how to do virtual strategic planning

The Complete Guide to Virtual Strategic Planning

2020 is almost over (*audible sigh*).

Although it has not been very kind to us, it has taught businesses many lessons, the most important one being that the future is unpredictable, and you can’t be prepared enough.

Looking forward to  2021, the world we knew has changed, bringing with it a host of new challenges businesses must prepare for.  With the impact of COVID-19 on businesses expected to linger until at least the end of 2021 , the need for strategic planning has become more important than ever.

However, with most of the team – if not everyone – working from home, businesses have had to resort to virtual strategic planning.

Without the convenience of everyone in the same room to coordinate their effort, can strategic planning be done effectively online?  In this post, we are sharing some effective tips for conducting strategic planning sessions remotely, hoping it will help you carry out your meetings successfully.

Virtual Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is the process by which organizations determine their vision for the future and develop strategies to get there successfully. It involves:

• Conducting a situational analysis to assess the current environment
• Establishing the vision of what the organization want to become
• Develop the action plans and strategies to get there

Our comprehensive guide to strategic planning covers the process step-by-step and provides useful techniques you can use to simplify the workflow.

While conducting a strategic planning session in-person is difficult enough, doing one online where participants have the option to turn off their cameras and mics, and continue on with any other tasks, is even more challenging.

Let’s see how you can do a virtual strategic planning meeting where participants are actually engaged and stay productive.

Planning the session

A strategic planning session requires the presence of the executives of the company, who often already have many other responsibilities on a daily basis. But their unwavering attention is essential to run a productive strategic planning session. Therefore, when scheduling your session, make sure that the participants have no other obligations they should attend to on the day/s selected.

• Make sure all documents, reports, and access to the tools that will be used during the session are already shared with the participants prior to the meeting
• Encourage the participants to join from a distraction-free space in their home
• Have an agenda outlining the meeting activities; timebox each of them and stick to the time limits as much as you can

Help the team get into a strategic thinking mindset prior to the meeting by

• Creating a neutral space devoid of reporting hierarchies where everyone’s contributions are equally acknowledged
• Encourage participants to share their opinions and suggestions openly, and allow them to do so without interruptions or objections

Increase engagement via video conferencing tools

Video conferencing is the next best medium to in-person communication in a remote setting. Having the cameras turned on is a great way to ensure that everyone is paying attention and remains engaged.

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Skype, and Slack are some of the most commonly used video conferencing and meeting platforms used by remote teams, and you can use them here to conduct your planning sessions as well.

Use a visual workspace to stimulate creative thinking

A whiteboard is an essential tool in an in-office strategic planning session. It’s where ideas shared are recorded, categorized, and prioritized. It helps stimulate and keep track of the conversations and streamline the planning session altogether.

Fortunately, you can use an online canvas like Creately to emulate this experience around your office whiteboard, even during a virtual strategic planning session.

Creately offers an infinite canvas with access to shape libraries over 50 types of diagrams and charts, along with real-time collaboration capabilities including in-app video conferencing, synchronous editing, comment discussion threads, real-time change previews, and mouse tracking.  With it, you and your team can

• Share input on the same canvas, while talking with each other as you do so with in-app video chatting
• Collaborate on brainstorming around ideas, analyzing them and prioritizing them  using simple tools like mind maps and affinity diagrams
• Planning the work to be done along with assigning the responsible parties, and keep track of the progress made
• Using one canvas (or one folder with all relevant strategic planning canvases) to plan and organize all things discussed during the planning sessions
• Share the canvases with external stakeholders and collect their feedback in comment discussion-threads that you can resolve as you go through them
• Export the data charts and diagrams (as PNGs, SVGs, PDFs, or JPEGs) you have worked on during the sessions so you can print, share, embed, or publish them

It also provides multiple scenario-based templates including several for strategic planning;

SWOT Analysis

During your situational analysis, you can use a SWOT analysis to examine the strengths, weaknesses, opprotunities and threats.

Action Plan

Plan and organize steps or tasks you need to complete in order to achieve the strategic goals you have set with this action plan template.

Affinity Diagram

An affinity diagram can be used to organize data gathered from your brainstorming sessions, discussions, analysis and research during strategic planning.

Strategic Planning Canvas

Streamline your virtual strategic planning process and communication around it by bringing all aspects of planning on to one canvas. The template below comprise of a SWOT analysis, process flow, strategy map, action plan and a timeline all on one canvas for easy access and management. Zoom in on the specific area as you work on it with the team.

OGSM Template

OGSM stands for Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures and it is a strategic planning model used to convert a company’s vision into an actionable business and marketing strategy. Learn more about how to use it with our resource here .

You can use this Objectives and Key Results template to collaborate on setting and managing your goals with your team during strategic planning.

Do a series of shorter planning sessions

Instead of an all-day planning session that may only exhaust the participants, plan for several shorter sessions over the span of 3-5 weeks.

For longer planning sessions, take frequent and longer breaks lasting 20-30 minutes to allow the participants to manage their local home environment and attend to any issue that may arise (i.e. feeding their pets) and also refresh themselves occasionally.

Have participants do homework prior to the meeting

Have the participants review and analyze relevant reports and documents, and write down their questions, observations, and recommendations prior to each session. This will help devote time more productively for actual planning, decision-making , and problem-solving during the meeting time.

Keep all documents organized and easily accessible

Numerous reports, presentations, documents, spreadsheets, and marketing assets are exchanged and referred to during strategic planning. And more often than not, these are scattered across various platforms and devices.

Especially when working remotely, where asking for a simple data report may turn into a prolonged Slack chat or even another dreaded video call, it’s important to maintain a central location to store and manage all relevant files and documents, so everyone knows where to find what they want without having to ask another.  

Use a document and file management system like Google Drive or OneDrive to simplify collaborating on shared documents.

What’s Your Take on Virtual Strategic Planning?

A solid strategic plan is crucial for any business to grow and thrive in the ever-changing market they are competing in. With the new set of challenges brought on by COVID-19, it’s become even more important to continue with strategizing for the future.

As of now, it’s still unclear as to when we will be able to conduct physical planning sessions in the future. However, although done online, separated by screens, which may even pose a different set of difficulties, virtual strategic planning is the only practical way for remote teams to go about this right now. With the points above, we hope that you manage to streamline the process of virtual strategic planning successfully.

