The words strategic planning tend to send people scurrying for cover.  The groans can be heard for miles as staff cry, “Why me? Why now? Why plan?”  But strategic planning doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t even have to be long.  Think of it more as tactical thinking and doing.  We do this all the time, whether it’s at home planning a trip, or just getting through our busy weeks and months. 

Probably the most important part of strategic planning is the part of making something happen that moves your organization in the right direction.  Without conducting laborious assessments you as the leader often have a sense of the right direction.  Cultivate the personal skills of observation, listening and awareness and apply them daily.  A second personal skill that will help is the ability to set priorities and stick with them.  Often leaders in organizations wait until months of assessment work and input from stakeholders to set a priority list.  With a little digging you can probably find that level of work has been done in your organization more than once to date (unless you are a very new/young organization).  Use that information and your own knowledge as the leader, and set some organizational priorities that you can justify. Once those priorities are set, it makes it so much easier to make concrete decisions. Remember that to be successful you can’t be everything to everyone, so when a new issue or problem arises, if it is not essential to your mission, or moving you toward a vision of excellence in your work, it needs to be owned by someone other than your organization.  You can always support others in their work, just don’t take it on yourself.

Past chair of the HA Section, Giorgio Piccagli explains that “For me, a strategic plan points to a target and tells us the emphasis we will put in that direction. It allows us to say what is important and what we will do. Even more important, it allows us to say what we will not do. I think a clear statement of vision, mission, and direction allows people to save their energies proposing things you will not do, and also acts as a recruiting mechanism for human and other resources to implement that plan.”

Often when leadership changes, new leaders believe they need to go through strategic planning.  It’s essential that those leaders spend some time looking at the organization and determining how many times those employees have already been asked to strategically plan already.  Too much strategic planning can lead to a lack of strategic doing.   While a full-blown strategic planning process is sometimes necessary to shift the direction of an organization, it isn’t always essential, and particularly in organizations where leadership changes frequently.

So think carefully before investing in a full-blown strategic planning process and find out if you can’t instead do a little strategic investigation and build on the good historical work that might be in your organization already.  Your employees will be happy to tell you if they think a strategic planning process is needed or warranted.

To comment or share your thoughts on this article to be included in the next HA edition, please e-mail tricia.todd0002@umn.edu.