Strategic Planning
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” – Yogi Berra
Strategic planning is a time to take stock of your current situation, clarify your purpose, set a vision for the future, and identify a clear path to get there.
Typically, you, your team, and sometimes others outside your team or organization will collaborate through these four phases:
- Getting Ready. Before moving forward, you must ensure everyone goes in the same direction. Confirm a mutual understanding of the purpose and expected outcomes of your project, and of the role of leadership in the process.
- Getting Real. Conduct an honest and critical assessment of your situation. What are the current capabilities, opportunities, resources, and needs surrounding you? Review the relevant data available, such as reports and employee engagement survey results. Conduct interviews and surveys to get a pulse from those who should be benefiting from your project to ensure you’re meeting their needs. Reflect on similar projects you and your team have completed and ask successful teams from the organization for their advice. This part of the process should be tailored to fit your current situation and timeline. Don't put off planning until you have ALL of the possible information—sometimes you need to put assessment activities on a to-do list for later iterations of your plan.
- Getting Together. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming, and you can move through a process to come to consensus. Get together to sort out the details:
- Review of situation assessment: The strategic planning team reviews and discusses information included in the situation assessment. In addition, this may include documentation of organization history, trends analysis, and appreciative inquiry into organization success factors.
- Mission statement: Creation or review of the organization’s mission statement, with attention to clarity of purpose, customers and values.
- Vision: In a given time frame (often 3 – 5 years), what will be accomplished? Vision elements emerge from brainstorming and shared discovery of themes, and may include a mix of external and internal desired outcomes.
- Strategies: In a given time frame (often 1 – 2 years), what needs to be done to achieve the vision? Referring to the vision described above, the team drafts a variety of approaches for reaching its vision. Brainstormed strategies are organized to describe the group’s consensus on its future directions.
- Action plans: What specific steps need to be done to initiate the strategies? The planning team develops initial implementation plans – activities with visible timelines and assignments that can be done in the next 3 - 6 months to kick-start the work.
- Getting Started. Strategic planning is a series of collaborative and critical conversations about the work – you still have to do the work. With a great strategic plan, you set yourself up for success, and it becomes easier to adapt to change.
Resources from the Enterprise
From MMB’s Management Analysis and Development
MAD'S Approach to Strategic Planning
Resources from Successful Teams
