Eight questions to ask before you hire a strategic planning consultant
Most selection conversations focus on two things: what happens in the session, and what it costs. Neither is a good predictor of whether you will have something usable a year later.
If you are on a board or leading an organization that is about to commission a strategic plan, you are probably comparing two or three proposals that all look broadly similar. Everyone will facilitate. Everyone will deliver a document. The prices will be different enough to matter and not different enough to decide.
These are the questions I would ask, including of myself. Some of them are uncomfortable, which is rather the point.
1. What happens after you send the document?
Ask it plainly, and listen for whether the answer has any substance. For a lot of planning work, the honest answer is "nothing", because the engagement ends at delivery. That may be perfectly acceptable if your organization has the internal discipline to carry it. If it does not, you are buying a document, not an outcome.
2. Will the objectives come with owners and dates?
A strategic objective with no named owner belongs to nobody. A milestone with no date arrives whenever. If the proposed deliverable stops at the level of goals and themes, someone in your organization will have to do the breakdown work afterwards, and that person almost certainly does not have the time.
3. How will the initiatives be sequenced?
Not listed. Sequenced. Ask how dependencies will be identified and what happens when two priorities need the same person in the same quarter. This one question separates people who have delivered plans from people who have written them.
4. How will you test whether we actually have the capacity?
Planning sessions are optimistic rooms. If nobody in the process is checking the plan against the calendar and the payroll, you will approve a plan that requires about 1.4 of your executive director.
Most plans fail on arithmetic, not ambition. They assume time nobody has.
5. Who will actually do the work?
In larger firms the person in your selection meeting is frequently not the person who will run your sessions or write your plan. That is not automatically a problem, but you should know it before you sign rather than after. Ask for names, and ask what happens if that person leaves mid-engagement.
6. Have you worked with organizations shaped like ours?
A chamber of commerce is not a small company with a board attached. Volunteer directors rotate. Authority is shared. Decisions take a meeting cycle rather than an afternoon. A consultant whose entire background is corporate will build a plan that assumes a decision speed and a staff capacity your organization does not have.
The same is true in reverse. If you are an owner-led business, a consultant who only works with public bodies may bring more process than you need.
7. What will you tell us that we will not want to hear?
This is my favourite question, and the answers are revealing. A consultant who cannot name anything is either not paying attention or is planning to agree with you for the duration of the engagement. Neither is worth the fee.
You are not hiring someone to validate the direction you already had. You are hiring someone with enough distance to say that three of your five priorities are actually the same priority, or that the initiative everyone is attached to has failed twice before.
8. What does the review cycle look like, and what does it cost?
Ask this even if you do not intend to buy it. How a consultant answers tells you whether they think of a plan as a deliverable or as something an organization runs. If review is not part of how they think, it will not be built into what they produce, and your plan will be structured for approval rather than for use.
A note on price
Cheap planning is not a saving if the plan does not get delivered. Expensive planning is not a guarantee of anything either. What actually determines value is whether the engagement produces something your organization can carry after the consultant has gone.
Whatever you decide, get the scope and the fee in writing before work begins, with the phases separated out. A proposal that cannot be broken into phases is a proposal you cannot scale down if your budget changes, and budgets change.
And one question for your own board
Before any of the eight above: why are we doing this now? If the honest answer is that the last plan expired, you will get a plan that expires. If the answer is that there is a real decision to make or a real change coming, you will get something worth the effort, because the room will have something to actually decide.