graded doesn’t change the fact that we need to know
how we’re doing. It goes back to that lack of time/money/people again… if we can’t do
everything, and we have objectives that we are responsible for achieving, we have to know
whether our limited resources are being used in the most effective manner or if we would
be better off doing something differently. That’s just the facts of the situation.
As I mentioned a few slides back, setting up your plan of action on a matrix can make that
evaluation piece pretty easy. It allows you to go systematically through the actions and
review how it was supposed to play out. Part of the practical barrier to evaluating a
program is often just figuring out what the heck the program was supposed to do in the
first place, or who was responsible, or when. If someone has to reconstruct that in order
to do that evaluation, that’s just another reason not to do it Might as well take that out of
the way at the beginning.
It’s very hard to evaluate something that you have been deeply involved with doing –
you’re just too close to the situation to see it objectively. That’s why teachers typically
don’t let you grade your own essay on the exam. It might make sense to recruit someone
else to lead the evaluation so that you get a relatively fair and unbiased perspective.
Chances are, someone who’s been outside the process may see something that you would
have missed.
The last piece here, though, is probably the most important. The message of the entire
evaluation process, from beginning to end and from leadership to junior staff, has to be “let
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us understand what we are doing and how we can do this better for the good of the whole
community.” That is incredibly hard to do. But it’s absolutely necessary. If there is any
sense of a witch hunt, the process will probably fail – or at least fail to benefit the work.
Period. All organizations can do better at something; your process must be communicated
loud and clear as existing to find out how we can do better.
If you can’t get your leadership to do that, and do it with conviction, then you might want to
skip this step, or do it very quietly. That’s Della talking – don’t put that on the test!
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There’s an old song that my mother used to sing that says “You gotta pick yourself up,
brush yourself off, and start all over again.” And over and over and over….
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The rule of thumb in strategic planning generally used to be something like three to five
years. I don’t think there’s a rule of thumb anymore, and if there is, it’s a lot shorter than
that. Given the uncertainty that we talked about back in the analysis section, and the
shortening time spans, and the number of people who want to “do something about
economic development,” your time frame is almost certainly shortening.
You may need to at least revise the strategic plan at least once per year (another reason
not to let the process take a year). Of course, the world doesn’t need to stop when you’re
doing your plan – planning and doing will overlap, and sometimes you will be stuck doing
something that your plan revision might be starting to indicate should change. Welcome to
the modern world.
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I thought it was important to point the class to a few of the other things in this chapter of
the book. I felt like the benefits of strategic planning was a bit of a regurgitation of other
“why you should do this” sections, so I skipped it. If you are taking the test… you know.
The costs section seemed very out of date to me… or written by a consultant who is much
better at squeezing money out of communities than I am. Economic analysis consulting
firms today employ fewer people and have less overhead than they probably did when that
chapter was written, and they use the same online tools that you can use (there are a
couple that are subscription-based, and they’re not cheap, but they don’t cost five digits
per data set, either.) So be very careful of price… and dig deep to know whether you’re
paying for a name, for imaginary employees laboring over slide rules, or for what you
actually need.
And then the most fun part: what can go wrong….
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This is my interpretation of the section in the book on what can go wrong… look for the
text box on the second to last page of the chapter.
I’ve harped on these points before. When strategic plans go badly wrong, it’s usually
because of one of these factors blowing up on the planning team. Channeling the
involvement has to do with structuring what your participants do to lead them to deal with
the issues that you need them to deal with. That’s why I said a microphone in the middle
of the room isn’t doing you any good – if you don’t end up with any guidance, wisdom,
insight, etc. that makes the plan better, more supportable, more powerful, then you’re as
bad off or worse than if you had not done it at all.
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These three situations happen at the other point where strategic plans sometimes fall
down: the participants are afraid or not empowered or not willing to make choices and
decisions.
An encyclopedia plan includes reams and reams of data but very little direction-setting or
priority-establishing. It’s Everything You Every Wanted To Know About Our Town And A Lot
That You Didn’t, but it doesn’t tell us much about what we need to do to address our issues
A Rainbows and Unicorns plan is what the author of the chapter was so concerned about
warning us against – “Be Realistic!” This often happens when no one is willing to challenge
the idealists and find that delicate balance between realism and stretching.
The Grocery List is probably the most common type of subtle strategic plan error (it won’t
blow up in your face, but it will hamstring you down the road). This is the plan that lists lots
and lots of neat programs and ideas and great things to do…. But it doesn’t set any
priorities, and it doesn’t make anyone responsible for getting anything done. If everything
is a high priority, then nothing is, and if everyone is responsible for everything, no one is
responsible for anything. Grocery lists are fine when you have more than enough people
and money to do everything, but when you don’t, a grocery list become a list of should-have-
beens.
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The biggest risk, of course, is that the plan gets ignored… and we all go back to what we
doing before.
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Done right, a strategic plan is more than just a plan. It catalyzes. It organizes. It galvanizes.
It empowers, it emboldens, it enables.
A good strategic plan gives leaders the power that they need to lead. It gives staff the
clarity of purpose, and it gives communities the power of understanding and confidence.
More than any single incentive, more than any specific program, your strategic plan is most
likely to determine your organization’s effectiveness.
Go get em. And good luck.
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This is a slide I put on the end of a lot of presentations to get at questions and ask, “what
would you guys be talking about on your way to the parking lot coming out of all this?” In
this case, these guys weren’t going to a parking lot, but to get a group picture taken (a lot
of them were thrilled about that…). So we didn’t have much parking lot discussion. But it
was a real pleasure to hang out with these folks that morning.
Thanks
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Strategic planning annotated Ohio Economic Development Assoc March 2014

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