Address the elephants

The Argenti System is designed to concentrate your thoughts on the truly strategic issues.  These are the ones you must get right if your organization is to prosper in the long term.  All your other decisions, hundreds of them, will follow logically from these key strategic ones.  The hallmark of effective strategic planning is the small number and the great significance of the decisions it tackles.  The most important of all its many special features is the way in which The Argenti System conducts the strategic review to find and address just these few key issues – no more than six.  We believe this rule is unique to our system.

The Argenti System sees the strategic planning exercise as an elephant hunt - the Chief Executive and his team join together as a hunting party to search through their company and its environment for those issues that are of elephantine long term significance.

Because the Argenti System teaches them to ignore anything that is not of this huge gravity the exercise never becomes bogged down in detail – like so many other 'advanced' systems of planning do.  The Argenti System is designed to identify only the top six strategic issues - the 'strategic elephants'.  It then invites the planning team to determine a small set of highly effective strategies to deal with these six key issues.  Get these right and all the lesser problems fall into perspective.  Get them wrong, and the detail won’t matter anyway.

Why only six?  Because you can’t do everything;  so you better make sure you do the important things.  Strategic planning is the responsibility of executive management.  If they don’t do it, it won’t get done.  So they need to work out, at the highest level of the organisation, what the strategic priorities are.  The Argenti System has never seen an organization - even those in very serious difficulties – that has more than six.

How it works

The Argenti System is provided as an HTML document with hypertext functionality.  It consists of:

  • The System itself - which takes the Chief Executive and his team through the five stages of the strategic planning process
  • The Planning Facilitator’s Guide - which shows the planning assistant how to control the process
  • The Knowledge - Guidance Notes which support key aspects of the process and provide standardised definitions to improve cooperation.

When you purchase The Argenti System on-line it is downloaded into your computer where you can print it out or transfer it to your colleagues' computers.  

The first Action, which can only be tackled by the Chief Executive, is to form a Planning Team and to select a Planning Facilitator. The System explains exactly who to select, and why.

The planning team, and the planning facilitator

The formation of a small, temporary, planning team is an essential feature of our System.  The team members are supported by the Planning Facilitator, also temporary, who is directed step-by-step through the process by his Planning Facilitator's Guide.  He may email us for additional advice at any time and as often as he needs. (The Planning Facilitator may be a member of your own staff, or an external contractor – including an accredited Argenti Planning Facilitator. For guidance on selecting the best option for your particular circumstances, see Facilitation.)

Under the chairmanship of the Chief Executive, and closely aided by the Planning Facilitator, the Team moves through a series of strictly programmed meetings and workshops.

We strongly suggest that at two of the scheduled sessions a number of additional managers join the planning team in a tightly structured discussion.  The key to your selected strategies being effectively put into operation by your management is to generate their enthusiastic ownership of them. Our long experience of facilitating these processes in a wide variety of nations and corporate cultures means that, by following our detailed advice, an extraordinarily high level of engagement is usually achieved. This means that the people who will be putting your strategies into action - your top and middle managers - will do so with great enthusiasm. Without that, many plans simply fade and fail.


 

  
How long?

The primary elements of the strategic planning process can typically be completed in 8-10 weeks. The actual timeframe will vary with the size, complexity and circumstances of each organisation, particularly including:

  • the availability of meaningful information on historical performance of the organisation and some peers
  • the structure and calibre of existing forecasting and reporting systems, and
  • the level of testing required to validate proposed strategies and assess them for risk.

Argenti knows that it is easy to get distracted, so the process is designed to build momentum at every step. Indicative timelines deliberately provide just enough time to complete the work-up for each successive stage.

A version to suit you

There are four versions of The System - three for companies, and one for not-for-profit organisations (NPOs):

  • Standard version
    Suitable for all companies of every sort and size including co-operatives, mutuals and partnerships, but less attentive to the particular challenges of smaller companies and groups of companies.
    Price A$4450
  • Smaller Companies version
    Especially modified to assist with the problems of strategic planning in smaller companies, family businesses and start-ups. Also suitable for smaller co-operatives, mutuals and partnerships. We define Smaller Companies as those with fewer than 100 employees and turnovers less than $20m.
    Price A$2670
  • Groups version
    Groups face a number of special difficulties in strategic planning associated with their need to plan at several levels in their sometimes complex hierarchies. This version has a number of sections on the coordination of several planning teams at Group, at Division and at Profit Centre levels.  (Groups which have purchased a Group version may claim a 20% discount when they subsequently order a Standard Version or a Version for Smaller Companies for any of their subsidiaries).
    Price A$6230
  • Non-Profit Organisations version
    Non Profit Organizations (NPOs)require a very different approach to the one for companies. Companies invariably adopt just one aim - profits - while NPOs display an amazing variety of goals. Defining exactly what these are, and quantifying them, is one challenge; several others are addressed in this Version which is valid for all types and sizes of NPO.
    Price A$2670

Key Strengths of The Argenti System

  • It focuses the organisation
  • It is far more systematic than any other known scheme and is designed to bring into the strategy discussions everyone who can usefully contribute.
  • It pushes senior executives to contribute – often for the first time - at the strategic level, where their input is most needed
  • It results in a small but completely practical set of strategies.
  • Its instructions are clear and simple - it takes you through the process of introducing a formal, disciplined, system of strategic planning step by step; it avoids the use of management jargon and academic techniques.
  • It is based on more than four decades of hands-on experience of introducing strategic planning into many hundreds of companies and not-for-profit organizations all over the world
  • It shows how to avoid the major planning mistakes that many organisations still make today
  • It undergirds and interfaces readily with existing business planning, forecasting and budgeting, and performance measurement processes.
  • Because of all these special features, it usually has a quite amazing effect on the morale of everyone concerned
  • It improves the security and future performance of those organisations who use it.

 

 

  
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Argenti Systems (Australia) Pty Ltd ACN 121 557 104