strategic planning

strategic planning, disciplined effort to produce decisions and actions that shape and guide an organization’s purpose and activities, particularly with regard to the future. Strategic planning is a fundamental component of organizational management and decision making in public, private, and nonprofit organizations. It is a structured approach to establishing an organization’s direction and to anticipating the future. Through strategic planning, resources are concentrated on a limited number of objectives, thereby helping an organization to focus its efforts, to ensure that its members are working toward the same goals, and to assess and adjust its direction in response to a changing environment.

The process of strategic planning is disciplined in that it raises a sequence of questions that helps organizational leadership examine experience, test assumptions, gather and incorporate information about the present, and anticipate the environment in which the organization will be working in the future. By setting priorities, strategic planning implies that some organizational decisions and actions are more important than others. Much of the strategy lies in making difficult decisions about what is most important to achieving organizational effectiveness. Typically, the strategy encompasses activity over several years and needs to be altered over the course of time.

There are a variety of perspectives, models, and approaches used in strategic planning. The way that a strategic plan is developed depends on the nature of the organization’s leadership, the culture of the organization, the complexity of the organization and its environment, and the size of the organization.

The modern concept of corporate strategic planning grew out of budget exercises carried out in the 1950s in the United States. By the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, strategic planning was occurring in most large corporations. During this time, the U.S. government introduced program budgeting as a way of recording detailed information on costs associated with specific activities covered by a budget. Public and nonprofit organizations recognized the usefulness of strategy formulation during the 1980s, when the notion of marketing for public and nonprofit organizations gained prominence. Most well-known models of public and nonprofit strategic planning have their roots in the Harvard policy model developed at the Harvard Business School at Harvard University in the United States. The systematic analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) is a primary strength of the Harvard model and constitutes a step in the strategic-planning model.

Strategic planning clearly defines the purpose of the organization and establishes realistic goals and objectives consistent with that mission in a defined time frame within the organization’s capacity for implementation. It communicates those goals and objectives to the organization’s constituents. Strategic planning develops a sense of ownership of the plan and ensures that the most-effective use is made of the organization’s resources by focusing the resources on key priorities. It provides a base from which progress can be measured and establishes a mechanism for informed change when needed.

The indicators to be used in assessing organizational effectiveness must be chosen from several possible areas and data gathered from several possible sampling frames. The pattern of strategy in an organization is determined not only by the plans and actions of its leaders but also by forces in its external environment. Because both organizations and environments can change over time, and because different agencies operate under different conditions, no single strategy is universally viable.

Organizations cannot be effective unless they know where they are headed. Effectiveness is not random; it begins with a clear vision, mission, and goals. Formal strategic-planning approaches establish those missions, goals, and visions. Strategic management offers a means of systematically thinking about and reviewing an organization’s direction, environment, and strategies. Strategic planning is essential and continues the process for public organizations that wish to determine their own vision and mission. But strategic planning and continuous change require committed leadership, a supportive organizational culture, an established structure for coordinating and managing the implementation process, and the ability on the part of organizational members to participate in the planning process. Participation can be a powerful device for directing the energy of participants in the public organization.