Supporting a CEO in introducing strategic planning

Background
The Regional Studies Association (RSA) is a learned society concerned with the analysis of regions and regional issues. Based at the University of Sussex, it provides, through its international membership, an authoritative voice of, and network for, academics, students, practitioners and policy makers.

CEO Alan Kinder joined RSA from the Geographical Association, in which role he first encountered David Saint at an ACEVO conference and took up the offer of a consultation.

More recently, in his new role as CEO of RSA, he saw that Action Planning was again offering 60 minute Diagnostic Conversations for ACEVO members and decided this was the perfect opportunity to resume their relationship.

Brief
Alan had initiated a strategic planning process at the RSA, but was finding that, as a community, there was no shared experience in strategy formulation – expressing who they are, what they’re for, what they’re trying to achieve in a particular time frame, or the values that underpin all of their work. He wanted guidance from David on how to communicate notions about strategy to an organisation unfamiliar with that sort of language.

Process
David and Alan had three meetings on Zoom over a five-month period, in between which they had a further phone conversation and exchanged emails, knocking ideas back and forth and exchanging draft wordings, which David critiqued. Using David’s advice, Alan began to explore wordings with his members and found that they ‘signed up’ quite readily.

“David helped navigate how we’re going to introduce strategic planning tasks for people, particularly the board, but also the wider membership, especially when they couldn’t necessarily see what it was or why it was valuable. He understood very early on that what lay at the heart of this challenge was the idea that we needed to construct a strategy together and we had to quickly get to the good stuff – what we’re actually going to do – so people got excited about that, rather than bogging them down in the process. David helped to put together a subtle process that wasn’t perceived as a long and arduous thing to go through.”

Outcome
Alan formed a strategy working group, which turned out to be instrumental in this exercise being successful and engaging a Board comprising members from all around the world.

Alan described the support from David as one of those situations where “you might end up bringing the solution yourself but it came about by wrestling with the problem with someone who’s got the qualities of listening, but also the knowledge to listen well.”

Alan will continue to turn to David whenever he feels the need for his expertise.

Consultant’s insight
There is much mystique surrounding strategic planning – most of it misplaced! It is extremely important, and needs to be thorough, but it also needs to be done in a pragmatic way, and taking account of the preconceptions of, and other pressures on, those engaged in the process.

And sometimes it can be useful to get an external perspective on things, even when you are pretty sure you know what you are doing. In this case, Alan had plenty of knowledge and experience of strategic planning, but he was finding it difficult to introduce these concepts to an organisation that was not used to this approach – and was perhaps a bit suspicious of it. Being able to talk through the issues with a like-minded but totally objective external sounding board seems to have been just what he needed. It was a pleasure to be able to help.