Got more tips on virtual strategic planning? Let us know in the comments section below.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

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Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist/content writer at Creately, online diagramming and collaboration tool. She is an avid reader, a budding writer and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.

Virtual Strategic Planning Sessions: 7 Tips for Great Strategic Zoom Meetings

By Jessica Wishart

Annual & Quarterly Planning

Here are some tips for having your next quarterly planning session if some (or all) of you team members have to join remotely:

• Use video. Even if some of you are in the same room, have everyone join the virtual meeting with a webcam turned on. This will keep you all more engaged throughout the meeting and make it less tempting to multitask.  This will allow you to read the body language of the participants and be able to encourage participation. The large group should feel as personal as it can be as it will help facilitate problem solving, which is the main reason you've invited the leadership team.
• Rethink your meeting agenda. Don’t just push through the agenda as planned. Give the session more thought, and adjust the agenda to maximize the time and effectiveness of your team. You might decide to spend more time on the discussions portion of the day to work through opportunities and threats related to COVID-19 and less time on another agenda item that’s not as pressing (maybe you finish that Core Customer discussion next quarter, for example). If the thought of doing two straight days virtually is just too daunting, can you break your meeting up over the course of the week? Maybe plan multiple 2-3 hour blocks for virtual planning instead of two straight days to break it up.

• Start with virtual participants. If you are going around the room round-robin style to share something as a group, always start with the virtual participants first. This ensures they aren’t forgotten and feel included and tuned in to the meeting.  It is always best practice to ask open ended questions to encourage them to open up early.  We often recommend opening up the meeting with sharing a story of one of your core values .
• Consider the visuals. If you have people joining remotely, do not rely on white boards and flip chart sheets. The virtual participants cannot see them and will be frustrated and distracted. Use online collaboration tools instead, like Google Docs or Rhythm software, where everyone can see, follow along, and add their input.  Video conferencing and screen sharing help, but you must make sure to be prepared with the proper visuals to ensure that everyone is on the same page.  If you have some of your team in a conference room and some in a virtual meeting room, encourage all of the people in-person to bring their laptop so virtual participants can feel more engaged in real time.  
• Read the room. The facilitator should keep an eye on the virtual folks as well as the people in the room - are people checking out, glancing at emails, getting antsy? Be aware of when you may need to call everyone back to attention, take a break, or mix up the format of the discussion. If you have two days, be sure to get feedback at the end of day 1 so you can make adjustments for day 2.  Virtual planning meetings require you to be constantly reading the room and making adjustments.
• Mix up the format. To keep the team engaged, try some different formats. For example, maybe you can break the team up into smaller sub-teams of 2-4 people for some of the exercises (like writing Red-Yellow-Green on Priorities or voting on top Start, Stop, Keep ideas for the quarter). Some virtual meeting tools, like Zoom , offer “Breakout Rooms” where you can divide virtual participants into smaller groups for small group discussions, which is like having a virtual planning session within your session, and then share the findings with the full team. For the portion of the meeting where the team is working on individual Priorities and Red-Yellow-Green, ask everyone to physically get up and move to a different location to do this individual work. Maybe even ask them to print a paper tool and go outside to fill it out.

Strategic planning sessions can be exceedingly difficult to run on your own in person, let alone a virtual strategic planning session.  Our thirteen years of experience have allowed us to work with thousands of plans and we know the best practices that help your virtual team get aligned.  The strategic planning process is often best left to the experts, especially if you are under pressure to hit the targets outlined in your business plan.

If facilitating a remote planning session seems daunting, let us help you! Our experts can facilitate virtual strategy sessions as well as in-person planning to help your team navigate success in these times.  Learn how to facilitate a strategic planning session with this great blog post, or this article on how to prepare for virtual strategic planning.  Looking for planning tips for an on-site, read the article.

Download our virtual planning process infographic below:

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Additional virtual strategic planning session information:.

5 Best Practices to Manage Remote Employees

Learn More About Virtual Planning Sessions and Facilitators

How to Engage Remote Employees

How to Use Daily Huddles to Stay Aligned with Remote Teams

5 Steps to Having a Productive Virtual Monthly Meeting

The Anatomy of a Great Quarterly Plan (Infographic)

Rhythm Systems   Quarterly Planning Resource Center

Photo Credit:   iStock  by Getty Images

Jessica Wishart

Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images

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Strategic planning during covid-19 pandemic: business planning for 2023, the "balance" of strategic thinking, part ii… strategic metrics: are they in sync, how to prepare for an effective 2024 strategic planning session [video], quarterly planning: use a start-stop-keep exercise [infographic].

Tips for remote strategic planning

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• Strategic planning

The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented uncertainty for companies trying to plan for the future of their organizations during a time of unprecedented uncertainty. But even before COVID-19 caused a massive shift toward remote work, strategic planning at many organizations was ineffective. Teams often lacked clarity on the next steps needed to actually execute plans.

But the heart of the problem is that strategic planning (specifically, remote strategic planning) is often doomed to fail from the very beginning. 

Our approach needs to change. It’s time to focus on fostering engagement, alignment, and clarity to make strategic planning worthwhile and effective.

Where strategic planning fails 

Picture the ideal strategic planning meeting. Everyone gathers around a conference room table, passionately tossing ideas back and forth. It’s a free-flowing conversation filled with energy and the unexplainable synergy of collaboration. Suddenly, someone jumps up, grabs the marker, and takes to the whiteboard to jot down what everyone’s been discussing. One idea stands out, and the whole room knows that’s the right path forward. 

Unfortunately, that isn’t often what happens. 

Strategic planning meetings require lots of preparation. You need to understand the organization’s position in the market, know the resources available, and use all of this information to make sound business decisions. 

These meetings often last several hours, and it’s easy to get off track or stuck in the weeds. When this happens, colleagues lose focus, become disengaged, and start working on other projects or tasks. 

Even worse, ideas get lost, thrown away, or erased from the whiteboard—and even if they are written down, these documents are accessible to only a few people.  

All of these issues can quickly add up and hinder strategic planning. Everyone leaves the meeting with very little to show and no actionable next steps forward. 

How strategic planning suffers from remote work

Working remotely can add to and exacerbate the traditional problems with strategic planning. 

One of the biggest problems for teams attempting virtual strategic planning is keeping everyone engaged and involved. Over 50% of employees have admitted to working on other tasks during virtual meetings. When employees are distracted, they lose the opportunity to offer their own ideas and miss out on critical information. 

