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Strategic Planning: A "How-to" Guide (Christianson, Topic, 2014)

C. V. Christianson, George Topic

Joint Force Quarterly, 3rd Quarter 2014, Issue 74, p. 80-83

Let's look at a typical "military" interpretation of strategic planning. What can we learn from this for game theory? Amazingly, an activity as important as strategic planning is given only 4 pages here.
 

p.81 Simon Sinek's excellent book Start with Why... Sinek's approach can be used as an "icebreaker" to help start thinking about the central issues a strategic plan must address... We have distilled Sinek's pattern or framework into the following basic questions around which this portion of the process should generally revolve:

• Why does the organization exist?...
• What guiding principles do we embrace?...
• What do we do? This describes our mission... and what essential elements and critical tasks are necessary for success.

If everyone agrees to the answers to these questions, the rest of the process should be relatively straightforward.

p.81 Environmental Scan

This step is easy to start but hard to finish. There are forces beyond an organization's control that affect its ability to achieve mission success and how it conducts its work. There are also conditions within an organization's span of control that can help shape where to focus effort and influence how to perform the organization's work.

p.82 the most important part of the scan is to understand why a factor is important and how it might affect the organization.

p.82 Generic examples of strategic goals might include:

• Because we concluded that the future is likely to be more uncertain and complex, we may want our organization to become more adaptive.
• Because we concluded from our scans that future success will increasingly depend on other players, we may want our organization and its leaders to focus on building new/better relationships.

p.83 At the end of the day, the effort [JLJ - strategic plan] is designed to make decisions about what "investments" are the best bets for an organization since there will always be risk. But it falls to leaders to manage that risk and accept the consequences of their judgement and decisions.

p.83 There is no school solution or ironclad template for how to develop a strategic plan... Finally, nothing is final [JLJ - isn't that a contradiction?]. The best plans are continually reassessed and adjusted as factors change.