 Kako, my name is Retsu Chiyama, your host for another stimulating episode of a series titled Business in Hawaii. Today we're going to delve into an area called Strategic Planning and with me is my guest Peter Adler, who will be talking about the why's, the how's and what strategic planning is all about in the world for business, nonprofits, academic institutions and many groups that want to achieve greatness, want to meet goals and be better organizations, but we'll be also discussing all that and more with Peter Adler. Welcome to the show. Hi Ray, thank you for having me on here. We'll start from the beginning. Where did your work in strategic planning begin? My background, I'm a sociologist by training, although I've studied the sociology of law and so on. But my interest for 30 years has been in the alignment and consensus building. As a mediator, as a facilitator, I've worked with a lot of groups, sometimes in very high conflict situations, sometimes in planning problems and that's where the strategy work comes. And sociology is all about groups and organizations, the study of. And society in large and society at small. And small, so we're talking about small groups, big groups and organizations. Exactly. So what would you say is the good side of strategic planning? Why should groups and organizations do that? People come to strategic planning for many different reasons and sometimes when people approach me about helping them, I have to go through a decoding process to understand what do they want to do with the plan, why are they planning and so on. The good thing is, all planning is a way of repositioning yourself for something new. If you just need to do what you're doing, you may not need to plan, although you may need continuity. Now, you're beginning at a place, I think, is it that you're trying to help people become self-aware, to know themselves? I'm interested in people getting things done at the end of the day. And the plan is a tool, it's part of the road, the yellow brick road to where you want to go. Michael Porter, who is one of the people whose influence I drive under, is at Harvard, he's a business professor, very well known in strategy work, both quantitative and qualitative. And he says it's all about understanding the position you want to occupy at some future point in time. Oh, right. Yes. What is the journey to that point? What is the journey? But where are you trying to get to? So, when you first meet with people who think they need a strategic plan and want to go somewhere, where do you begin? What's the questions that you ask them? Great question in itself. I ask people why they need a plan, what they want to do with the plan once they have one. I talk about what kind of plan, what's the audience for it? Is it internal, is it a compass for themselves, is it an external document? So there's a set of questions and that helps shape both the yellow brick road as well as the outcome. And how do you develop it? Is it a small group who are representing the organization or do you involve the entire organization? Do you have a, yourself as a mediator, a facilitator, as a guide, how does it work in the best sense? Every process is molded to the needs of that entity, organization, agency, whatever it is. And sometimes it involves consultation with many stakeholders. Sometimes it's a small group of executives. The process that I kind of like doing is having a small group that is going to be a planning committee and one that will do a lot of listening to external audiences, both internal and external, and taking a lot of information, do a lot of analytic work, and then chart a course. Do those ideal people exist or do you have to develop them to be the people that you want? I think it depends on the maturity of the organization. If it's a new startup and it's an entrepreneurial organization that's just getting its legs under it, you may have to find people. I've also found, always, it's very good in the process to bring in outsiders to help do some forecasting and help do some sensing of what's in the air. Forecasting for their, I guess, for business, the market sector or industry, for example, or nonprofit in competing against other nonprofits in the same area of philanthropy? Imagine, for example, a larger grocery operation. And one of the things that they might think all the answers are inside of them if they just think and talk long enough, but very often there's outsiders who may say, let me tell you about economic forecasts around agriculture, around food, around delivery of services. And sometimes in the face of disruptions, Amazon bought whole foods and they're delivering it. They're going to deliver by drones. What does that mean? Who would have thought that? Or if you're, like you say, who would have thought that in the retail space? That's the major question. That's right. Because that's the competition already, but that's something from left field who appeared out of nowhere. And it happens. It happens more and more and with more intensity. So do organizations do strategy planning and they come to you and what was the most, give me an example of a strategic plan that worked and was easy to do? I don't know that it's easy necessarily, but there's a couple of them that have stood out in my mind. And one was with the Hawaii Public Broadcasting and Leslie Wilcox, who was a relatively new executive director, very strong credentials, very creative. And she came in at the moment at which Hawaii Public Broadcasting was moving from a state entity to a non-profit. So it had people in both. Right. Interesting problem. About 50, 60 people. So we designed a process, and this is a mutual process working with her and her executives, and we said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to listen to all the employees. We spent a day, 60 people in a room, and a process of gathering information. Then we listened to her board, we had a half day with them. And she had an advisory council because it's a regulated