The types of strategic planning and tools of planning

The key components of ‘strategic planning’ include an understanding of an entity’s vision mission, values and strategies.

These are as follows –

1. Vision – Outline what the organisation wants to be, or how it wants the world in which it operates to be (an ‘idealised’ view of the world). It is a long-term view and concentrates on future. It can be emotive and is a source of inspiration. For example, a charity working with the pots might have a vision statement which reads ‘A World without Poverty.’
2. Mission – Defines the fundamental purpose of an organisation or an enterprise, succinct’: describing why it exists and what it does to achieve its vision. For example, the charity above might have a mission statement as ‘providing jobs for the homeless and unemployed.
3. Values- Beliefs that are shared among the stakeholders of an organisation. Values drive al organisation’s culture and priorities and provide a framework in which decisions are made. For example, ‘Knowledge and skills are the keys to success’ or ‘give a man bread and feed him for a day, but teach him to farm and feed him for life’. These example maxims may set the priorities of self-sufficiency over shelter.
4. Strategy – Strategy, narrow5 defined, means ‘the art of the e A combination of the goals for which the firm is striving and the means (po Kies) by which it is seeking to get there. A strategy is sometimes called a roadmap—which is the path chosen to plow towards the end vision. The most important part of implementing the strategy is ensuring the company is going in the right direction-defined as towards the end vision.

Organisations sometimes summarise goals and objectives into a mission statement and/or a vision statement Others begin with a vision and mission and use them to formulate goals S objectives. A newly emerging approach is to use a visual strategic plan such as is used within planning approaches based on outcomes theory. When using this approach, the first step is to build a visual outcomes model of the high-level outcomes being sought and all of the steps which it is believed are needed to get to them. The vision and mission are then just top layers of the visual model.

Many people mistake the vision statement for the mission statement, and sometimes one is simply used as a longer-term version of the other. However, they are distinct; with the vision being a descriptive picture of a desired future state; and the mission being a statement of a rationale, applicable now as well as in the future. The mission is therefore the means of successfully achieving the vision. This may be in the business world or the military.

For an organisation’s vision and mission to be effective, they must become assimilated into the organisation’s culture. They should also be assessed internally and externally. The internal assessment should focus on how members inside the organisation interpret their mission statement. The external assessment—which includes all of the businesses stakeholders is valuable since it offers a different perspective. These discrepancies between these two assessments can provide insight into their effectiveness.