STRATEGIC PLANNING

Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning

The pace of change in organizations is accelerating. Consequently, high-performing organizations or units within them attempt to engage in planning, designing, and managing their own desired future rather than simply reacting and responding to changes imposed on them by the environment. Strategic planning is believed to be an important aspect of organizational health, and processes outlined to complete this task are thought to be unifying for the organization.

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 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 well controlled effort to make basic conclusions and activities that form and direct what an association is, what it does, and why it does it, with a aim 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 method is well controlled in that it calls for a certain alignment and pattern to hold it concentrated and productive. The process raises a sequence of questions that helps organizational leadership examine experience, test assumptions, gather and incorporate information about ...