How do your strategies stack up against expected results? Are your internal leaders aligned on strategic direction? Is there enough commitment and accountability to reach your goals? If the answer to any of these is no, your strategic plan needs more work. That’s where facilitated strategic planning helps. An outside perspective can test assumptions, identify blind spots and make sure all systems are moving forward.
The AgriThority® strategic planning process is built for agricultural innovators, products and companies and follows a 3-phased approach:
- Analysis: create a fact-based look at your company, including industry audits and market surveys.
- Alignment: gain consensus among key opinion leaders around strategic direction.
- Action: requires high-impact execution, with focused, timely action items assigned to specific people.
Phase 1: Market Analysis
Every strong strategic plan starts with facts. Analysis combines internal facts and stats with industry audits and market surveys. AgriThority® builds on traditional agricultural market research, pulling information from many sources and adding targeted surveys to document specific industry needs or trends. This step often challenges conventional wisdom or uncovers core issues that must be resolved before the plan can move forward.
Phase 2: Gain Internal Alignment
Leadership alignment comes from facilitated brainstorming and organized collaboration. A SWOT analysis is not enough on its own. Consolidating opinions leads to strong specific strategic imperatives to move the company forward. Allowing equal voices from employees and leaders also builds trust and understanding. Third-party facilitation makes that open dialogue possible.
Phase 3: Turn the Strategic Plan Into Action
A strategic plan only works if it’s executed. Action planning requires strong commitment and communication at every level of the organization. When roles, expectations and timing are clearly assigned, vision becomes a practical roadmap to success. An effective action plan also includes review and tracking steps. Regular evaluation lets your team adapt as milestones are met or markets evolve. Clear direction speeds decision-making and builds confidence at every level of an organization.
Whether you’re aligning a leadership team or an entire industry segment, AgriThority® can facilitate the analysis, alignment and action planning that turn strategy into results.
Case Study: The First Forty Days™ in Cotton
The AgriThority® strategic planning process works across all industries, not just individual companies. Through cotton industry analysis and a strategic planning workshop, stakeholders came together and launched The First Forty Days™ initiative.
“The First Forty Days initiative put me in touch with other perspectives on things that impact cotton,” says Bob Kemerait, Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia. “We recognized the interrelationship between everything that goes into getting a crop established that was always there but needed to be drawn out and brought together.”
Strategic planning workshops brought together people from different disciplines, and The First Forty Days™ was born.
“The collaboration with people who wouldn’t normally be working together was the biggest advantage of the strategic planning workshop that led to The First Forty Days,” Kemerait says. “The facilitation of a multidisciplinary effort brought forward this idea of that beginning period of time, and it has a tremendous impact on what happens later in the season. It led to a greater movement forward and greater success because it was integrated across disciplines and brought the mindsets together.”
“I cut my teeth on the First Forty Days concept, and now I use that same concept as a mental template for me on other crops, as well,” Kemerait says. “It’s always a good time to have a strategic planning workshop that will draw out the importance on why processes are working and where to improve. With razor thin profits for growers, we need to find ways to help them be profitable.”
Contact AgriThority® to start your strategic planning process.
Are your strategies built for extraordinary results?
To accelerate your organization toward top performance, apply our proven strategic process to set direction and build consensus.
Our 3-phase facilitated strategic planning process requires factual Analysis, generates Alignment among key opinion leaders while building strategic imperatives and defining Actions for High-Impact Execution. Implementation of focused and timely action elements assigned by person is paramount.
