Part 1 of 4: Strategic Framework vs. Strategic Plan

Co-authored by Galen Ellis and Selma Abinader (www.abinadergroup.com)

How do y'all create a road map for the future of your organization that can adapt to changes in your surroundings over time? Consider developing a Strategic Framework instead of a Strategic Plan. What is the divergence between the two?

Welcome to the starting time in a 4 article serial on strategic planning.

To be successful today, all organizations must bear their planning efforts in a way that accounts for our circuitous and speedily evolving environment. The traditional Strategic Program seeks to chart a class from Point A to a Point B many years in the future. While this is a very useful practice, it often fails to factor in how individuals, organizations, and institutions collaborate, react, and adapt to each other or to the changing environment they're working and living in.

Strategic Framework planning is a more on-going, flexible process that allows groups to customize their efforts toward meeting the vision twelvemonth to yr while making ongoing adjustments to their objectives and strategies based on progress, irresolute ecology atmospheric condition, funding, regulations, and other internal or external forces.

To better empathise these two dissimilar approaches, let'south imagine nosotros are working with one of our clients. In a facilitated procedure to develop a Strategic Framework, our client, a public health bureau, selects their broad strategic directions for the next v years. These are carefully selected focus areas on assessed internal strengths, weaknesses, and forces in the environs that help or hinder the achievement of their vision. They are seeking to increment the consumption of and access to good for you foods and beverages, and increase participation in and access to physical action through education, policy, and systemic modify interventions over the next five years. If this client was completing a typical strategic planning process, they would go along to place measurable objectives for each of their strategic directions to determine their programming for the adjacent five years. Simply what happens if this organization suddenly finds itself with an unexpected shift in climate that makes the communities they serve become more apt to pursue policies that (for case) increment sales taxes on sugary sodas and other policy changes? Or the contrary – tides change and there is less political will to engage in policy change? Or perhaps budget priorities change the chapters to hire staff or provide grants and contracts to local organizations? Or if there is a new influx of resources or enquiry pointing to the effectiveness of an arroyo not previously considered? These what if's are countless, but past committing to broad, long-term strategic directions and and so developing brusk-term implementation plans on a more than frequent basis, this organization will be more flexible; and therefore, more likely to push the needle on these well considered priorities.

Both the Strategic Plan and the Strategic Framework are developed to systematically establish a fit between what an agency does well and what is happening in their external environment. They both focus on identifying and resolving factors in the internal and external environment that impact an agency'due south ability to achieve its mission and desired vision of success.

The Strategic Framework is generally made up of the get-go three components, with the remaining components making up what nosotros phone call The Tactical Implementation Plan. The Strategic Framework clearly defines how the system needs to focus their efforts more in alignment with their values, vision, mission and the external surroundings on a more brusque-term, year-to-year basis.

Our advice in these rapidly changing times? Don't create a strategic program. Rather, build a strategic frame. With this flexible framework, yous can still set out on long journeys from Point A to Point B, just with more pit stops to accept in the view and evaluate the path. Think of it as the difference between bringing along a printed route-map or a smart phone app similar Waze, which is constantly updating based on user input, atmospheric condition and road weather condition, construction, and the turns you make up one's mind to brand. Your Strategic Framework is yours! It should be relevant to your needs equally they evolve. Review it. Tweak it. Make it your ain.

CONTINUE READING:

Part 2: Celebrate and Drag Who Y'all Are and Why Yous Exist! Values, Vision, and Mission

Part iii:The Environmental Scan: Using Informed Insight to Manifest Your Vision

Part iv: Doing What You Exercise Best: Wise Selection of Strategic Directions