This issue is magnified when teams turn to documents and spreadsheets in an effort to replace the whiteboard. If keeping people engaged was a problem before, it only gets worse when everyone is staring at lines of text and numbers. 

Without a truly collaborative space, one person, or a small group of people, can end up dominating the conversation. Others in the group can't share their thoughts and have fewer opportunities to build off everyone’s creativity and insights. 

Organizations miss out on innovative solutions when there is lopsided engagement during remote strategic planning meetings. But companies need collaborative planning and creativity to keep them moving forward. A lack of dialogue leads to poor communication and misalignment of plans. 

We need a solution to drive conversation and engagement, and it needs to not only recreate the synergy found in the office but make it even better. 

The way strategic planning should be

Strategic planning is all about determining the best path forward for your organization and executing that plan. But that’s rarely what happens. It’s time to take a new approach to strategic planning–and that’s where virtual whiteboarding comes in. 

A virtual whiteboard, like Lucidspark, is more than just a digital canvas to brainstorm ideas. It's a virtual strategic planning tool that drives engagement and alignment, making it possible to take action on your strategic plans. 

Here are some helpful tips for refocusing your approach to virtual strategic planning: 

Prep for your meeting

Before the meeting, get your board organized and ready to go. Define and organize your strategy pillars with swimlanes. Plan out your agenda using the Notes Panel in Lucidspark. Create a sectioned-off space on the board designated for brainstorming and ideation. 

Go further and assign everyone a specific color; this way, everyone knows who added each note and idea. In Lucidspark, you can use the Collaborator Color feature so everyone on the board will have color-coded cursors, shapes, and sticky notes. 

Now when everyone comes together, your team can jump right in. 

Foster collaboration

Facilitate the meaningful conversation and dialogue needed to plan the upcoming year and make critical decisions. 

Ask everyone to come to the meeting with a few ideas prepared as a jumping-off point. Try out some brainstorming activities to get your team’s creative juices flowing. Throughout the meeting, ask for teammate’s thoughts and feedback on ideas.

Use the virtual whiteboard’s shared canvas to build off of one another’s creativity and spark ideas from everyone on the team. 

Keep the board organized

Once the board is filled with sticky notes and ideas, it can be a bit overwhelming. The next step is to organize it. One way is to sort ideas based on the lift each one will require. Is it a heavy lift that involves multiple stakeholders and handoffs? Or would it be easily accomplished by one person?

You can also organize ideas based on priority. If you have a ton of high-priority tasks, it might mean you can’t take on as many medium or low-priority ideas until a later date.

In Lucidspark, it just takes a few simple clicks to automatically sort ideas using tags.

Vote on ideas

Whittle down your canvas of ideas by voting as a team. Give dot voting a try. 

Lucidspark makes voting simple and easy. You can determine the number of votes everyone gets and make it anonymous. Even try voting with emojis. No matter how you decide to vote, it’s a great way to get everyone aligned and build consensus to move the project forward. 

Keep an overflow list

After you’ve narrowed down which ideas you want to incorporate into your strategic plan, don’t miss out on the other great ideas that were contributed during this session. 

Save ideas for the future with an overflow list. Just add anything that didn’t get picked up this round to this list. When you come back to the board down the road, you can pick up right where you left off. 

Determine the next steps

This step is often where strategic planning fails. Now that your team has determined the best path forward, you need a plan to achieve it. Establish what happens after this meeting. 

This can mean completing a new customer journey map to understand how customer needs may have changed and aligning those insights with your product strategy. Or you might decide you need to get a new blog up and running to reach prospective clients. 

Whatever it is, write down who is responsible for each action item and what their next step is to accomplish it. With a plan in hand, everyone is aligned and has a clear path forward, making strategic planning a success.  

Strategic planning post-pandemic

No one knows what work will look like six months or even a year from now, but as we adjust to this new normal, strategic planning is more important than ever. That’s why a tool like Lucidspark is critical to moving organizations forward. 

For anyone leading a meeting or a planning session, getting and keeping people engaged and involved in the process is essential. Now’s the time to take advantage of a visual collaboration tool like Lucidspark to foster context, conversation, and planning. It’s time to reimagine what virtual strategic planning can accomplish.

Now it's time to put these tips into practice. Facilitate an effective strategic planning session in Lucidspark.

Lucidspark, a cloud-based virtual whiteboard, is a core component of Lucid Software's Visual Collaboration Suite. This cutting-edge digital canvas brings teams together to brainstorm, collaborate, and consolidate collective thinking into actionable next steps—all in real time. Lucid is proud to serve top businesses around the world, including customers such as Google, GE, and NBC Universal, and 99% of the Fortune 500. Lucid partners with industry leaders, including Google, Atlassian, and Microsoft. Since its founding, Lucid has received numerous awards for its products, business, and workplace culture. For more information, visit lucidspark.com.

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Add some life back into its strategic planning sessions and start turning your plans into action on the spot. Learn how to facilitate a strategic planning session in Lucidspark.

Tips for remaining agile in a remote environment

Though the Agile methodology was created for software development, it is now used across many industries and has even been a great management tool for remote teams. Project managers and project owners following the Agile method are focused primarily on optimizing their teams and delivering a completed product to the customer. How do they do this?  Pre-pandemic, teams would frequently meet in conference rooms, draw on whiteboards, use sticky notes, and collaborate face-to-face. Currently, many teams work from home, which eliminates the possibility of meeting in person.  So the million-dollar question is: How can teams be agile in a remote environment? In this blog post, we will explore the Agile management method and how remote teams can use it to increase efficiency and productivity.

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8 Ways to Improve Virtual Strategic Planning Sessions

By bridget castellini.

Among the seemingly endless changes that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrust on our agency is how we approach strategic planning with our clients. Pre-pandemic, we would engage our clients in our “Going Vertical” strategic process that included three, deep-dive, in-person sessions at our agency. 

These sessions happened in our conference room with rolling chairs, whiteboards and a snack table. We even took advantage of our building’s rooftop deck for breakout sessions and a fresh-air lunch. 

How do you replicate this sort of interactivity and team-building when you’re no longer in the same room? It’s not easy but it can be done, albeit within limits, of course. We’ve spent a year experimenting with ways to improve our virtual planning sessions and offer these eight insights.

