Planning to Succeed

Over the years at Fox & Associates we have progressively become more aware of how important regular Strategic Planning is.  Carl has been the driver behind this push to think more strategically, inspired by business guru and writer Jim Collins.  In our last round of strategic planning, we came up with the CREATE acronym for our values, which was fantastic, but also arrived at a mission statement that doesn’t sit quite so comfortably with us now.

So, this year seemed an excellent time for us to again think strategically and update our plan for the long term.  The timing, as all of Canterbury work on the redevelopment of our city, seems perfect.  We engaged the folk at Results.com to help us out and found involving them was very beneficial as it kept us to deadlines and focussed us on… results.

The first step was to confirm our core values, we picked up the previous set, dressed them up a bit, and ended up with: ‘stronger together’, ‘value excellence’, ‘be creative’, ‘enjoy it’, ‘connect with people’ and ‘be generous’.  We believe that these values are already embedded in our culture, our work output and the style of our dealings with clients

Next, we teased out our organisation’s purpose.  We asked ourselves ‘What inspires us to go  into work each day?  We concluded that we are motivated to provide ‘creative solutions for people, property and places’.

Thinking big, we set a huge, but entirely achievable, goal for ourselves – probably the most challenging and exciting part of the process.  Sharing this goal is in itself a challenge because not only our team, but also our clients, will now be able to hold us accountable for reaching it!  We boldly plan to have achieved completion of 45 legacy projects by 2028.

We define legacy as those projects which achieve recognition or innovation or both.  Legacy projects will typically also be long lived, large or complex.  These are the projects of which we feel especially proud.

We believe planning strategy is a process every organisation should regularly do, especially when confronted by huge change within an organisation, or following events like natural disasters. Our strategy ensures that everyone at Fox and Associates understands their role in the company and how they contribute to the big picture. We’ll be keeping you posted as we progress towards our 2028 goal.