Strategic Collaboration: Breaking Silos for Smarter Planning

What is it like to have a strategic initiative fall apart because of poor strategic collaboration?

Not exactly a pleasant experience.

Was it because sales and marketing weren’t aligned? Maybe customer feedback wasn’t making its way to the product team. Or perhaps leadership couldn’t effectively translate the strategy into an actionable plan.

When teams like sales, marketing, product, engineering, and customer service fail to communicate and collaborate during strategic planning, inefficiencies and wasted resources are inevitable.

Creating a winning strategy for your business begins with collaborative strategic planning. Even the most brilliant strategy can fail if it’s isolated or disconnected from the teams responsible for its success. 

That’s why we’ve created this guide — to help you improve collaboration during the strategy planning phase and set the stage for seamless execution and impactful results. 

Before describing the role of collaboration in planning, it's helpful to state what planning itself means for businesses. Strategic planning is one of the three pillars of the Always-On Strategy model, designed to be flexible and adaptive over time. 

These pillars are:

• Planning: Establishing a strategic direction for the business.
• Execution: Transforming vision into action.
• Evaluation: Measuring results and adapting.

Planning is the vital table-setter for the ongoing success of a strategy. During this step, executives should engage frequently, using collaborative technology platforms to refine their ideas. By reconciling ideas and addressing specifics like risk assessment, executives can effectively align priorities and pursue a shared goal.

Learn more about cross-functional collaboration

This early alignment is important because it prevents teams or departments from generating strategic priorities contradicting one another. Rather than having to get into alignment later, all functional and departmental leaders have a common vision to pursue from the beginning. 

The positive effects of collaborative work in strategic planning can reach every corner of an organization, benefiting all the departments participating. In the Always-On model, a company's strategy shapes that business's performance and receives constant iterations. This process is smoother and more natural when the strategy is built through cross-team collaboration and unity.

Specific advantages of cross-functional strategy include:

• Less duplicated work: When leaders launch strategic collaborations, they prevent duplicated work because they can split the load and contribute to a unified plan. Reducing unnecessary work comes from aligning teams and having them each work on distinct projects.
• Fostering innovation: A strategy that draws on different perspectives from across the organization makes it easier to reach a novel or groundbreaking conclusion. Each group brings valuable insight from its areas, such as the possibilities of new technology or customer learning.
• Natural knowledge sharing: Besides sharing insights and observations, contributors from various teams can turn them into innovative ideas based on their professional backgrounds and areas of expertise. Diverse perspectives make a strategy more likely to be comprehensive than if it came from a single department.
• Streamlined workflows: Building one strategy based on collaborative expertise from leaders across departments is a way to look forward to the strategy's outcomes and prevent gaps from emerging later.
• More inclusive, engaging work: Cross-functional planning ensures people are engaged and have their opinions heard. It highlights every team’s role and underscores the value of gathering feedback across the organization, which can build ownership and engagement.

Building a strategy is more impactful when there's engagement from across the organization. The resulting strategy is then ready for adoption organization-wide as it’s not an entirely new concept to learn but a mutually agreed-upon direction ready for direct implementation.  

Considering how much easier it is to work from an aligned and unified strategy, it's worth asking why so many companies encounter problems and end up disconnected during strategic planning.

The culprit is often ingrained business practices that may have taken root over time. Companies that address these issues early on are well-positioned to achieve better strategic collaboration. Examples of these barriers, along with tips to overcome them with cutting-edge tech-based approaches, include:

Siloed information

When each department keeps its data private, it's difficult for leaders to collaborate meaningfully on a strategy.

The solution: Centralize data in one shared digital workspace for universal access.

The benefits: Shared digital spaces promote transparency, collaboration, less duplicate work, and faster decisions thanks to having a "single source of truth" for strategic initiatives.

Communication issues

In an era of hybrid working models, companies can struggle to run effective collaborative meetings involving participants at different locations.

The solution: Use a platform with built-in collaborative tools, such as digital whiteboards, weekly check-ins, goal progress updates, and more.

The benefits: Better communications solutions enable increased productivity, regardless of location, the ability to have a real-time business overview, and better overall strategy visibility.

Lack of accountability

Companies that don't have strong practices regarding ownership of goals, projects, and tasks can have trouble assembling a coherent strategy.

The solution: Assign responsibilities and ownership of the strategic work in a cross-department platform.