industry. We had a half, a couple of hours with them. And then we had a small group that wrote the plan and then went out with that plan and said, here's what we're thinking, last chance to comment, and that became the plan. And you know what? It's three pages. Yeah, it's three pages. So in those three pages, is there a template or format that is ideal for organizations? You say three pages, you're saying there's better than 100 pages. Well, I think so. Or one page. Yeah. What is the key here? How many strategies have we seen, big, fat, long plans, 100 pages, and they end up in the waste basket on the shelf? Nobody reads them. Yeah. Nobody can remember them. In fact, let me stop here. For most organizations out in the world, in the state of Hawaii, or nationally or globally, if somebody asks them, where is their strategy plan, what does it mean, what are three objectives or goals for the objective plan, they would think and think and think. And they would call somebody, probably in the planning department, if it's a huge organization, and say, where is that plan, and you're correct, why is it so hard for strategic plans to stick in people's minds? So Dwight Eisenhower on the run up to D-Day, which we just remembered, he famously said, plans are useless, planning is everything. Oh, okay. And what he was really saying was, it's not the paper plan, it's alignment around it. So that's part of what I think of as triple helix, alignment, scrutiny, strategy, alignment. Those are the three things that need to come together. And when you see Eisenhower, he's not known as a great soldier, but as a diplomat when you think about it. He came out of supply and logistics. He's dealt with people and trying to align people and then have them execute. That's right. Lots of contingencies and they knew it was going to be a very challenging invasion. They knew that. They were expecting 80% losses of 150,000 people, much less turned out, but tough, tough, tough. But I'm reminded of another quote from Peter Drucker, who said famously, strategy is execution. Yeah. That's right. And what do you think of that? I think it's critical. Okay. So at the end of the many planning processes, not everyone, it has to be shaped to whatever the client particularly wants, but at the end of it, what's going to happen in the next 100 days? What are we going to do in the next three months? What's the action plan? And a strategy, depending on the horizon, usually three to five years or longer, needs to end with an execution element. And then people got to follow up on it or else it's dead. But when you mention strategy, planning, these are big terms. I mean, an organization may have people who just do small things in a cubby hole or at a desk and so forth. How do you ensure that everybody in the organization follows some highfalutin strategy that's made up by the board or the corporate leadership? I happen to have a, I like a shorter plan myself that's memorable that people can remember and that the strategy is almost always more important than the strategic plan. The mission is more important than the mission statement. So it's what is it that is the in people's heads who have to execute? Right. Because once it passes to a new generation, they have to do the plan. Right. So it has to survive and sustain itself through generations, people in similar roles. With living people. Yeah, right. Yeah. And the people who make the plan really need to be part of the execution. What is a common mistake when organizations come to you and ask for your help and they ask you questions and think they know what you will deliver? I think the most common one is they don't really know why they need to do this or why they want to do it. Or it's, how should I say this? I don't mean this in a disrespectful way but it's a camouflage for other things that they want to do. I'll give you an example. Right. A hard example. Okay. So I was approached once by an unnamed organization and they said, Peter we need a strategic plan. Can you help us? Why do you want to do it? Well, we need to know what we're going to do the next five years and I asked why three or four times and what was at the bottom it was they actually wanted to let go of their CEO. They wanted to fire their CEO and they wanted to create a new plan that says, you don't fit. Right. So if I know that, if I know that I can say well we may have a better way of getting to that. It's a basis for something else that they wanted behind the idea. Once I learn that I understand what they also want out of a plan. Right. And then they can carry on with their own conversations. Interesting. But we're going to go into even more interesting things after this important break. Aloha. I'm Stan Osterman, a host here on Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness here on the island. We are a Hawaiian non-profit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Mahalo. Aloha. This is Scott Perry and I'm the host of Let's Talk Hawaii at Think Tech Hawaii. In this show we're going to be speaking in English and Japanese and I'm going to use my 30 years of experience to help many Japanese viewers improve their English skills as well as learning many interesting things about Hawaii. You can catch my show every other Tuesday, 3 p.m. Hawaii time. See you then. Nice job. This is Ray Tuchiyama back in the trenches with strategy planning on business in Hawaii. We've been talking about nonprofits. We've been talking about television stations. We've been talking about unnamed groups. All with ideas for the future, a goal, and where they want to go in business or with developing an educational institution of school or university. We now come to the most difficult, challenging, and intractable area on earth, the state of Hawaii. I remember there were strategies planning back in the 60s. There was an office for planning, a d-bed. In the early 70s there was a huge statewide consensus building for Hawaii 2000. Imagine that. In 1970, looking three decades out and