Strategic plans are the end product of your strategic development and implementation process - not the starting point. They should be written only after you have done your environmental scan and worked through strategic thinking processes to identify your preferred future.
Plans need to be well written and specify clear actions, accountabilities, measures and targets. Equally though, they need to be designed and written for your organisation, not written using software or a template.
And most importantly, plans need to be developed in collaboration with people - from the beginning of the process. If your collaboration is to send out a draft plan for comment by your staff, you are missing the point. Strategy without people is strategy without a future.
Writing effective strategic plans is often a challenge, particularly in terms of aligning action with organisational strategy and ensuring effective performance measures to track outcomes. Plans can suffer from the "what we have is what's in the plan" syndrome, where actions and measures are designed around existing activities and data respectively, rather than on action and data needed to achieve strategic outcomes. These plans are usually very long, and usually ignored in day-to-day decision making about effort and resources.
Thinking Futures works with organisations to build effective strategic plans in two ways:
- reviewing your existing planning frameworks to identify gaps and bottlenecks (usually in the form of too many actions to implement and track), and
- a Developing Meaningful Plans project which focuses on the first stage of strategy execution: alignment of strategy and plans.
Contact Thinking Futures for more information about how to strengthen the development of your next strategic plan. |
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Developing Meaningful Plans
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A Developing Meaningful Plans project takes as its starting point the assumption that plans are the third step in strategy development, and are written after decisions about strategic direction have been made.
Typically run over a four week period, the project has three main stages:
Staff input: prior to the workshop, a short survey gathers information about key issues and concerns held by staff about the current planning process and major issues facing the organisation. Survey outcomes provide one major input into the plan. Interviews of key players in the organisation is an optional step at this stage.
Workshop: a workshop with key staff involved in writing the plan opens with an exploration of what constitutes a meaningful strategic plan, and why they are valuable. Staff are taken through the major planning steps - setting goals that align with organisational strategy, identifying action, performance measures and targets - and then undertake small group work to write draft plans.
Finalising the Plans: working with Thinking Futures as required, the plans are finalised after the workshop in an interative process that builds on feedback about the plan's content from the organisation.
Want to know more? Contact Thinking Futures. |
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