The benefits: Explicit accountability frameworks lessen confusion and encourage productivity.

Misaligned goals

Sometimes, objectives and priorities across departments don't align with each other or with the company's overall business objectives.

The solution: Standardize goal setting using frameworks like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in a unified platform.

The benefits: Consistency enables collaboration across teams and departments and alignment between teams and their strategic goals.

Inconsistent tracking

When teams use different measurement systems to track progress, they may disagree on initial targets and periodic evaluations.

The solution: Choose one set of metrics and share results through a unified system.

The benefits: Standardizing metrics sets a standard for measurement and interpretation, resulting in smoother assessment cycles.

These challenges and solutions show why standardization and unity are essential in strategy management. The main issue is that departments often use separate systems and have conflicting priorities, making it hard for them to collaborate effectively during strategic planning.

Organizations with a single source of truth for their strategy management are best positioned to overcome these challenges and deliver smooth, effective collaboration. 

Setting up a collaboration-friendly planning workflow is essential for today's businesses. Breaking down silos between departments comes from these choices, as leaders actively decide to work together more effectively.

When designing the organization's strategy planning approach, useful practices to follow include:

• Current state analysis: Bring in collaborators early in the strategic planning process to involve multiple departments in analyzing the current state of the business. This allows the organization to set a mutually understood baseline.
• Kick-off meetings: When updating a strategy for the year or quarter, adopt an inclusive, collaborative tone from the start, establishing a clear agenda and shared objectives.
• Working groups: Unite collaborators from across departments into regular working groups to work on parts of the new strategy with their complementary strengths. Participants bring diverse perspectives and expertise to the collaborative effort.
• Goal-setting workshops: Since misaligned goals are one of the common pitfalls preventing strategic collaborations, ensure that goal-setting sessions incorporate multiple opinions. Pursue shared objectives within mutually agreed-upon frameworks.
• Collaborative scenario planning: Creating potential scenarios works best through collaboration, so ensure each team contributes expertise to shape well-rounded outcomes.
• Group risk assessment sessions: Risk assessment is another process that can be more accurate and comprehensive when multiple teams contribute. Since risk comes from many sources, each group shares its perspective and predictions.
• Strategic check-ins: Make cross-team collaboration a priority and keep it top-of-mind once the strategy is underway. Always-on strategy management means constant assessment and revision while multiple teams take part.

Companies trying to be more collaborative can examine any step in their strategic planning process and determine whether more perspectives would enhance that step and the overall strategy. The answer is yes in many cases, and it is a good time to increase collaboration. 

Perhaps the most important technology priority for companies that want to plan more collaboratively is ensuring a unified, centralized tech platform is in place. This system will become a single source of truth for all strategic initiatives where leaders and stakeholders can work together.

But what defines a truly industry-leading technology platform for strategy planning purposes? Useful features and modules include:

• Brainstorming on a digital whiteboard: Contributors from different teams and locations can use a digital collaboration tool to share ideas and valuable insights for the strategic outline, minimizing the risk of information loss or miscommunication. Collaboration can occur at the team, department, or company level.

• Making data-backed decisions with AI insights: AI assistant functionality on today's platforms can provide decisive, actionable results that feed into strategic planning based on input from companies' cross-functional teams on goal performance.

• Communicate the strategic direction: Executive summaries can help ensure team alignment by summarizing the strategic direction. Clear summaries streamline strategic planning by clarifying where the business is headed and how it plans to get there, keeping everyone on the same page.

• Seamlessly track ownership and goal progress: Aligning team ownership of assignments and consistent, centralized, shared goal tracking are important considerations for more collaborative organizations. Strategy software should support both functions.

In an era of widespread hybrid work, these features provide a valuable framework to unite an organization's various teams, whether they're made up entirely of in-office personnel, remote employees, or both. 

Finding the right technology tools allows your organization to enable collaborative effort in its strategy management processes, from planning to evaluation. Connecting all stakeholders through this centralized platform also points the way to improved productivity, alignment, transparency, and collaboration.

Quantive StartegyAI is for businesses seeking to take strategy management to the next level. With a full suite of collaborative tools, it allows your whole company to play an active role in creating, executing, and adapting successful strategies.

See how Quantive StrategyAI can help you improve strategy management and unite your teams around a shared mission. Try for free.