July is one of my favourite months of the year.
Across Australia, organisations are approving budgets, refreshing strategic plans, and mapping out the next 12 months. Through my leadership consulting work with commercial businesses, charities, and faith-based organisations, I spend a great deal of time sitting in boardrooms facilitating these conversations. It is one of the parts of my work I enjoy most because every organisation is different. Different markets, different challenges, and different ambitions.
Yet I am continually surprised by how often the planning process looks exactly the same.
Too many strategic planning days become an annual ritual. The PowerPoint gets updated. Last year’s goals get reworded. The budget is adjusted by a few percentage points. Everyone agrees the discussion was productive, everyone enjoys the lunch, and very little actually changes.
Strategy should never be an exercise in documenting what you are already doing. It should challenge what you believe, expose what you have overlooked and give you permission to think differently. A planning day should leave the leadership team slightly uncomfortable because the best strategy rarely emerges from comfortable conversations.
After building Back In Motion from a single suburban physiotherapy practice into a national footprint, I learnt that our biggest breakthroughs rarely came from writing better plans. They came from asking better questions and having the courage to act on the answers.
As you enter the new financial year, here are five questions I encourage every leadership team to wrestle with.
1.What are we pretending not to know?
Every executive team has an elephant in the room.
It might be a leader who is no longer the right fit, a declining service, a tired business model or a cultural issue everyone politely avoids. The greatest strategic opportunities often begin with the most uncomfortable conversation. If your planning day never creates a little tension, you are probably not discussing the right things. The issues that everyone quietly acknowledges in the corridor are often the very issues that deserve the most time around the board table.
2. If we were starting again today, what would we never build?
Success creates baggage.
Over time we accumulate products, meetings, reports, committees and processes simply because they have always existed. During my years at Back In Motion, some of our best decisions were not launching something new. They came from having the courage to simplify, remove complexity and focus on what genuinely created value. Sometimes subtraction is the highest form of strategy. Every activity you stop doing creates more capacity to excel at the things that matter most.
3. What could we become genuinely known for?
Many organisations confuse growth with expansion.
In reality, the organisations that outperform are often those that become exceptional at one or two things rather than average at twenty. Ask yourself this simple question: “If someone mentioned your organisation in a room full of potential clients, what would you hope people immediately said about you?”. If the answer is not obvious, it probably is not obvious to your market either. Reputation is rarely built by trying to be everything to everyone.
4. Are we building systems or depending on heroes?
One lesson I have learnt through serving on commercial and not for profit boards is that organisations become fragile when success depends on a handful of gifted people.
The healthiest organisations invest relentlessly in leadership development, succession, culture, and systems. Great people matter. Great systems allow great people to flourish long after the founder has stepped away. If your organisation cannot perform well without one or two key people, your next season of growth will always be limited.
5. Does our budget reveal our priorities?
Here is a simple test.
Ignore the strategic plan for a moment and simply look at the budget. If I could only see where you are investing your money, your people and your leadership attention, would I accurately identify your strategic priorities?
Too often budgets are simply last year’s numbers with a few adjustments. Instead, they should become a financial expression of the future you are intentionally trying to create. Your budget tells the truth about your priorities far more honestly than your strategic plan ever will.
The new financial year does not necessarily require a new strategy. It requires fresh thinking. The organisations that thrive over the next decade will not be those with the thickest strategic planning document. They will be those willing to challenge assumptions, have courageous conversations and continually rethink how they create value.
The smartest leaders do not simply write better plans. They ask better questions.
And more importantly, they have the courage to act on the answers.
Jason T Smith is a leadership consultant, keynote speaker, author, and entrepreneur. He founded the Back In Motion Health Group, growing it from a garage start up into one of Australia’s largest allied health organisations. Today he advises commercial businesses, charities and purpose driven organisations on leadership, strategy, and sustainable growth. Jason is the author of UNLIKELY and Outside In, Downside Up Leadership and speaks nationally on leadership, organisational culture, strategy and building organisations that thrive.