You and your team have just finished setting your strategic plan. After several days of workshops and breakout sessions, you’ve come up with the goals and initiatives that you want to focus on for the next year or more. You feel good about the direction you’ve chosen to take and the clarity you and your team have after coming up with a strategy together.

A few months into the year… everything changes.

The operating budget you thought you would get was significantly less than expected. You also found out that you’ll need to upgrade all of your laptops and office applications to comply with a new federal policy before the end of the year. You have a surge of new clients that you didn’t anticipate, but you’re also spending a lot on adding new resources to meet the extra demand.

The strategic plans and projects that you just decided on just a few weeks earlier suddenly seem unimportant. There are more pressing issues to deal with. The projects are put on hold or completely abandoned. They may or may not be reconsidered at the next strategic planning session - the following year.

4 Reasons Story Makes Sense for Defining Strategy

1. It’s engaging, emotionally evocative, and flexible enough to keep up with the changing conditions that often require continual adjustments to strategy.

2. A story lends itself to being edited and revised while still progressing toward a pre-determined outcome. As external and internal circumstances change, a story-based strategy allows the ‘what’ of the strategy to remain constant and the ‘how’ of the strategy to unfold one chapter at a time.

3. Organizations and teams who adopt a story-based planning framework create an environment that encourages rapid learning, adaptation and resilience.

4. Storytelling invites more input and participation from all levels into strategic planning and decision-making.

The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework

The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.

As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that make sense for your situation.

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Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.