Strategic Planning: Why Bother?  Part 1

Life is a journey, not a destination; it is a process, not an end point. In the spirit of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, a truly examined life can be a journey of self-discovery: a Journey into the Self.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

—Socrates

For some, life is viewed as a time of many opportunities and too many choices. For others, life is a struggle with challenges and frustrations. For a select few, life is not a problem to be overcome, but a mystery to be explored—perhaps even solved. Personal strategic planning, by using its powerful and penetrating questions, can provide a life-long technique or process to deal with the “cards one was dealt.” It may help the practitioner to optimize one’s life—to get the best out of life, not simply the most out of life.

For others, strategic planning may be a process that focuses on identifying and eliminating “toxic” people and forces from their lives. For many, it will serve to address crises; for others, opportunities. For just a few, strategic planning will be an ongoing way of life—a lifestyle by which they constantly update and address their goals and celebrate their efforts and successes.

The History of Strategic Planning

The story of formal strategic planning started some 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic Age, in the Karakadag Mountains of southeastern Turkey. With the planting of einkorn (a primitive variety of wheat), the Agricultural Revolution began. Humans had been competing with other, often faster and larger, animals in a world of hunting and gathering. Homo sapiens were just another animal except for two key items in their toolkit: the ability to communicate with words; and the ability to think, reason, and plan for the future.

In the intervening ten millennia, all human progress and civilization has been linked to this ability to plan: to collect and store seeds, to select and till the soil, and to plant, nurture, harvest, preserve, and process food. Along with animal husbandry, this deliberate modification of ecosystems permitted a massive increase in human population. It also allowed individuals and society the time and stability to specialize in developing ideas, concepts, products, and services.

Over these hundred centuries, there have been many periods of human endeavor and achievement that have been linked with strategic planning. During the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and the two World Wars in the twentieth, strategic planning has played a key role in meeting the demands of industry. Formal strategic planning has resulted in great successes as well as dismal failures, from multinational corporations like General Electric to the politically-driven disasters of the Communists in the former Soviet Union.

While strategic planning addresses the future, it cannot predict it. It can assist in dealing with some aspects of our world of accelerated change and instability which are driven by a number of dynamic forces:

·     Technological advances

·     Telecommunications

·     The “Global Village”

·     International competition

·     Multinational corporations and ventures

·     Instability of organizations

·     Time-based rapid competition

·     Worldwide excess industrial capacity

·     The threat of economic depression

·     Increased consumer expectations

·     Government intervention (laws/regulations)

·     The power of diversity

·     Population explosion and shift

·     Changes in values

Many aspects of these changes may also apply to one’s personal life. When successfully applied, strategic planning has accelerated many of these changes. It is ironic to note that while strategic planning has solved many problems, it has also created new challenges and revealed countless opportunities.

Classic Strategic Planning and You

In this age of rapid change and uncertainty, replete with untold challenges and opportunities, every organization, every business, and every person needs a game plan, a compass, a road map; that is, everybody needs a strategic plan.

Since prehistoric times, some level of planning, albeit primitive, has played a key role in the survival and success of humankind. Formal or informal, even at a subconscious level, planning has been applied to a wide range of human endeavors from hunting and gathering, to farming, trade, exploration and military excursions.

Strategic planning has proven to be a powerful management tool for one’s business or professional life. In its most basic form, strategic planning:

·      sets direction

·      allocates resources

·      evaluates alternatives

The Author’s World of Strategic Thinking and Planning

After earning a degree in Chemistry, I went on to Cornell University for an M.D. degree. Next I completed an internship and residency in pathology at the University of Vermont. To meet my military obligations, I served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Fresh out of the CDC, I was named as the Chief of Pathology at a medical center in New England at the tender age of 33.

It was an opportunity of a lifetime. I co-founded a medical group, using the organizational design of synergy (equality and sharing) instead of classic hierarchy. The awesome power of synergy carried us successfully along for almost a decade.

In 1981, I developed a one-page plan entitled by an acronym: “WIAFDIHIDLOY/M” (“When it all falls down, I hope it doesn’t land on you or me”). This one-page strategic plan addressed the “crises” our group was experiencing as we expanded into the increasingly complex and competitive world of healthcare. The plan listed specific potential crises, their immediate or long-term effects, and how each might be neutralized or minimized in the present or in the future. This planning process, which augmented the organizational power of color-coded file cabinets and three-ring notebooks of my youth, served us well for several years.

Eventually, I was introduced to full-fledged strategic planning and became addicted to its grand form. After adding the concept of the power of values, I created my own version, the six step Values-driven Strategic Thinking and Planning. I shared my insights as a lecturer and consultant. Included in these six steps are the creation of Values, Mission, and Vision Statements, followed by SWOT analysis (internal strengths and weaknesses, external opportunities and threats) and selection of Goals and Plans (often referred to as Focused Action Plans). The last step is Implementation or the “do it” phase. This six-step process was arranged in a hexagon motif.

For several decades, I have served as either a participant, observer, consultant, or facilitator of strategic planning projects in over one hundred professional and business settings nationwide. Some of these projects led to laudable successes. These planning projects were, however, costly in time, energy, emotions, and money, and generated lengthy reports—often never used.

As a result of these experiences, I sought a simpler, focused, or “minimalist” approach to strategic planning. Upon my retirement from the full-time practice of Medicine in 1995, I re-visited the one-page plan of 1981 and developed Optimize Your Life! The One-page Strategic Planner.

While the One-page planner is a variation on the theme of classic strategic planning, it

places most of the effort on a limited number of specific tasks—each of which can be reduced to one page! Unlike the bulky, computer-driven boilerplate reports produced by many strategic planners, the One-page adaptation can be readily understood, mastered, and applied in a wide range of venues. The process first addresses the Goals of the organization, then focuses on the components of the Goals—specific Projects. Next, each Project is reduced to even smaller specific Focused Tasks.

By reducing strategic planning to its smallest and most manageable units—Tasks—the chances of successful Implementation are much greater. Since success breeds more success, each small but successful advance brings support for strategic planning, and the cycle can be repeated with other tasks and other projects, until the larger goals are reached.

Over the past decades, Optimize Your Life! has been modified and improved with the help of many organizations, associations, and academic institutions. First, it was successfully applied in business and professional activities. Subsequently, it was adapted for personal strategic planning.

During the application and field testing of the concepts in this book, it became evident that personal and organizational strategic planning were, in fact, one in the same. This was based on my own observations in the field and was later supported by Charles M. Dwyer, Ph.D., who noted:

“Organizations do not have, never have had, never will

have, indeed cannot have: objectives, goals, missions,

 visions, ideals, ideologies, or philosophies.”

Therefore, one can conclude:

“Organizational strategic planning is, in effect,

the merging of the personal strategic planning of

the key individuals involved in the organization.”

As a result, the text and the worksheets can be readily adapted from personal strategic planning, the primary focus of this book, to organizational strategic planning. 

Failing to plan may well be

planning to fail.

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To be continued in Newlstter #3 2009 

©2005 American Author, a division of Cevado Technologies. All rights reserved.