1. Identify roles and responsibilities. 

Just like you do before an in-person meeting, take the time to make sure everything is set before the session begins. Note who is leading each segment of the session, and what roles others will play. Appoint a host to populate links in chat and post reminders about what’s next. Make sure those who will share their screens are identified in advance.

2. Prepare, test, practice. 

Prior to the pandemic, everyone learned the importance of testing the screens before every presentation. This is even more important now. So, host a virtual test session on whichever platform you’ll use.

Ask your colleagues to test from the actual location and with the actual equipment they will use for the meeting. It’s always a good idea to do a dry run to make sure everyone’s comfortable with her or his speaking part — and that you can accomplish what you need within your time constraints. 

3. Set clear expectations.

Before the session, set expectations by sharing a detailed agenda with time frames. Send any background info, noting precisely what you expect people to read and absorb prior to the session. 

Place the Zoom or Microsoft Teams credentials in several places — in the invite, on the agenda, etc. Refer to where you are in the agenda throughout the meeting. (Consider using the chat function to remind people of what’s coming next.) If you plan to use breakout rooms, then make sure that’s communicated; people want to know these things in advance. 

4. Record it and transcribe it.

Use the record function. Ask the attendees for their permission first, of course, but recording the session will help to capture everything that is shared. It also takes the pressure off someone trying to capture every word; instead, everyone can focus their energy on engaging and adding value. 

There are several low-cost services online that will machine-transcribe your recording. We have learned that so much is shared during the strategy sessions that it’s extremely helpful to have a recording.

5. Conduct some ice-breakers. 

Start with a short ice-breaker, especially if this is the first time the group is together. You may even want to scatter a couple more throughout the session to help break things up. For instance, ask everyone with a pet to show theirs on screen. Or you can ask everyone to show a piece of art or knick-knack that they’re fond of. Keep them short, easy and include an element of fun.

6. Select your collaboration tools.

If you’re in the office, then whiteboards, sticky notes and markers work great for strategy sessions. How do you ideate virtually and recreate that whiteboard feeling and flow? The good news is that there are several tools out there that do a really good job with this. Google’s Jamboard is a good one. Some of these tools even allow you to incorporate real-time polls and get immediate results. Whichever tool you use, be sure to test the tool and gain confidence before using it.  

7. Surprise and delight. 

Ask a client if they prefer salty or sweet and then send them a snack package that can be unboxed and enjoyed during the session. We like to include a journal that is branded with our logo — a gift we typically give in person at the first session. Clients appreciate the extra touch — even more so now that it’s an extra step to get a package to them. 

8. Survey participants. 

After the session is over, ask attendees to complete a simple form indicating what they did and didn’t like. Use the learnings to improve your next session. 

A virtual strategic planning session is not the same as an in-person meeting. We know that. We’ve done this for more than a year. So why are we still attending virtual meetings that have glitches and hiccups? It doesn’t have to be that way. 

What has worked well for you? Please drop me a line and let me know. 

Bridget Castellini

Bridget Castellini is the managing partner of Wordsworth Communications  and has over two decades of strategic communications experience. She is proud to cultivate a culture that attracts the best and brightest talent. Connect with her on LinkedIn: Bridget-Castellini.

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Bringing Strategic Planning Online

Eliminating static from collaborative strategic planning.

The senior leadership meeting had already lasted an entire day when the CEO turned to his seven officers. “Now that we’ve established the vision of what we want to become, it’s time to develop our plan to get there. This time, I’d like to involve all thirty-six directors, who will bring us a first-hand perspective on our customers, markets, employees, and regulators.” One officer looked skeptical. “We have a hard enough time getting ourselves on the same page. It’ll be challenging to get all our managers in one room focused on one agenda.” Another added, “With all these different perspectives it’s going to be like trying to herd cats.” “In fact,” said the third, “the directors don’t buy into the plan. It’s going to be pretty hard to get their attention”. The CEO shook his head. “And I thought that our strategic planning process was off to a great start,” he mused to himself. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to be that simple.”

Strategic planning is the process that organizations use to establish their visions of the future and develop the strategies to secure those visions. The basic steps of the process are to:

• Understand the current environment
• Establish the vision of the future
• Identify paths, or strategies, to get there

Once a static, calendar based task falling in the domain of the planning department, today’s planning follows a more dynamic model where strategic decision making occurs continuously within the organization. The fast pace of change in the global economy dictates that business leaders have to evolve their strategies “on the fly” as new opportunities or threats emerge. They must listen and learn from their customers and from the employees who serve them. This type of strategic management requires increased input and collaboration from key knowledge workers in the organization. Room must be made for innovative thinking, so the environment in which strategic planning takes place must be open and receptive to new ideas.

When successful, this new participatory and open style of discussion results in a strategic plan that is much more relevant to the business. But the planning process itself is more challenging to manage. Those leading the charge often get caught up in “processing the process”, going through endless iterations in an effort to capture everyone’s view and reach consensus. The result is a process that gets bogged down. The danger is that as participants begin to feel unproductive, their frustration leads to disengagement. Therefore, what starts out as a collaborative endeavor often becomes an inefficient and exasperating exercise.

Incorporating collaboration technology into the process is one way to remove the roadblocks to collaborative strategic planning. This technology speeds up and refines the planning process by dramatically increasing participation on the one hand and productivity on the other. It enables more knowledge workers to engage in a highly effective progression of data gathering and idea generation, leading to a thoroughly documented set of prioritized issues and solutions. It also provides a forum for continued collaboration so that the plan becomes a “living” document that plays an ongoing role in strategic decision making.

How Collaboration Technology Gets Everyone on the Same Wave Length

Group collaboration technology emerged in the early 1990s with the advent of desktop computers and client-server networks. Referred to as “groupware”, computer applications such as email, newsgroups, shared authoring systems, chat rooms and group decision support systems, were designed to facilitate the work of groups. By the late 1990s, the Internet fostered an explosion of webbased collaboration technologies, among them web conferencing, team workspaces, content management systems and online meeting software.

In general, collaboration technology promotes participation because it makes meetings easily accessible. People can participate in most web conferences and online team rooms using a basic web browser. The ability to archive group events makes it possible to participate in both synchronous (“real-time”) and asynchronous (“different times”) activities. And the technology makes it feasible and cost effective to include geographically dispersed knowledge workers. All this facilitates the dynamic, continuous and opportunistic nature of strategic planning today.