wanting to develop scenarios and goals for the state. I don't even know where we're going next year. This is a very challenging area for a state of now 1.3 million citizens, with young people leaving the state, with all kinds of issues on homelessness, affordable housing, on our economy, and should we come together for a strategic plan for the state and how should we do it? I don't know that I have all the answers to that but I do have some ideas and thoughts and let me just say I think you're spot on and exactly right that we are at a moment where we probably need to do some longer term planning. I've been particularly worried about short-sightedness and what I will call strategic complacency that we don't look out far enough. We don't look out 10 years, 25 years, which is only one generation. And that was the beauty of Hawaii 2000. They really did a serious attempt at it. And again the planning process was critical. And neighborhoods were involved from the Hawaii to Hilo. All sectors were involved. And it was a smaller state at that time too, maybe 900,000 barely. So you could see that people were actually actively involved with the political leadership and business and universities to put together. Why isn't there people at the top or at the grassroots calling for a strategic plan? I think that the rush of modern, the speed of things now lends itself to short-sightedness. And what we have in the political arena, for example, is leaders who have to worry about their next election or about their next run-up. And so their planning has to deliver in a short term. Business we look at three quarters, four quarters, the first quarter next year. If you ignore that. The stock price. The stock price. Where is it going to go? We need one quarter. If you ignore them at your peril. But that doesn't mean you can't also look longer term. I'll give you a great example. I did some work with NASA a few years ago, not on a strategic planning, it was on a particular issue that they were facing. And one of the things I was aware of, they would do what they call decadal planning, 10-year plans. And I asked, what's in those 10-year plans? And they said, well, we have to go, we have to prepare investment strategies and go to Congress and legislature and talk to the private sector. And we needed to say, are we going to focus on, you know, planets close in, astronomical systems close in, or are we going to go deep beyond the galaxy? Are we going to do mainly robotics or are we going to do man missions? Are we going to focus on astrophysics or on engineering? So they had to make some threshold decisions and they would go through very elaborate decadal planning on that. And I was impressed with that. I was impressed that they would exercise foresight, think ahead, and it's not the same kind of business plan you would do for a three- or five-year plan. But I was impressed. We don't have that. Now, but you have an interesting issue here. With so many issues out on the plate or with the state, what three would you choose? What three? What three issues would you choose for the state and really dive into? So I happen to have a list of about 20, and I won't go through them all, but these are for 25-year vulnerabilities and threats. And I think there's an interesting book that I've become enamored of and it's called Super Forecasting and it's by a guy named Philip Tetlock and Philip Tetlock and David Gardner. And they have developed a method. It was seeded by DARPA originally and it's a method for making much more robust predictions than individual experts make and it's proven. It's empirically validated. I'm actually trying to bring these folks to Hawaii if I can figure out how to do it and hold some workshops. And they have a method and what they do is they will frame the question, they've identified really good people who are, and they're not experts necessarily, but they're people who can track down and they're sleuth down the answers to a question. So if we said, for example, who do we think will be the next president of the United States? They have a way, a methodology. And what they do is they crowd source, they have dozens of experts that pose the question and then they crowd source the answer. And we know that that produces more optimum results. We can do that. We could do that and understand the right vulnerabilities off a longer list and now begin to prepare and mobilize around it. So I think there's something about forecasting and prediction that goes hand in hand with the making of a plan. So in my life before I was very interested in an alternative future, so scenario planning also and that is still around for many companies. What if the price of oil went up? What do you do? You invest in oil seeking and so forth. For Hawaii though, there are parts of the state that of course for a livable society, the environment, the economy and so forth, can you, or education is one, have people come to you, what their biggest issues are? Have you have a sense of that? Not yet. It's part of what a small group of us are thinking about doing is doing some survey work to find out that and then we could begin to drill down into particular areas. And ultimately you're saying what area should we invest in? That's great. Or what should we defund to refund something else? Those are hard decisions politically. Very hard because even with education, it moves so slowly. It's a huge area. It's a jungle knot. Yeah, everybody talks about what skills should students be taught in order to meet the needs of jobs in 20 years. Who knows? That's right. That's a very critical area. Where we have a disconnect, I think, is that are people really getting the, like you say, with life so urgent and so micro in terms of mobile phones, with internet and so forth, they don't have a kind of looking to the future and kind of mentality. Is that the first step? I think so. And again, I think this is still to be thought through and thought through with a collective group of people who are really