Tackling Strategic Planning

Strategic planning has long been a business practice in America as a tool to develop and work toward organizational goals. While the process of developing a strategic plan and its content have evolved a great deal since the 1950’s, it has typically centered around the business leaders defining the organizational goals and objectives. (Blackerby, P. 1993 and Blackerby Associates, Inc. 2003) Once adopted, the strategic plan runs for a three to five year period. Public sector and non profit organizations have been applying the concept of strategic planning to their institutions for more than 35 years as a tool to assess their effectiveness. 

At the core of the typical strategic planning process is the organization's mission, vision, and belief statements. The late Richard DuFour believed that when a school's beliefs are put into action everyday by faculty, staff, and administrators, then the district mission would be seen in action and its vision would come closer to realization. This would work equally as well in private and non profit sectors. 

The next step in the process is to identify key indicators of organizational performance. Once identified, a three year look back at performance on those indicators will be put together for the team to review and identify current issues the plan might address. The team will also identify potential issues that could impact organizational performance that come from entities outside the organization.

The work of the team to complete the first two steps of this process allows them to develop goals and objectives to address the agreed upon key issues to improve the organizations performance. These are put in writing using language that aligns with the organization’s mission, vision, and beliefs. The strategy behind the plan is then put on paper in the form of actions the organization will take over the next year to meet each one of the stated objectives.

Finally, the team sets quarterly meeting dates to evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented actions in regards to meeting the objectives and benchmarking where they are in their journey to implement the strategic plan.

The mission, vision, and belief statements identify the culture we want our organization known for and to be seen in the actions of employees on a daily basis. As mentioned, the typical strategic planning process requires the planning team to fully immerse themselves into these key documents. While the language of these documents aligns with the plan’s goals and objectives, and there may be action steps that could be connected to improving organizational culture, these plans rarely include an analysis of data indicators. This means that the planning team will not  know if their work genuinely moved the needle on organizational culture toward their mission, vision, and belief statements.

It's time for strategic planning to evolve once again and gather indicators of organizational culture to use in the development of the plan itself and place an equal amount of support from the facilitator on the quarterly evaluation process. Once there are goals, objectives, and action steps to improve culture, the plan needs to identify a very specific tool to gather data throughout the year for the team to use to evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented actions. For quality evaluation of the rest of the plan, the planning team should identify ways to collect actual data points to review quarterly for all action steps aligned with each objective. This will make the evaluation process more meaningful for the team and for the organization as a whole and increase the likelihood of successful implementation of the plan. 

It is important to note that DuFour also said time and time again that schools spend too much time planning and not enough time acting, evaluating, revising, and acting again. The most important work of the strategic plan isn’t in its development, even though that is very important. Rather, it is in the implementation of the action steps found in the plan, the evaluation of their effectiveness, the revision of the action plan, if necessary, and finally, the further actions taken moving forward. The process is repeated as the year progresses.

Businesses, both large and small, along with schools and other non profits, have invested significant resources in the development of their strategic plans annually. The process requires the participation of several staff members and stakeholders, multiple days to develop, and a significant investment of financial resources. Has your organization's strategic planning process delivered significant longitudinal improvements that are commensurate with the significant resource investment over time? 

If you would like to discuss how your organization could benefit from a new strategic planning process, reach out to Bob Mackey at Building Better Futures, LLC to set up a time to discuss this further. 

Blackerby, P. (2003). History of Strategic Planning. Retrieved January 3, 2023, from http://www.blackerbyassoc.com/history.html