How to Improve your Strategic Plan

A Strategic plan is a basic tool for business or organization. It is what gives it a written and concrete expression of its basic direction. It answers the basic question of the business or organizational direction, What do we want to be in the future? How do we hope to occupy that position in the future? An absence of a strategic plan, an indispensable tool for business or organizational success, may have negative repercussions that may well hang on to the future.

Plan to Plan

Since perfection is a character that is absent in all strategic plans, how can strategic planners improve on their plans? They should plan in order to plan again. This paradoxical statement states that when you plan, you have to keep in mind that it is bound for obsolescence and that you are directed, out of necessity to make a new plan. This kind of mindset allows the strategic planner to be uncomfortable and to resist the urge of complacency. This kind of mindset also allows the strategic planner to be constantly on the lookout for improvement.

Many strategic plans have experienced initial brushes with success but then that is all there is to it. Strategic plans that have sustained successes are those plans that have been destroyed and abandoned before it has reached its apex and a new and different plan formulated to take its place. This is a rather radical argument with strategic plan improvement, but in a rapidly changing market place, this makes sense. A blank sheet of paper is all that is needed for improvement, set aside the old things that have been pass and start with the new things.

Plan to Focus on the Fundamentals

A major blunder of the strategic planner in business and organizations is to adapt quickly to new management and strategic planning concepts and ideas. This is expected behavior because new management and strategic planning concepts and ideas are like new tools to the strategic planner and it is just novel. But planners have to remind themselves that there are things that are foundational to the strategic plan, things that are fundamental to the strategic plan that if it is left out, success then becomes an illusion.

The foundation of strategic planning is people. Not just anyone but people in the organization who have the mental gift that can be utilized for a very specific purpose: to alter business or organizational strength, so much that it can be used against the competition in the most efficient manner conceivable. These people may or may not be difficult to find, the important thing is to find them and use them as the foundation of the strategic planning process.

Since strategic planning is founded in people, the strategic planner and his staff should make that commitment for self-evaluation. Do we qualify to be the foundations of the strategic planning team? If the answer is in the negative, wisdom dictates that a quick search be made within and outside the organization. The right people, those called upon to be the foundation of the planning process have the uncanny ability to discern what to include and what to exclude in the strategic plan.

These are things that may be difficult to duplicate by the wrong people. The right people also blend right in to a common core; they may look differently, they may live differently and they may think differently but they have a common core: the right direction for the business or organization.