The best way to predict the future is to create it.
—Peter Drucker
Don’t let the future happen to your organization—create it!—with strategic thinking and strategic planning. The two are different. Strategic thinking should be a continual habit, while strategic planning should be a recurring exercise. I can help you with both.
Strategic thinking includes:
- Asking questions to identify and clarify problems
… but people and organizations generally aren’t good at asking and answering tough questions about themselves. They need an outsider to pose the questions.
- Finding new ways to think about opportunities and challenges
… but your knowledge may be so finely tuned to your specialty that you don’t know about, or can’t figure out how to adapt, strategies from outside your specialty.
- Using the hidden knowledge and talents of your staff and stakeholders
… which a talented facilitator can draw out.
Strategic planning is a structured process of thinking about and writing down where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there.1 Here’s how I can help you with each of those topics:
- Where you are: This is the complete picture of where your organization now stands in terms of its mission, programs, procedures, people, and more. Do all your people have the complete picture they need to do their own strategic thinking? Could you even draw that picture accurately and completely in your own mind? I can ask you questions and draw for you a well-organized, user-friendly sketch of where you are that you can then share with your people to help them contribute to the strategic planning process—as well as make better strategic choices every day.
- Where you want to be: This is your dream of where your organization should be in terms of its mission, programs, procedures, people, and more. Just one of the ways I can help here is by facilitating the planning process so leaders are free to participate and subordinates feel free to speak up.
- How to get there: This is the sequence of steps needed to get from where you are to where you want to be. There are a number of paths from here to there; a strategic planning process I custom-design and facilitate for your organization helps you find the best of the many paths.
Contact me for a free consultation on how I can help facilitate your own or a grant-mandated strategic planning process, or design a process just for your organization.
Notes
- This section draws heavily on John M. Bryson and Alston, Farnum K., Creating and implementing your strategic plan: a workbook for public and nonprofit organizations., 2nd ed. (Chichester: Pfeiffer wiley, 2005). ↑
