Its planning time again and to avoid the ceaseless barrage of emails and phone calls – my team has voluntarily shut itself in a meeting room to discuss the business strategy for next year. I can’t disclose the top-secret, mind-boggling, category-expanding outcomes, but I can talk about the process.
This year we’ve been challenged to incorporate a thinking tool called ‘SCQUARE’ into our planning process. The whole marketing team sat through this training at the start of the year, and while we used real-life business issues within the training, this is the first time we’ve used it without anyone leading us through it. I have to admit that in the beginning I thought it was a little silly and obvious, but its actually turned out to be incredibly valuable.
We spent the day challenging each other to reconsider our logic and in turn questioned our own assumptions. We’ve still got a lot of work to do – but its exciting to know that we’ve got this strong team vision of what we want to achieve next year and in fact for the next few years, and better yet – we’re putting the right projects in place to ensure we’ll hit the ambitious targets we’ve set.
Go Germs!
Tags: hitting ambitious targets, strategic planning, team work