Web-based Group Decision Support Software

One category of collaboration technology, which we refer to as web-based decision support software (WDSS), has a dramatic impact on outcome-oriented group processes such as strategic planning. WDSS provides tools for online data gathering, brainstorming and idea generation, prioritizing, voting and documentation. Our experience working with dozens of organizations has demonstrated that WDSS effectively:

Encourages innovative thinking

Anonymous parallel brainstorming produces a higher number of ideas with more novelty resulting in productive “out-of-the-box” thinking. Participants control their own brainstorming process first by contributing their own ideas and then considering the ideas of others. This often generates another round of creative thinking.

Improves the quality of participation

WDSS allows more knowledge workers to contribute their experiences by increasing accessibility, regardless of location and time. It also facilitates a higher volume of input by providing the ability to parallel process (contribute ideas concurrently with others across multiple topics). The result is greater depth and breadth of thinking on the given topic.

Keeps the process moving forward

WDSS boosts productivity in two ways. First, the automated capture of ideas and evaluation online lets the facilitator monitor progress and make immediate information available to participants. Second, the anonymity option has a profound effect on a group’s ability to move through a process without becoming stalled by difficult debates and entrenched positions. It levels the playing field, especially in hierarchical organizations.

Promotes objectivity

WDSS facilitates rational and even-handed decisions. Because everyone has an equal voice and an equal chance to be heard, participants listen differently and less judgmentally. Ideas, regardless of the source, tend to be more carefully considered.

Enhances decision-making and buy-in

WDSS speeds up decision making. With anonymous voting the group moves quickly from divergence to convergence through a series of narrowing, evaluating and prioritizing steps. Because some of the negative aspects of group dynamics are removed and participants feel they have been heard, they tend to stay engaged in the process and show greater buy-in to decisions.

Getting Wired - Bringing Strategic Planning Online

Let’s return to our CEO from the beginning of this article and follow the process that was undertaken in 2004 by Electrogrid, the pseudonym of a private corporation with both federal and state mandates to build and manage the electrical grid. Deregulation of the electrical utility industry had created a complex and uncertain environment in which to create an efficient marketplace providing open, non-discriminatory access to electric transmission services. Increased scrutiny by government regulatory agencies and the resulting compliance requirements, coupled with public skepticism, had created a public relations challenge and a highly charged internal political environment. Previous attempts at strategic planning had failed due to lack of buy-in by the corporation’s managers, starting with the 36 directors. Some of the issues raised were lack of trust among the leadership team and lack of input from those in the trenches.

Integrating Technology into the Process

The CEO wanted to encourage strategic thinking on the part of his extended leadership team. So it was critical that the process include the input of his 36 directors. Recognizing that the group dynamics would be challenging and that the time taken from day-to-day management would be an issue, he decided to incorporate WDSS. His expectations were that the technology would:

• speed up the process
• foster a collaborative environment getting beyond positions and personalities
• enable input from a large group so that everyone gets a say
• provide immediate and complete documentation
• permit the group to collaborate before, during and after the stratgic planning workshop

Electrogrid selected Facilitate.com 8.5, a web-based decision support application, to support both the pre-work and the planning workshops. Facilitate.com 8.5 provides tools for brainstorming and categorization, prioritization, voting, action planning, surveying and reporting. An important factor in the selection of Facilitate.com 8.5 was the ability to set up online surveys and discussion forums allowing the directors to participate from their offices and to identify key focus areas for the workshop. Another deciding factor was the expectation that the anonymity provided by the brainstorming tools would allow for an open and thorough sharing of ideas and give everyone an equal voice in the strategic thinking process.

The Process in Action

As the facilitators, we chose to intersperse a variety of online activities with traditional face-to-face discussion and small group break-outs. We designed the physical layout to accommodate all these activities. A large conference room was divided into two sections. On one side, classroom style tables faced several wall projection screens. A network with access to the company’s intranet was installed so that each participant could connect in with his or her laptop computer. On the other side of the room, we set up several tables for small group discussion, each with one intranet access point. A printer and copier were located nearby. The process consisted of six steps (see figure 1).

Pre-workshop Activities

We used traditional and technology assisted techniques to identify the strategic areas that the group would focus on during the one day planning workshop. The CEO and his officers took part in face to face interviews, while the thirtysix directors gave their input in an online survey and an online discussion forum. The CEO and the officers were able to review the online input and request clarification. They then formulated seven strategic focus areas for the organization.

Strategic Planning Workshop 1 : Morning Session

The morning session kicked off with the CEO’s review of the corporate vision. The next item on the agenda was the Environmental Scan. The objective was to capture as much knowledge about Electrogrid’s environment and key issues as possible. To encourage divergent thinking, the format for this session was anonymous large group brainstorming using Facilitate.com 8.5. Sitting in the conference room, managers entered comments concurrently into their computers, quickly exchanging and documenting ideas on electronic flipcharts. With anonymity ensured, they wrote frankly and read with an open mind. Within thirty minutes, the Environmental Scan produced two hundred well-documented issues of concern to the organization.

The group spent the next 90 minutes commenting on the strategic focus areas. Each focus area was set up as a separate topic with the same series of questions. Participants were allowed to move freely between topics, spending time where they felt they had the most to say. After an hour and a half, each of the seven topic flipcharts contained twenty-five to forty ideas (see Figure 2).

Afternoon Session

The objective of the afternoon session was to consolidate the large group input into a series of strategy recommendations. To facilitate convergent thinking, self-selected small groups representing each of the seven strategic focus areas were directed to develop a strategy brief describing intent, outcomes, challenges and assumptions. They were also charged with identifying the appropriate measurements of success. No technology was used in this activity. Instead, the groups were working from printed reports documenting the results of the large group brainstorms.

By mid afternoon, the small groups had produced draft strategy recommendations. These were presented to the group as a whole, who were asked to comment online and vote on how well each recommendation addressed key issues. (See figure 3).

Quick Tip #1

Make sure that the technology supports, rather than drives the process. Use it only when it adds value.

Quick Tip #2

Use asynchronous collaboration (surveys and online topics) to gather information and identify important topics. Use real-time collaboration for prioritization and decision making.

Quick Tip #3

Large group brainstorms work well for data gathering and small groups for building recommendations.

