Strategic Planning is a management tool that can be used to focus the organization’s energy and resources; to ensure that members are working towards the same goals and objectives; and to assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to changing environments. Although disciplined and rational in its construct, strategic planning is as much art as it is science. A thoughtfully crafted, well-executed strategic plan helps people move faster, achieve more, and spend less time on things that don’t add value.

Strategic Planning is most useful when it supports strategic thinking and leads to strategic management. Strategic Thinking means continually asking the question, ”Are we doing the right thing?” It requires a clear sense of the organization’s mission, an understanding of the relevant socio-economic and operational environment, and creativity in developing appropriate responses. Strategic management implies managing day to day in a ways that focus on the most important decisions and actions. It is naturally adaptive and keeps an organization relevant.

The notion of strategic panning in business today has roots in the military model. Although our understanding of how it applies to management has been transformed in the past 50 years, one key element remains — aim to achieve competitive advantage. More recent models of strategic planning have focused on navigating change and organizational learning. “Strategic ability,” the hallmark of an agile organization, is becoming more important than the strategy itself.

Given that all kinds of events will cause the unfolding of history to differ from the plan, the ability of an organization to succeed has more to do with its ability continuously to transform itself rather than whether it has the right strategy. This focus on transformation — on organizational learning and building internal capacity — is central to the success of most organizational development projects.

Benefits of Strategic Planning

Although a credible strategic panning initiative requires a modest commitment of financial and time resources, the benefits can be extraordinary and include:

• A framework and clearly defined direction that guides and supports the governance and management of the organization
• A uniform vision and purpose that is shared among all constituencies
• An increased level of commitment to the organization and its goals
• An enhanced ability to set priorities and to match resources to opportunities
• Greater ability to deal with risks from the external environment
• A built-in process to help with crisis management

Models

Although strategic planning efforts are best designed to fit the specific needs of an organization, most models includes the following steps:

1. Explore Mission & Vision: The organization’s vision sets out the reasons for its existence and the ideal state that it aims to achieve. The mission identifies major goals and performance objectives. Both are defined within the framework of the organization’s philosophy and used as a context for development and evaluation of intended and emergent strategies.
2. Conduct Assessment & Gap Analysis: This step involves scrutiny of the organization’s internal and external environment. There are a number of useful models that can be applied to this process including the “SWOT” analysis — an examination of the organization’s internal Strengths, internal Weaknesses, external Opportunities, external Threats. The process leads to the identification of the strategic issues the organization has to address on order to accomplish its mission and move towards a desired future.
3. Establish Strategic Programming: To address strategic issues and develop deliberate strategies for achieving its mission, an organization must put in place strategic goals, action plans, and tactics. Strategic goals must be specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic, and time/cost bound. Actions plans define how an organization will get to where it wants to go and who will be accountable for getting it there. Tactics are specific actions taken to achieve goals and implement plans. Strategic planning promotes cohesion and channels the organization’s energy and resources.
4. Structure Evaluation & Review: Periodic evaluations of strategies, tactics, and action steps are essential to assess the relative success of the strategic planning process. Performance should be measured no less often than quarterly to evaluate the effect of specific actions on long-term results and on the organization’s vision and mission. The review may lead to changes or adjustments in the plan to include integrating emergent strategies.

Some business executives would argue that strategic plans are out of date by the time they are promulgated and are, therefore, a waste of time and energy. Certainly the pace of business today is urgent and coercive. Yet there remains much value in engaging the process on a regular basis as a way to hone strategic thinking and strategic managing skills, and as a complement to team building and performance management mandates.

(Editor’s Note: David Porter is a Poulsbo-based management consultant specializing in helping small and medium sized businesses. Reach him at 360-779-2334 or drporter22@comcast.net.).