The recent blizzards hitting the Eastern parts of our country led to shutdowns of federal operations in and around DC, Baltimore, and other major government centers. Thousands of federal employees were told to stay at home. Hooray, snow day! But wait a minute. Most of these folks, I would bet, have a computer, Internet connection, and telephone in their house. The government should realize natural and other disasters will from time to time make commuting to the megalith office blocks of the bureaucracy impossible, but why can’t most government workers just telecommute?

There are two principal reasons for this obvious solution not being embraced and implemented. The first is culture. An office-based culture finds it hard to define work as anything that can happen outside the four walls of the building. Work is both a job and a place. But large corporations and nonprofits of all sizes have long embraced this cultural change, enabling people to work from home or the road. The government can do it too.

The second reason is technology. Many government departments have old computer systems and high security concerns, which makes logging in remotely difficult, if not impossible. It is time for those system to be upgraded, allowing our public servants to do their work, without necessarily commuting, and even during a blizzard.

Does your organization have a “snowmaggedon” plan that the Feds could learn from?  How would your organization continue to provide vital services in the face of a commuting disaster?

A January 25, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention.  Entitled “Strategic Plans Lose Favor, Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Decisions” by Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli, the article describes several big companies’ efforts to find a better way, in the current economic uncertainty, to plan for the future.

Walt Shill, head of the North American practice for Accenture, is quite blunt: “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead. Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.” Corporate planners are increasingly revising their forecasts monthly, but this too is the wrong solution in my opinion. It consists of continually moving the goal posts. When you first miss your numbers, recast them. Next month, repeat.

It is great to see corporate America, and consulting giants like Accenture, beginning to see the problems with long-term static planning approaches to strategy. We identified similar problems in the nonprofit sector years ago and prescribed a better approach to strategy, our Real-Time Strategic Planning methodology, which was described in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution in 2008. Sometimes our sector leads the way! In this work we describe an ongoing strategy process designed to anticipate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.