Quick Tip #4

Use pre-workshop brainstorming online as a way to gather data and give yourself time to design the next steps.

Figure 2: Large group brainstorm on strategic direction

Figure 3: Large group comments on strategy brief

A process that typically takes several days of meetings was accomplished in a single face-to-face session. I was amazed that using the software had such an impact on the depth and quality of discussion. -Workshop Participant

In this exercise, the technology enabled group members to comment freely and honestly, while giving them a structured thought process to keep the discussion focused. Participants had a say on all topics, regardless of their functional area of expertise.

The strategic focus teams continued to work over the next four weeks to refine strategy recommendations. The large group then reconvened for one day to test the strategy recommendations using three scenarios.

Once again, the juxtaposition of small group work with several iterations of anonymous feedback by the large group made it possible to rapidly refine the recommendations while allowing everyone to have their say.

Integrating the Strategic Plan into the Business

The workshop concluded with a brainstorm, this time with the ideas attributed by name. The officers and directors were asked to reflect upon how to make the strategic plan into a “living, breathing roadmap for Electrogrid vision of the future” by sharing their responses to the questions:

• How will the corporate strategic plan affect the business planning of my division or department?
• What will I do to incorporate strategic thinking into the on-going life of the business?

A small group of managers volunteered to work with the Director of Strategic Planning to develop the budgets and controls to complete the strategic plan.

Smooth Transmission – How Technology Made the Difference

The CEO turned to his officers. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the past few weeks. We’ve developed strategies that incorporate the best thinking of all our managers and focus on the key areas comprising our vision. I think we have a roadmap everyone is comfortable with, yet one that we can change whenever we need to. And I feel we’ve become a stronger team as a result.”

How did Electrogrid’s experience measure up against the attributes of good collaborative strategic planning? The strategic planning process at Electrogrid was transformed from unproductive and irrelevant into one that everyone agreed was productive and worthwhile. The use of collaboration technology made it easy for all key knowledge workers to participate and encouraged creative brainstorming within a structured framework for strategic thinking.

The following table sums up the outcomes of Electrogrid’s strategic planning process and the contribution of web based decision support software.

Quick Tip #5

Use anonymity effectively, especially to help break through barriers of hierarchy and politics. Don’t use it when the team is productively focused on developing a solution.

Quick Tip #6

Electronic voting is a quick way to check on the degree of consensus – and move the process along. Sometimes it appears that people are disagreeing, but in fact they are in agreement and simply enjoying the debate!

Quick Tip #7

If you don’t have a good process, technology won’t help you. Make sure the process is sound.

Collaborative Strategic Planning, What WDSS Contributed to the Process and Strategic Planning Outcomes

Leads with strategic thinking.

Online data gathering prior to the planning workshops enabled very large amounts of information to be processed by the leaders of the corporation. The online survey involving all key managers generated a broad view of the critical issues facing the organization.

Leadership listened in a new way. The workshops focused on the strategic areas that were vital to achieving the corporation’s vision. Managers were encouraged to think strategically by considering all focus areas, not just their own.

Recognizes the need to innovate

Brainstorms increased the quantity and quality of ideas and minimized difficult group dynamics.

New ideas were heard without judgment. Anonymous brainstorming and voting created a penalty-free environment for creative ideas.

Is dynamic and continuous

Managers were able to participate fully through online discussion topics and surveys without leaving their offices.

Managers established the context for strategy formulation. They took ownership of the process and were eager to incorporate it into their own operations.

Requires an egalitarian culture

The survey demonstrated a larger degree of consensus on the main issue areas than senior management had expected. Anonymity increased participation and generated more objective discussion.

Having this information made available to participants allowed the discussion to quickly get beyond political infighting. Senior managers were involved in the entire process and able to listen to a detailed conversation among the managers of the business.

Plugging In: Bringing Collaboration Technology into Your Strategic Planning Process

As the old saying goes, “where there is a will, there is a way”. The first step is to decide to adopt a dynamic and participatory strategic planning process. Then, the incorporation of web-based decision support software will provide the tools to structure the strategic discussion so that the process moves forward, new ideas are encouraged and decisions are made objectively. WDSS is simple to implement and it’s easy to justify the cost based on savings from reduced travel and meeting time alone. Most significant, it is an effective way to integrate the knowledge and creativity existing within your organization into your strategic planning process.

About the Authors

Danuta McCall is responsible for services delivery at Facilitate.com, a collaborative consulting and technology company. She combines business strategy experience and facilitation expertise to help clients across a wide range of industries integrate people, processes and technology to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. She has experience working at all levels in organizations, including senior managers and executives, facilitating collaboration, problem solving and innovation across organizational boundaries. Prior to joining Facilitate.com, Danuta spent 17 years at IBM where she developed and practiced effective techniques for leading virtual teams.

Julia Young is a founding partner of Facilitate.com. She is an experienced consultant specializing in group facilitation, organization development and work process improvement with a unique expertise in Internet collaboration. Julia has worked as an internal corporate consultant and HR manager in the high technology industry and as a senior external consultant to government organizations and large corporations in industries such as oil & gas, electric utilities and retail. At Facilitate.com Julia has worked to design and implement practical collaboration tools for the meeting room and Internet. Combining the logical mind of an engineer and a facilitator’s attention to group process, Julia seeks to explore how technology can augment our effectiveness as facilitators.

About Facilitate.com

Since 1992, the California-based Facilitate.com, Inc. has specialized in software tools and facilitation techniques that enhance the collaborative work team environment. In 1996, Facilitate.com was among the first to recognize the potential of the Internet as a collaboration platform and released its first web based product. Since then, its products have been designed to improve meeting productivity and results in virtual, distributed settings as well as in the conference room. Facilitate.com 8.5 helps generate, capture and formalize ideas with tools for capturing, categorizing, voting, surveying and building instant documentation. Facilitate.com has helped over 250 clients in industry, the military and higher education transform meetings into opportunities to unleash creativity, solve problems, and take decisive action.

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FacilitatePro is a pleasure to work with. I have another event tomorrow. Being able to work up ideas in parallel is going to shorten the event by 2 or 3 hours. Also, virtually everyone in the event is a strong introvert. Letting them write anonymously in their own little world should be a great help. And, being able to make real-time changes in a conference as the session evolves helps keep the team on track

How to Lead a Virtual Strategic Planning Session

How to lead a strategic planning session: 3 strategic planning tips.

