Studies have shown that the organizations which are successful over the long-term have one thing in common – they each have a strategic planning process in place and have developed a mission and vision that guides their organization.
What Is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is typically comprised of several components, including developing a company mission and vision, as well as defining the goals and values of the organization. Developing these components establishes the direction of the company and helps to position the organization for success in the future.
Mission and Vision
A mission is a public statement of the organization’s purpose. It defines the purpose of the organization for the public and prospective customers. The mission is a concise statement about the organization, its uniqueness and reason for existence.
A vision statement is an internal statement that defines the direction of the organization – defining long-term goals that the organization hopes to achieve in 5 to 10 years. The vision drives the goal-setting process and helps keep everyone in the organization focused and moving in the same direction.
Organizations often go through quite a bit of research prior to strategic planning, especially if they conduct external and internal scans for a SWOT analysis to determine what the company’s overall Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) are.
And more recently, one of the newer trends in strategic planning is to do a SOAR analysis, which focuses on the company’s Strengths, Opportunities, Achievements and Results. It focuses on the positive, and driving the positive, such as:
- How can the company utilize what’s good about the organization?
- How can it use its strengths and opportunities in order to achieve its vision?
- What will things look like five years down the road?
- How will the company get there?
- Who are the company’s customers?
SOAR is part of the appreciative inquiry theory and practice (Stavros, Cooperrider, Whitney and Fry, 2008. Appreciative Inquiry Handbook: For Leaders of Change). It is relatively new, and some are calling it one of the bigger innovations in strategic planning models in recent years.
Goal-Setting and Values
Once a company has defined its vision, departmental goals can be developed, then individual performance objectives, so that every employee can see exactly how they will be contributing to the organization as a whole.
Values define how the employees should work together in moving toward their goals, and in essence, the company’s culture. The behaviors exhibited by the management and employees should ideally reflect the defined values of the organization.
So strategic planning is really the foundation for aligning every department, and all the employees, with the goals and culture of the organization.
In my next Insight, I will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the strategic planning model.