Strategy is thinking about identifying where you want to be in the future. Strategic planning is the way you go about documenting, implementing and monitoring that strategy today. Strategic planning should not be confused with thinking strategically.
Yet, strategic planning definitions often encompass the four strategic activities involved in thinking about the future, deciding about strategic options, and planning to implement those options. Flawed strategy or inadequate implementation can be the result of confusing these four levels of strategic activity.
In reality, these levels overlap and blur, but there tends to be a focus on producing tangible plans rather than on the quality of the thinking that go into the plans. As a result, even when you believe you are thinking long term, consulting widely in your planning processes and taking multiple viewpoints into account, you are often just reinforcing deeply held and untested assumptions and thinking.
Strategy development processes that do not start with a defined stage to systematically explore possible futures, as well as surfacing and challenging of assumptions, beliefs and ideas held by staff about the future, are flawed.
Staff respond to authentic opportunities to participate in the development of a shared view of the future, which is achieved by adding a simple step inyour planning process to ask what they think the future might hold for their university or organisation. Like all scanning information, staff input is subject to analysis and interpretation, but it is a step that adds breadth to strategy development.
In the four level model shown here, strategic thinking is a distinct stage in the strategy process, requiring its own methods and approaches, and time to do properly. This stage is about long term and divergent thinking, and exploring the maze of the future. The strategic thinking stage is informed by high quality environmental scanning.
The outcomes of this thinking inform strategic decision making about which direction to pursue, which in turn directs strategic planning – which documents action to achieve strategy.
Strategic planning in terms of documenting agreed action and monitoring that action is well understood and practised today.
However, strategic thinking is a stage in strategy development that is not well understood, and it is the stage where futures approaches add most value. It is here that the “who, where, and how?” of strategic planning is enhanced by the futures focus on ”what, when, and why?”. It is about thinking long term, and this is the capacity that I work with you to develop.
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