Right about now, many ImageThink clients are realizing they need to host a remote strategic planning session. These strategic planning meetings, which can help keep the team focused on the big goals ahead, and provide the detailed tactics to achieve them, used to happen with minimal disruption before we were all working from home. The forced move to working from home isn’t working for everyone, and 2020 has thrown a lot of teams and companies for a loop when it comes to cooperative and collaborative meetings. (Read our tips for elevating virtual meetings and leading creative virtual brainstorms for some helpful thoughts.)

The global pandemic, slowing economy, and necessity of social distancing has set many companies behind and made goals set last year seem utterly unattainable. But don’t let the challenge of working from home scuttle 2021 with an unsuccessful strategic planning session.

As we move into what we like to call strategy season, ImageThink is helping clients capture and leverage their most valuable insights from a tough year, even in a virtual environment. We’ve collected 3 of our favorite strategic planning tips for doing so below.

Tip 1: What You See Is What You Get

Meeting together in person is a whole body experience. You mingle by the coffee, smell the whiteboard cleaner, notice your attention drifting to the window every so often. But most importantly, you instinctively pick up on far more conversational cues than are readily perceived online. Things like body language, eye contact, the understood excitement when multiple people try to jump in on an idea.

Instead, most online conference applications require participants to look at a Brady-Bunch inspired tableau of talking heads (including their own), or worse, a wall of black tiles with their colleague’s initials. Occasionally someone will share their screen, and the company’s best and brightest get to watch the words slowly populate, character by character in a Word document.

It’s not exactly inspiring stuff, and it instantly kills any momentum generated around a good idea. It’s also not as fast as operating together in real time around a whiteboard or flipchart, and many of the online versions of those tools haven’t quite cracked the experience.

Including a graphic facilitator, who can help guide and record your virtual strategic planning session visually, share their screen as they write, draw, and map out your best ideas dramatically increases attendee attentiveness, participation, and feelings of value as they see ideas marked and added to the board. Not only is the content more engaging in the moment, but it is more memorable, and provides a clear map of next steps and action items, with owners that your team can refer to moving forward.

Tip 2: Not Everything Has to be Done Live!

When we work with our clients remotely, we also build in additional time to prepare templates and visual frameworks that we’ve found increase creativity and help participants remember key takeaways better.

Part of the challenge of remote meetings, is that they fail to capture the fluidity and conversational nature of their in-person counterparts. Businesses are competing with technology, disparate time zones, and also every individual employees work-from-home setup.

It’s why as we work with more and more clients who have gone to full remote setups, we have baked in more planning time, and encouraged the use of templates, frameworks, and pre-made visual elements to help jump start the brainstorm, meeting, or remote strategic planning session. We find these elements help to open people up, who are missing the traditional pre-meeting preamble and chit chat.

Tip 3: Remote Strategic Planning Takes Longer Over High-Speed Internet

When discussing how to conduct a strategic planning session, perhaps the greatest tip we can offer is to allow more time. Space your sessions out. It’s natural to suppose that in the absence of travel, bathroom breaks, breakfasts and lunches, that these important meetings, when hosted virtually should be wrapped up more quickly. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Time is the secret sauce to developing good ideas. The reason off-sites and national conferences work so well is that they force people to press pause, collect their thoughts, and see what new and inventive ideas pop up. And while Zoom fatigue is very real, the temptation to shorten your strategic planning retreat should be resisted at every cost.

Instead, ImageThink always suggests spreading that one-day virtual strategic planning session over two days, and creating a virtual-specific strategic planning schedule. Take the 3-day retreat and schedule the agenda over the course of a week. This serves many purposes. It ensures that people don’t get burnt out on a full day of staring at a computer screen and wearing headphones, it allows more everyone to contribute (both in real time and asynchronously), and most importantly, it allows everyone on the team to have a break to think for themselves and develop their own thoughts and ideas, that can be questioned, examined, and stress-tested in the next session.

Face Uncertainty with a Remote Strategic Plan ning Session

A global pandemic, peaceful protest marches, violent police abuses, wide ranging business closures, a stock market on a trip to the moon, and an election year. If 2020 has a defining quality, it’s instability.

Instability creates, encourages, and broadens uncertainty, and the only thing worse than uncertainty is uncertainty without a plan. Plans can be bent, broken, adapted, and remade (as many of us have experienced this year), but with a strategy in hand, your team will be able to head off challenges with a clear map, that they helped develop.

Whether remote, in-person, or in a hybrid form, strategic planning sessions are more critical now than ever. Give yourself extra time, create engaging visuals, and plan for a successful 2021.

If you find that you do need additional help running your meeting, consider contacting us for virtual meeting facilitation . Our team is ready to discuss how we can help today

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Strategic Planning: Virtual or In-Person?

By Anthony Taylor - February 21, 2022

SME Strategy is a strategy consulting company that specializes in aligning teams around their vision, mission, values, goals and action plans. Learn more about how we can help align your team with our strategic planning and implementation services.

Strategic planning - should you do it virtually? Should you do it in person? What are the pros and cons?

So at SME Strategy, we facilitate strategic planning, we facilitate stakeholder engagement, and we support teams with the implementation of their strategic plans . And one of the big things that's coming up with teams these days, especially because of the variant and COVID-19 changes and restrictions for travel, is the pros and cons of doing strategic planning online.

Since COVID, came to be in about March 2020, we've shifted all of our programs online, and we've actually had really great results - I would argue better results being online. But it was mainly out of necessity. Now that we have the option of either meeting in person or virtually, you as the leader, you as a meeting organizer have to decide which of these do we want to choose? And what are the pros and cons for each? So that's what we'll cover in today's video.

So, starting with virtual. What are the pros of doing virtual strategic planning sessions ? To start, shorter sessions are more engaging. So instead of doing your typical two or three day off site, what we're doing is three hour sessions over a series of weeks. So for a typical strategic planning session, we would do it over five weeks, three hours for each session. And what's really great about that is that we condense the content. And then people can focus for a short amount of time versus being burnt out after two full days.

The other benefit of doing it virtually is it's a lot easier on the calendar. So if you've ever participated in an offsite, you had to basically be away from your phone or email for two full days or three full days. When you come back, everything is backlogged, you feel overwhelmed, you're sitting at the desk, and you're wondering about all these emails coming in. So you're not actually fully present. When you do it online, it's a lot easier for people to find a three hour block over a series of weeks. And it's easier to schedule in for most people.