committed to working on it. We're in the middle of a major change. And Dean Neubauer, former chancellor at the university and very smart on Asia and Pacific education, he was telling me, he said, we have the fourth industrial revolution going on. And the one we've been in is about computerization and internet and so on. The one that's coming is artificial intelligence, big data, biometrics. There's a series of things that are going to have profound implications. We're not ready for that. We're not ready for that. And the question is, can we also harness some of that in the planning for the ahead and planning for the future? So I think there's a good moment coming. Well, you sound optimistic. I am. And who would join you in this kind of group thinker in determining the priorities or issues to really focus on? Who would make those decisions? This is one of these intersector things. These are cross-sectoral things. So you need to find some champions who are both in the public sector, the private sector, and the civic sector. And you need them to come together and work together and say, we will champion this. We will help boot this process up. And we will help design it and we will help implement it. And guys like me, guys like you, perhaps, we can assist with those things. But if you don't have the champions, it's not going to happen. Well, it reminds me of the heady days around 59 into the 60s, when the state of Hawaii blossomed under statehood, made major investments in education and research. Even Governor Murn said he desired a Hawaii economy based on research. Back in the 60s. And but at the same time, if you look at Asia-Pacific, from way up, certain countries were doing better than others. Like the Philippines was actually speeding ahead of Japan in terms of economy development and others. And then the Singapore was nothing. It was absolutely nothing. Now look at it, it's a rock star. It had no, Changi Airport is not that old back in the 80s. And they had no Singapore Airlines. Interestingly, they did do a lot of planning and the MIT group that I know said to them that you should invest in engineering, education, English language, management. And there's something in the horizon that you should provide incentives for, semiconductor. Again, they did that. They listened and started to plan ahead for the future. And of course, semiconductors are old generation. Now they're moving into even more new areas today. But going back to your question, I think this is a sidle area. And do you need one leader to kind of take everybody forward? No, you need several leaders working together. Because it's not like the governor can control all this, nor can the business roundtable do it by itself, nor can the Hawaii Community Foundation do it. You need a real collaboration at a high leadership level. And they have to catalyze it. They have to be the catalytic converters. And why do strategic plans fail? I think part of it is a lack of courage. And a failure of nerve, sometimes, because sometimes you need to make tough moves and bull move. Part of strategic planning, a strategic plan, may involve chucking over some ballast. We don't do that. Everything, we just accrete more. So we don't do that. And it's hard in a little island. It's hard in a place where people know each other and have to bump into each other at Costco and Food Land. So it's difficult. These are very involved, difficult decision. A plan with no priorities is not a plan. I don't believe it's much of a plan. But it's paradoxical, because I would think a small place could move faster. But you don't think so. No, I think we're actually moving too slow. We're moving very slowly. And in the face of some big vulnerabilities. Is it because we're geographically isolated? I don't think so. I think we're a person. Singapore is a middle of nowhere, too. Yeah, exactly. In Hong Kong, there are a lot of places. There's a national circuit board of interesting places that are doing this. We're not on it. We're really not, except in the tourism area. And even that, we have to anticipate some changes in that. That's going to come. It's one of the vulnerabilities. What happens if there's a air goes out of the sum of the balloon? Well, everybody spews that. But I think people just are not thinking. They're just propelling themselves as if it will be the same, but just a little different in the future. And we'll muddle. We'll muddle, too. That's the awful word to use. But that's the truth. I just want to come back because I think that the core to planning for me is this triple helix, this DNA, which involves really careful scrutiny, data gathering, information, introspection. Second is about strategy, about that position you want to get into it, and then getting alignments around it. Those are three tough tasks. That's very tough, even for a small group. Because what is out there, I don't know. And then it's a massive bet, almost. It's a risk. You've got to gauge risk. Especially if they're worried that a lot of times strategic plans, people, when you get in a group, they want to hang lots of ornaments on it, and nobody wants to have their ornament on there. And it's what I used to call the Platte River Plans, which is an inch deep and a mile wide, but you can't tell where it's going. And of course, how good is the information? Right. That's right. How good is the data? What is the real data? Is it something that you really can make a decision out of? And the last one is, of course, alignment, because everybody has their own agenda, and their fear that their role will be diluted or eliminated. And that's the worst of all worlds. But sometimes that's what the change process involves. That's the ballast sometimes that's hard to throw overboard. Well, with those words on a ship that's moving in the ocean to a great new objective, or one that we have to really throw ballast out, or sink or swim, we have a metaphor that will end this show. Business in Hawaii, this is Ray Tuchiyama. Thank you very much.