December, 2004

Puzzled by the Confusion of Strategic Planning

A few weeks ago, I was helping my five-year-old to clean up the disaster-area formerly known as our playroom. The need to clean the playroom is a project that is discussed in our home on a regular basis but actually executed only semi-annually. I never keep track of the date, confident that my trash hauler has it marked on his calendar so that he can anticipate those times when he needs to schedule an additional truck.

My well-documented obsessive compulsive behavior fails to manifest itself during the playroom cleaning process. I personally don’t care which broken toy gets deposited in which trash bag. What we determine is worth salvaging, doesn’t always wind-up in the box or container in which it arrived.

Case in point: Puzzles

When you tell a five-year-old to put away a puzzle, you have chance that most of the pieces of that puzzle can be retrieved, provided that the puzzle has been recently assembled within a fairly confined space. When the pieces of several puzzles are strewn across a playroom that encompasses an entire basement and you want the clean-up project to end the same day that it began, you have a tendency to cut corners.

So when I find a puzzle piece, it goes into the closest puzzle box. We then end-up with 50-piece puzzles that have either thirty pieces or eighty pieces, depending on their proximity to the people cleaning-up. Are those puzzles ever put together again? Of course not.

Which brings us to the real topic of this column: Strategic planning for Chambers of Commerce.

Few puzzles can generate the mental erosion that takes place when a Chamber embarks on a planning expedition. There are a variety of reasons why. First and foremost is the belief that crafting a workable plan for a membership organization isn’t rocket science. It would be much easier if it was rocket science. The mathematical axioms that figure into the construction of a rocket can be compiled and validated. No such luck for Chambers of Commerce.

The strategic planning puzzle for Chambers centers around piecing-together bits of information that not only may belong to some other puzzle but which are often shaped in a manner that makes it practically impossible for them to attach to anything. The most simplistic course of action in devising a plan too often boils down to giving members what they want. “You can never get into trouble doing that,” I recall one of the members of our last Strategic Planning Task Force saying, while others nodded in agreement.

Not so fast. A survey conducted by The Chamber last Spring revealed that among the priorities of our members for 2004 are that we should (a) Offer more information on health insurance issues, (b) assist small businesses with programs on effective budgeting and (c) reduce the cost of programs for members.

With those pearls of wisdom to guide us, The Chamber scheduled a four-part educational series on health insurance. Out of a membership of 920 businesses representing more than 48,000 employees, we averaged thirty people-per-session. More than half of those had either a direct or an indirect connection to a health insurance provider.

A month later we offered an educational program called “Saving Money.” This program was marketed heavily to small businesses as an opportunity for them to share experiences and concerns with one another and to better understand the budgeting process. Fifteen people signed-up. Six people showed-up.

By the way, did I mention that both the Health Insurance Series and the “Saving Money” program were free-of-charge to Chamber members?

We are not shortsighted to the extent that we don’t understand that many factors are involved in meeting member needs. We know that it is sometimes the timing of a program or event that makes it difficult for someone to attend. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day.

So we will keep looking long and hard at the puzzle, throwing out the pieces that don’t fit, repositioning the ones that do. And we’ll continue to rely on member input so that the puzzle never looks like something that we’ve pieced together with only ourselves in mind. Sometimes it will seem like there aren’t enough pieces. At those times, we’ll just look in a different box.

Any five-year-old knows to do that.

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