Communicating the Plan
Your strategy—and your plan for its implementation—are major elements of the strategy design process. At the same time, it is necessary for a business team to devote considerable attention to communicating the strategy to others:
- the senior managers whose understanding and acceptance is often a prerequisite for obtaining approval and funding for strategy execution
- the functions whose support is integral to successful implementation
- the individuals on whom you will depend for the hundreds or thousands of tasks and actions that will ensure operational delivery of what you intend
- the 'partners'—agencies, distributors, vendors and the like—that may have important complementary roles to play in execution of strategy
You can get your message across more successfully if you are able to document your plan in a manner that is clear and understandable, providing enough depth to answer the critical questions of your various audiences, but not burying those whose support you must have with extraneous or non-necessary information.
When properly structured, a plan document answers the important questions that your various audiences have in mind and prepares them for the role that you will ask them to play in helping you execute your plan. And, because you have to deal with a variety of settings for communication, the plan document should be structured in various forms, both as a document that an individual can easily review at one sitting and as a presentation, the key elements of which can be used to get across both the essential decisions and the central thrust of your strategy and plan to larger audiences, in situations where time for communication is limited.
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