Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is an unavoidable part of organizational management and decision making in public, private, or nonprofit organizations. It is a means of establishing major directions for organizations and a structured approach to anticipating the future and exploiting the inevitable. Through strategic planning, resources are concentrated in a limited number of major directions in order to improve effectiveness and [Page 934]performance of an organization. Strategic planning is a tool for finding the best future for the organizations and the best path to reach that destination. As with any management tool, it is used to help an organization do a better job—to focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, and to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future.

The strategic planning process is strategic because it involves preparing the best way to respond to the circumstances of the organization and its environment. The process is disciplined in that it calls for a certain order and pattern to keep it focused and productive. The process 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. Strategic planning is ultimately a set of decisions about what to do, why to do it, and how to do it. Strategic planning sets priorities for organizations. Because it is impossible to do everything that needs to be done, strategic planning implies that some organizational decisions and actions are more important than others. Much of the strategy lies in making the tough decisions about what is most important to achieving organizational effectiveness.