There are so many great systems out there on how to connect strategic planning to tactical operations, to ensure that strategic plans don’t become shelfware (get put on a shelf and ignored).

I’m a big fan of lots of thought leaders in this space, including Cal Newport’s Multi-scale Planning and Agile Scrum.

One key concept is being able to see how your organization/team/self connects all the dots across your productivity system. Below is a picture that shows how this could work.

Some example sources (inputs) of actions:

1. Annual strategic planning creates goals and metrics
2. Major Initiatives – important projects that aren’t in the annual strategic plan
3. Ongoing Operations (Recurring Responsibilities)

These should all feed into a consolidate action tracking system (e.g. Jira, Trello, Basecamp, Excel, Sticky notes on a Whiteboard).

Then several activities should “consume”/work through these actions, such as:

1. Quarterly, Monthly, Sprint, and/or Weekly Planning Meetings/Activities
2. Weekly Top Priority emails
3. Meetings/Discussions – It’s important to capture, publish, and track actions that come out of meetings — I like to have someone send out a meeting recap email after each significant meeting, with some key notes and then an action table with columns like Action, Owner, Deadline; and then someone copies those actions into the action tracking system