Strategic Planning

Managing vision and purpose requires planning strategically. Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

•   "What do we do?"
•  "For whom do we do it?"
•  "How do we excel?" or “How do we compete effectively?”  

In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years. In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determines where it wants to go and how it will get there.

The resulting document is called a strategic plan, but the process of developing and revisiting it is much more important than the document.