REPLY Society Strategy Development (SD7113)

[SDMAIL Jack Harich]

Posted by  Jack Harich <jack at thwink.org>

Goal/vision brainstorming has now gone on for 3 months. The Society 
Strategy Development thread started on April 1. But compared to how this 
is done in the business world, our work has not been productive. We have 
no high quality work output. There is no trend in this direction. (This 
is not to reflect on the work done by Kim. It's that getting a widely 
varied set of volunteers to collaborate virtually is just plain hard.)

Hence the purpose of this thread is to discuss how we can improve our 
goal setting process.

In 1979 I attended a two day goal setting conference of about 30 small 
business managers. The purpose was to set the high level goals for a new 
corporation, which was a non-profit cooperative. The attendees were its 
founding members. This was in the US. The managers came from a 6 state 
area in the Southeast.

The goal setting part of the conference was facilitated by an 
experienced outside moderator. He had no trouble helping the group end 
up with a mission statement and an organized list of goals in several 
operational areas. There was a tremendous sense of success and 
togetherness, because everyone's input had been used and everyone had 
seen the initial suggestions, which were weak, evolve into strong, 
executable goals.

The goal setting part of the conference took about 8 hours. (Half the 
time!) It was hard work. The new corporation went on to become so 
successful it opened its membership up to additional types of members. 
All high level goals were achieved.


The facilitator used this goal setting process:

1. State the type of goal being created. These were mission, membership 
services, product line, quality goals, etc. The process started with 
mission and discovered the other goal types as we went along.

2. Brainstorm possible goals. No judgment or discussion, just list them. 
This encourages creativity and participation. The only discussion was to 
always summarize the (sometimes long) suggestions into a clear single 
sentence or two, which was then written down.

3. Once we had a long list, it was then organized into types of goals. 
The group then split up into smaller groups to refine the goals in each 
type. Later they split up into specific goals, related goals, goal 
integration, etc. The groups were selected at random except there was at 
least one expert in each group familiar with the task of the group.

4. The small groups then reported back to the full group. For goal 
types, their work output was a smaller list of refined goals, and a list 
of pros and cons on the quality of the goals.

5. The process iterated until we had all the goal types we needed and 
the goals in each type were high quality. Quality means easily 
understood, achievable, value oriented, measurable, and well integrated 
into an overall vision.

There were no solutions posing as goals in the final list, only customer 
or member oriented needs that need to be solved later.


See this page: http://www.nps.gov/phso/rtcatoolbox/dec_goalsetting.htm

This describes a similar process. Notice the emphasis on refine, refine, 
refine. This is what's not happening yet on the Society Strategy 
Development thread. There is no sense of evolving anything. There is 
only encouragement to list more goals. This is not productive after an 
ample number have been listed.


Allow me to make a few suggestions:

1. The two processes above tell me that we need to stop asking for more 
goal/vision suggestions. We need to do what the above processes do: 
iteratively refine them.

2. Even before that, we need to agree on a minimal goal setting process. 
It can start simple and evolve as needed.

3. Most of the goals listed so far are solutions. This is a trap. It 
causes more harm than good, because it frames subsequent thinking. We 
become biased toward intuitively attractive but (usually) low leverage 
solutions. Better would be to first analyze, find the root causes, then 
find the high leverage points, and only then brainstorm on how to push 
on those high leverage points with solution strategies. Ironically, the 
is the same trap that SD is supposed to help prevent. :-)

4. Use the SD Wiki or website to list the evolving goals. Use a link to 
the pertinent pages in list messages. This gives us a visible concept to 
easily refer to and help evolve. When we're done, the work output is 
then automatically already captured and published.


Hope this helps,

Jack
Posted by  Jack Harich <jack at thwink.org>
posting date  Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:57:53 -0400