All across the world, organizations and institutions pour resources into the strategic planning process. The strategic plan (SP) is essentially the most critical blueprint to sustain an organization's thriving and effectiveness. Some basic definitions of the strategic plan describe its intention as detailing the purpose and direction of an organization. Your organization's strategic plan is quite dramatically a magnetic resonance image (MRI) of your entire body; furthermore, and perhaps more literally, the strategic plan outlines the purpose of the organization and the goals of your organization over the course of several years.
Our organizational wellness firm prefers to define a strategic plan as a collaborative administrative-care process for nonprofits and companies that design the purpose, intention, and impact of the entity. Because we take a holistic approach to strategic planning, we might ask (a) How can we be well as we endeavor to live into our mission, vision, goals, and values? and then an Embodied approach asks the question (b) How can we live into our mission, vision, goals, and values?
Strategic plans come in many different shapes and sizes — This means that your organizations may require a strategic plan for many different reasons and you will need to be very clear about this reason before posting your request for proposals (RFP), or before hiring a consultant that specializes in Strategic Plans.
Here are five (5) different types of strategic plans your organization may consider:
- The Basic or Fundamental → Establishing an organizational mission, vision, goals, objectives, and values.
- The Issue-Based or Goal-Based → A comprehensive option, secondary to the Basic Strategic Plan, to expand the organizational goals by identifying strategies to achieve the organizational goals. This type of strategic plan includes an implementation process, a review process, and a modification process.
- The Alignment → Interrogating organizational processes or problems that could indicate a misalignment with the mission or future of the organization. In this type of strategic planning process, we want to discover what’s not working, why it’s not working, if it needs to be modified, or if we need to adopt a new process.
- The Scenario → When external factors such as policy change, demographic shifts, or a global health pandemic (e.g. COVID-19), etc. impact the internal operations of the organization. Most organizations have recently experienced being thrust into the type of strategic plan without warning in the last few years.
- The Transformative → In partnership with other strategic planning approaches, the Transformative, involves leadership development coaching and a culture-shifting element to foster a change individually, collectively, and organizationally; responding to organizational harm and organizational trauma.
How Do We Know When We Need A Strategic Plan
Whether your organization is tiny, medium-sized, or a large organization, having a strategic plan is the best thing you can offer your organization. If you’re interested in establishing a thriving and impactful organization, consider starting your strategic plan now.
When organizations have strategic plans, it helps them:
- Clearly define the strategic direction of the organization.
- Keep organizational leaders, teams, and impacted communities clear on the organizational focus.
- Maintain organizational awareness of who the organization is and why the organization exists.
- See into the future of the organization.
Every organization needs a strategic plan in order to thrive.
On the road to becoming the most impactful organization, sometimes we need to open up Google Maps or Apple Maps for iPhone users. And if you’re uncertain of how to approach strategic planning, there are firms and experts like myself, interested in supporting your organization through the process.
If your organization has a strategic plan, ask yourself, when is the last time we reviewed our strategic plan? Ask yourself is it time for our organization to build a transformative and sustainable strategic plan.
Before sending out the RFP for a strategic planning consultant, ask your teams what kind of strategic planning model is needed — and try to avoid building a plan that will sit in a manila folder on your Executive Director’s desk never to be looked at again.
Build a strategic plan that lives and breathes, and that shapes a thriving organization for the betterment of your teams and those you serve.
