Preparing for All Potential Outcomes: How HRSD Used Innovative Scenario Planning to Future-Proof its Organizational Strategic Plan

INTRODUCTION The heart of any organization's strategy is what it actively chooses to do and not do and how effectively it executes those choices. However, strategic plans often fail because organizations tend to go through the motions of developing the plan simply because common sense says 'every good organization must have a strategic plan', or because the organization doesn't appropriately focus on specific results, has only partial commitment of executives and staff, doesn't have the right people involved in the plan's creation, or has difficulty accepting the change that often results when a strategic plan is implemented. PURPOSE This presentation will showcase the dynamic and long-range strategic planning toolkit and process components that the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) used to explore and prepare for future known and unknown driving forces, adapt to emerging trends in the industry, and leverage innovative scenario planning to prepare for a wide variety of potential futures to remove much of the uncertainty associated with the implementation of typical strategic plans. This has enabled HRSD to continue to deliver the highest level of service to its customers in a flexible and dynamic manner. ORGANIZATIONAL ASSESSMENT Methodologies for conducting an organizational PESTEL assessment, to evaluate HRSD's current internal and external environmental drivers, will be shared. PESTEL is a strategic framework that breaks down opportunities and risks into Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal factors (see Figures 1 and 2) and can be an effective framework to prioritize and organize corporate initiatives and strategic actions. SCENARIO PLANNING HRSD used Scenario Planning to examine external forces that can impact the way it may need to operate in the future, determining the external drivers of change that may be difficult to predict (but that should be incorporated into the strategic planning effort) and developing strategies and actions that benefit HRSD and its stakeholders under a variety of potential futures. Scenario planning is a disciplined way of describing uncertainties and anticipating a wide range of future outcomes and making choices today that best position HRSD for those outcomes. Figure 3 presents HRSD's Scenario Planning Process. From the results of the PESTEL assessment, HRSD identified its primary drivers of uncertainty and identified Regulations and Community Perception as the two drivers that were most uncertain relative to HRSD's future, and also the two that had the largest potential impact to HRSD's future operations (see Figure 4). Once these primary drivers of uncertainty were identified, HRSD plotted them in a scenario matrix, named each scenario (see Figure 5) and worked to describe each of the four resulting scenarios (see Figure 6). These scenarios were then used to guide the development of Strategies and Actions that would most appropriately position HRSD for an uncertain future. Those Strategies and Actions that were identified to be appropriate in all four potential operating scenarios were deemed as 'Must-Do's', as they would work to strengthen HRSD's position in any of the four potential operating futures. Those that were identified in two or three of the four scenarios were also reviewed, validated, and prioritized before adoption into the Plan to ensure alignment with the developed Goal Areas and key Objectives. IMPLEMENTATION HRSD successfully unveiled its completed Strategic Plan in March 2023 at an internal 'HRSD Live' Conference. The first of its kind at HRSD, the conference consisted of 54 staff presentations across several concurrent sessions with attendance by over 75% of the organization. The review of the completed Strategic Plan was the highlight of the keynote address provided by HRSD's General Manager. As the success of HRSD's Strategic Plan will ultimately be determined by the HRSD employees required to implement the Plan, a proactive change control strategy was developed to get staff at all levels of the organization involved in the planning process at the appropriate points and levels of development, to accept the changes that will be brought about by the new Plan, and to implement strategies to remove barriers to the Plan's acceptance. To that end, HRSD created a detailed implementation roadmap for each of the Plan's Actions, including identifying all necessary steps, deliverables, deadlines, budget, and Action owners, along with targeting an 18-month timeframe for the completion of each of the Plan's Actions. This helps to ensure that individual accountability is inherent in the Plan, and that it is revisited every 18-24 months to validate Action progress and completion, develop new Actions for each Objective (as necessary), and track implementation progress and success. Finally, to ensure that its new Strategic Plan becomes a 'living plan' to help drive its activities and budget for the next decade and well into the future, HRSD developed its Plan in a digital/dynamic format (using Microsoft PowerBI), so it could remain current, be accessible to staff across the organization, and stay attuned to HRSD's changing needs throughout implementation.