In this article, Eva Scheerlinck, CEO of the Australian Lawyer's Alliance (ALA), explains the potential pitfalls in strategic planning and outlines the approach they have taken to developing strategic focus and effectively implementing strategy for long term benefits ...
 Strategic planning processes create great expectation as leadership groups seek new focus and direction. Our experience at the Australian Lawyers Alliance was that our past 3 - 4 planning processes had failed to help us align and engage toward successful implementation. Fortunately, this time around, we found a way of making the outputs of our Strategic Planning actually work for us...
Past efforts
With our 3 or 4 prior strategic planning processes yielding strategic goals but no clear avenues for achievement, unrealistic expectations and priorities had emerged, and our focus had not been concentrated on the most effective ways of providing real value to our members.
Lack of a clearly mapped out strategic direction had led to a more reactive environment with priorities being buffeted by current events and pressures. This situation was stressful for me and my staff and the ALA was at risk of losing staff and members alike.
The planning process
Whilst I had a vision for the organisation, we needed help to turn around the way it had been working. We saw the value of using an external facilitation company to bring an objective perspective and help us achieve tangible outcomes in the time we had available. FAST Meetings Co. guided us through a process involving two strategic planning meetings; one for staff engagement, and another for strategic direction-setting by the board.
Through high levels of interaction and awareness-raising, the board was able to step back, examine the context and relevance of our goals, and begin to see gaps in our current way of doing things. It became obvious that for the amount of effort invested by staff toward previous priorities, the return had been minimal.
Our board was assisted in developing a strategic plan based around our long term mission by identifying 3 core Ends. This proved to be a profoundly simple but effective outcome, turning our existing strategy on its head and setting our sights squarely on our ability to add value to our members.
Strategy into action
Building on from that plan, we have now created clearly aligned accountabilities, measures of success and a structure that is helping board, staff and our local state branches in implementing the same priorities.
One year on from our work with FAST Meetings Co, we have a longer term focus and more highly engaged staff and board members.
We still have work to do, to ensure the State branches are fully engaged, which is always difficult with a ‘volunteer’ work force.
However, our reporting structure links directly to our strategic plan, and helps us facilitate board meetings that are more focussed and structured, so that we are able to consistently discuss the progress of our strategy, rather than deal with ad-hoc priorities or stray off track.
 Our Strategic planning process this time around has been profoundly different from our previous approaches, and I attribute much of the success to the effective guidance we received from FAST Meetings Co.
Eva Scheerlinck,
CEO
Australian Lawyers Alliance
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