One of the huge pros of having a virtual strategic planning session is that you save on costs. You save on travel costs, you save on flight costs, you save on food costs, and you save on room costs. And if you've ever had to plan one of these meetings, it can easily be $20,000, $50,000 - depending on how many people you're bringing in. So there's significant cost savings, meaning you don't have to lose the upside of doing the planning, but you don't have the associated costs to support all of those people.

Another pro of doing a virtual strategic planning session is equity of voice. So when you have a good facilitator who can manage the room, like us, everybody has the same Zoom square. So whether you're the CEO, whether you're the VP, whether you're a manager, you have the same size square on Zoom. And it's a lot easier to manage the conversation - it's not monopolized by one or two people. So if you're looking to have equity of voice and hear from everybody, having those little squares actually makes it really supportive.

>> Read more: How to Defeat Work-From-Home Burnout and Zoom Fatigue

Plus, digital tools can be used to solicit feedback. So we use JamBoard, Mentimeter, Google Docs as a means of pulling out information. And then people can take the information for what it is versus the weight of the person sharing it. Now, of course, there's always going to be that like slight consideration. But if you want to be able to have balanced perspectives and hear everybody's perspectives, then virtual is a great option for you.

The final pro of having virtual sessions is the time between the sessions. So I mentioned earlier that if you do a full two day strategy session, your brain is burnt out because you've just been going for 16 hours straight. Plus, there's usually some activities after. What's great about the virtual sessions is you get to have a three-hour chunk. And then you have a week as a team to talk about it, discuss it and unpack it. So if there's anything in the session that needs to be realigned on, refocused on or clarified, you have that time. Especially for SMEs, small and medium enterprises that are looking at developing their capacity for strategy work as it might not be in their DNA currently, it's a great way to build that muscle up. Hey, we have our session, we've got an hour homework, we've got that session, we've got an hour homework. So you get into the habit of building strategic conversations. And those five weeks, six weeks, seven weeks of practicing are going to really support the two three years of strategy execution moving down the road.

So I love virtual sessions - we get a lot done. It helps us help a lot of people because we can scale it and get across from Canada to the US and other countries. And it might be a great option for you, mainly because of the cost savings but also the outcomes are very, very high. And everything is way more focused. You're getting the best of people every time and they're not getting distracted.

>> Watch more: How to Re-think Your Virtual Meetings & Communication

We can help you align your team around a clear vision, mission, values, goals and action plans,

s o you can lead your organization more effectively and get better results.

Now some people say Hey, if I'm gonna have a meeting, if I'm gonna have a strategy meeting, it needs to be in person. With COVID, and all of the restrictions that might be happening, you might be pushing off those meetings for 6 to 12 months. So keep in mind that's a consideration as well. But a lot of people are saying Hey, it's time we can get back in-person. Why would you want to do that over a virtual?

Well, there is definitely the case for stronger in-person relationships and deeper connections. You really do get to understand a person better when you're sitting next to them. There's the non work time, going for dinners and chatting with people. But just getting to know the people that you're working with is great for building trust. So definitely a pro out of that - sharing mealtimes together. That's the informal conversation that adds the sort of meat to the bones of the strategy. You get to unpack some things, you get to talk about personal things, it'll really support the sort of team building camaraderie component of organizational development, which is important.

Another pro - you get everybody's full attention. So I want to say it's easier than being distracted. Because on your computer, even if you're focused on your computer, you may have alerts pop up, you may have your phone pop up in-person. It's a lot easier to sort of mandate and support - you do not check your cell phone, you do not have any other devices, you don't have anything that will blip and beep, you just have a pen and paper. So you do get greater attention. The flip side to that is after 12 hours, people are kind of burnt out, and you sort of lose their attention.

Next - conversation flows more naturally. This is one of the big things that teams have been struggling with for the past 18 months. You can only have one person talking at a time on Zoom. So when you're online, you want to be really conscious of not interrupting or not talking over somebody. Or if there's lag, it can be kind of awkward. In person, you have a lot better understanding of when that person's done a point, you can talk over them if you want, you can get a little bit more energetic or heated. And so that does have benefits because it can move faster. Downside of that is that you get a lot of multiple conversations at once. So pros and cons to that.

And the final benefit of in-person sessions is you get more of an opportunity to do the nonverbal communication. You get to see how people are feeling. You get their truest communication, mainly because some people just aren't that comfortable communicating through Zoom - they just don't find it as effective. 93% of communication is nonverbal. So you'll have a better chance of seeing people's body language, shoulder movements, head movements, and nods yes if you're in-person.

So it really comes down to the in-person session is about understanding those little intricacies - the trust building, the relationship building, and then the sort of banter side part of team development. Ultimately, you got to do what works best for you and your organization.

The pros for virtual - cost savings, time savings, flexibility. Plus, it's a little bit more resilient, given the fact that everything that's going to happen with COVID over time. You won't have to delay your strategy work, which is critical team building work, you don't have to put it off. Just because you can't meet in-person, it's important work you need to do. I would argue you need to do it now more than ever. So don't wait to have it in-person.. do it virtually.

The flip side is, if you really want to build that trust, you really want to have some tough conversations, and if you have to have tough conversations, most would rather do it in-person. In that case, put up the extra cost, and use it as an investment for your team building in the long term.

So, strengths of virtual - you get to do it fast, you get to do it more easily. And I think you get great outcomes from it. Plus, it saves a lot of money. Benefits of in-person is that you get to have that interpersonal peace, you get that team building, you get those casual conversations, and sometimes you get to have more honest conversations because you're not so worried about how it comes across (thanks to that nonverbal communication).

Ultimately you've got to look at what's works best for you. But I want you to keep in mind you have to do it. So for me, if it was a choice between not doing it at all, or doing it virtually - pick virtual. We've been doing it great, and having the right facilitator is key for that.

So if you are looking to align your team, move that forward in-person or virtually, be sure to click this link for a no obligation consultation . We'll just talk to you about your options, what the process could look like, and how it would fit best for your team.

So if you enjoyed today's video, be sure to like and subscribe to learn more management and strategy tips . My name is Anthony Taylor. I'm the Managing Partner at SME Strategy. We hope we can work with you in the future to help you get to where you want to go, along your One Destination journey.

Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.

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