Lean Strategic Planning (Winter 2025)

About the Program

Far too often, leaders find themselves overwhelmed by unfocused strategic, management and individual plans, inundated with too many priorities that consume far more capacity than is available. In the Lean Strategic Planning program, leaders will have the opportunity to refine their leadership approach with this innovative 1-day program tailored to streamlining the annual planning process. This practical, action-oriented program provides leaders with a strategic approach and a comprehensive toolkit to reduce the number of priorities they take on, with greater focus and better execution, saving capacity for unexpected events, better execution, and a more humane pace of work.

Elevate your learning journey by exploring our complementary program, the Lean and Agile Leadership Program.

Who Should Attend?

Leaders (Senior Managers to Executives) who:

• Are charged with creating and implementing strategic plans for their organization, branch, department, or work unit.
• Wish to create better, more realistic, plans and strategies that make breakthrough progress.

What You Will Learn

1. What Lean Strategic Planning and Deployment are and how they differ from traditional planning and execution.
2. Key shortcomings of traditional strategic planning (the cost of too many priorities, starting with the solution instead of the problem, lack of consideration of true capacity, low ownership of the plan, lack of an effective retrospective routine and visibility throughout the year) and how to address them.
3. How to gain consensus on the “must-do, can’t fail” versus “should do” versus “don’t do” priorities, and how to say “no, not yet” to lower-value priorities.
4. How to respond to unplanned, unexpected events throughout the year.
5. How to create ownership and alignment of the plan at all levels, from the highest executive levels to the front lines.

Program Takeaways

1. A practical toolkit for implementing a Lean approach to planning and techniques for utilizing this toolkit in your planning process.
2. A better understanding of how to assess available capacity , and how much capacity the plan will consume, enabling the creation of more realistic and achievable plans.
3. How to use the concept of “Catchball” to create broader and deeper ownership of the plan across various organizational levels and silos, enhancing the likelihood of successful execution.
4. How to manage and optimize execution of the plan throughout the year, including how to get the “critical few” priorities completed ahead of all others, and reduce the amount of effort priorities require.
5. Strategies for building organizational buy-in and support for this Lean approach to planning and execution.

Program Facilitators

Craig Szelestowski

Facilitator

View Profile [+]

Craig Szelestowski

×

Facilitator

Craig Szelestowski is a Lean government and transformation specialist with close to two decades of experience implementing dramatic turnarounds in Canadian government. He started Lean Agility Inc. in 2010 to apply Lean exclusively to government organizations. With his coaching, his clients have reduced lead times by up to 80%, increased capacity by up to 200% and created outstanding levels of employee engagement. 

In his public service career, as Vice President of Human Resources, Lean and Quality, he lead the Royal Canadian Mint’s Lean transformation which helped move the organization through a challenging era of cutbacks and job losses into an extended period of financial and organizational health and stability. During his tenure, the Mint realized tens of millions of dollars of Lean improvements, dramatically reduced the time and effort to deliver its products and services, moving from a financial loss, to a profit of over $68 million. In terms of employee engagement, it improved from 100 grievances per year to 20 per year and was named by Maclean’s magazine as one of “Canada’s Top 100 Employers” from 2007 to 2010. 

Over a period of the past sixteen years, Craig has introduced and/or applied Lean in over 60 projects in more than 25 public sector organizations in Canada.

He is widely regarded as one of Canada’s foremost experts on the application of Lean to both knowledge/project based work as well as to more transactional work such as permits and applications. An excellent speaker and facilitator, Craig has been called upon to share his expertise at numerous conferences across Canada, including: the 2018 Canadian Lean Summit (Results, Not Resistance: Building Buy-in and Execution into your Lean Initiative), the 2016 Conference Board of Canada Public Sector Transformation Conference (Taking a Lean Approach to Deliverology), the 2016 Ontario Public Service Lean Community of Practice Symposium (Banish the Backlog in Non-Transactional Processes), the 2016 Canadian Government Executive Annual Conference (Deliverology: Risks and Opportunities from a Lean Perspective) and the 2015 Canadian Government Executive Annual Conference (An introduction to Lean Government).  

Craig has served multiple times as a part-time professor at the Telfer School of Business at the University of Ottawa. He is currently the co-designer and instructor of Telfer’s White and Yellow Belt Lean Service programs and teaches Lean to Telfer’s MBA students.

Craig offers his services in both of Canada’s official languages; he served as the Mint’s Official Languages Co-Champion from 2004 to 2010.

Close