Since When Is Strategy Development Only The Domain of The C-Suite?

by Eric Britten

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Can You Open-Source Your Strategy, by Barry Newstead and Laura Lanzerotti, describes how The Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that operates Wikipedia) open-sourced a good part of its strategy development between 2009 mand 2010.  Senior executives ultimately set the priorities and synthesized the final initiatives into a business plan, but their customers, suppliers and colleagues contributed a significant amount of the input up to that point.

That may be a radical approach for many traditional planners, but it seems to me that it's just a continuation of the philosophy that has opened many corporate plannng processes to the rank and file, customers, suppliers and even other organizations in the same industry group.

True strategy development that takes a hard look at the future landscape has to be driven by ideas, perspective and opinions of those that are often external to the organization.  Why would you engage in strategic planning if you weren't attuned to what your customers were thinking about the future, particularly as it relates to your products or services?  The same goes for your suppliers and other partners.  Gathering that data is a critical initial phase in a modern day heads up planning process.  Letting others munch the data and begin to think about where that might take an organization is a natural next step in the evolution of planning. 

Strategic planning processes that incude external data gathering and interpretation are scenario, mission-based , and outcome-based planning.   Even in more traditional planning processes, these outside resources could add dynamic ideas to the S-W-O-T analysis.  Those who think strategy development is a secret process that only the top echelon should dabble in probably should keep their VCR players and Selectric typewriters.  A CEO I once worked for had it right when he said, "I don't care who knows our strategy.  Only we can execute it."

You can read Can You Open-Source Your Strategy in our business article library.  Click here to go there.