Research and Strategic Planning: A Foundation for Strategic Change

The word change means to make different, to alter in condition or appearance. In business organizations today, change is all around us. We see constant technological change, political change, social change, economic change, environmental change, and market change. Some change just happens to us. It is beyond our control. Other change happens because we make it happen.

The word strategy means skillful management in getting the better of an adversary or attaining an end. In business organizations, strategy refers to the planned actions we will take to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Strategic change, therefore, is the process of purposefully making our organization different in order to gain and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace. It is to make our organization more productive and more effective than our competitors.

Leading Strategic Change
Our work over the years with various manufacturing, service, health care, and human service organizations has focused on developing and implementing strategies. We begin the strategy development process by gathering feedback from important stakeholder groups to avoid “planning in a bubble.” Those stakeholder groups can include employees, customers, prospects, industry leaders, community leaders, etc.

Strategic change begins with the strategic planning process. As top executives of an organization work through the planning process, they identify one or more strategic actions that must be taken to achieve the mission of the organization and to create differentiation in the marketplace. Whenever strategic actions are implemented, change occurs.

The Planner Perspective vs. The User Perspective
The planner is the person or group of people who conceives, develops and implements the change. Users are all of the people who are affected by the change and, to some degree, are expected to change their behavior. Planners tend to concentrate on the physical or mechanical change. They construct plans to deal with this change from their own perspective. However, physical change is almost always accompanied by behavioral change. We ask people to do things differently, yet we fail to look at this change from the user's point of view. Actions to achieve behavioral change must be specifically integrated with those plans which produce physical change.

The process of managing strategic change, from a planner's perspective, follows a linear path from plan generation through implementation and renewal. Specifically, there are seven phases involved in the process: 1) research/information gathering; 2) action plan development; 3) pre­implementation planning; 4) implementation; 5) de-bugging; 6) refinement; and 7) plan renewal. Each phase addresses issues as seen from the planner's perspective.

As the strategic change goes through these seven phases, the people who are affected go through a series of experiences. While the process from a planner's perspective is very linear, the process from a user's perspective contains a number of different iterations. The series of experiences are first explained in levels of use: non-use; mechanical use; and routine use. As the change process goes through the seven phases and users progress through the three levels of use, they also go through eight stages of user concern. Those stages are: 1) awareness; 2) information seeking; 3) personal concern – (how will this affect me?); 4) mechanical concern (how will this work?); 5) new understanding achieved; 6) concern for consequences; 7) acceptance; and 8) commitment.

Facilitation
An experienced facilitator, one who understands the issues discussed in this blog and has demonstrated expertise in research and strategic planning, will add value to an organization's strategic change activities. If you are trying to identify and implement change throughout your organization, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). 

Tweed-Weber’s stakeholder research, coupled with our strategic planning process, can help you proactively execute change within your organization that will help you gain and sustain a competitive advantage in your marketplace.