Is your vision in motion?
You will react better individually and corporately to challenges and opportunities if you regularly engage in strategic and operational planning. Really.
Establishing a strategic plan is vitally important for organizational health. It gets everyone focused on where we are going, pointing the entire team’s arrows in the same direction, aligning our staff around a common cause.
The planning process and resulting strategic discussions are invaluable in facilitating leadership collaboration around what is truly most important to an organization.
But what about opportunities that present themselves as we are executing our operational and strategic plans? How can we remain nimble while being intentional? Plans are important. Reacting well to opportunities that present themselves is equally important.
The organization is at its highest level of Strategic “fitness” when we regularly focus on what we want to look like in the future, our vision, as part of our strategic planning process. Annual strategic planning sessions are our visionary workout routine.
If we’ve been regularly establishing visions of our future and their supporting plans, we will have collectively exercised the strategic muscles required to best consider new challenges and opportunities.
Here are some strategic “workout” questions to get you started:
- Will you dedicate at least one full day annually for your team to get away from the Tyranny of the Urgent to think longer-term?
- Do you have a 10-year target you are shooting for?
- Have you gotten outside yourselves by conducting SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) exercises?
- Have you established a reasonable and “blessed beyond measure” plans? Some team members find it challenging to meet stretch goals and are more likely to engage effectively when we begin with a more attainable first step. We also need to consider the scenario where God blesses us beyond measure.
- Is your future vision for your organization a literal picture and not just a picture frame? When we get to our future, we need to know if we’ve arrived there.
- Are we confronting the brutal facts in our organization?
- Have we established operational KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that support our vision and strategic plan?
Annual strategic planning sessions are our visionary workout routine, positioning us best to consider new opportunities and challenges.
