Let's talk about strategic planning. I'm guessing you either love it or hate it, right?

For those who hate it? Well, we've all been a part of strat planning sessions where we come up with 15 or 20 goals, pat each other on the back, then walk out the door and are hit with that sinking feeling that none of that stuff will ever gonna get done.

And what's more demoralizing than that? It's an awful feeling — the reality that says, “Here's stuff we should be doing, and we're fairly certain we won't ever do it.”

Those who love strategic planning, on the other hand, might very well have sat through a strat planning session that was facilitated by Gretchen Pisano.

Gretchen is a champion of what's known as “graphic facilitation” — the art of making people's thinking visible to others through shared graphics and artwork.

With the help of MACPA Executive Director Tom Hood, Gretchen has developed what she calls a “strategic thinking system.” It's called “Insights to Action,” and it does just what its name suggests: Through graphic facilitation, it leads organizations through a strategic planning session that results in specific actions, and it does so via five steps:

1. Sight. This is the usual data-gathering step, but it comes with a problem: “We've become very good at gathering data,” Pisano said, “but we gather so much of it that we lose sight of which data are important.” That's where the second step comes in.
2. Insight: Here, facilitators help their clients make sense of the data by identifying what is most important right now.
3. Create: Pisano explains this step with a question: “What are some of the possibilities we can create out of some of the insights we have?”
4. Communicate — in other words, explaining the plan to others in a way they can easily understand.
5. Inspire: “This involves communicating what you're doing in a way that's compelling enough that other people want to get on board and become part of the solution,” Pisano said.

What really differentiates “Insights to Action” from other strat planning systems, says Hood, is the fact that “we drive them to priorities. We look at high-leverage opportunities and are constantly trying to focus the organization on what's most important. A lot of strat planning systems come out with 15, 20, 30 priorities that never get done. We try to push them to five, and we find that, typically, those five get action.”

I've sat through a number of these sessions, and I'm here to tell you, they're amazing. The way they help build consensus, get everyone moving toward a defined set of goals, then follow through and take action on those goals is invaluable.

I sat down with Gretchen and Tom to have them describe the art of graphic facilitation and explain “Insights to Action” in detail. Listen to what they had to say in this CPA Spotlight podcast.

• Subscribe to our podcast here, or search for “CPA Spotlight” in iTunes.
• This slideshow takes a closer look at “Insight to Action.”
• Don't miss the new BLI course “Insights to Actions: Strategic Thinking System,” on July 13-14. 

More at the Expo
Pisano will lead a session titled “Insights to Action, Strategic Thinking System,” during Day 2 of the Maryland Business and Accounting Expo, slated for June 16-17 at the Baltimore Convention Center. Get complete details and register here.