Erica Olsen

A strategic plan is essential for a successful business, and creating a strategic plan that you can actually use is key. Your plan should include certain elements, like mission, values, and vision statements. It should also avoid common pitfalls, like neglecting the specific needs of your organization, so it becomes your road map for success.

Before you can really develop a strategic plan, you must know why you’re doing what you’re doing (your mission), where you’re trying to go (your vision), and how you’re going to go about it (your values). These are the glue that holds an organization together. You preserve these elements while your strategies and goals change and flex with the market.

Strategic planning has a basic overall framework. Not to oversimplify the strategic planning process, but by placing all the parts of a plan into the following three areas, you can clearly see how the pieces of your plan fit together: Where are we now? Review your current strategic position and clarify your mission, vision, and values.

When developing your company’s strategic plan, the elements of the question “Where are we going?” help you answer other questions, such as these: What will my organization look like in the future? Where are we headed? What is the future I want to create for my company? Because the future is hard to predict, you can have fun imagining what it may look like.

The vision statement, a key element of your strategic plan, needs to incorporate many elements. The following list contains elements that you can include in an effective vision statement (you don’t have to use every one, but keep them in mind when you’re writing or evaluating): Audacious: Your vision represents a dream that’s beyond what you think is possible.

The purpose of a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is to help produce a good fit between your company’s resources and capabilities and your external environment. Your SWOT analysis is a balance sheet of your strategic position right now. In the analysis, you bring together all your internal factors, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as your external factors, opportunities, and threats.

Often overlooked are the five key components necessary to support implementation: people, resources, structure, systems, and culture. All components must be in place in order to move from creating to activating the plan. These five components are as follows: People: The first stage of implementing your plan is to make sure to have the right people on board.

People are often resistant to change, and leading your company through change is a challenge for which you must prepare before implementing a new strategic plan. Lessons in leading change are timeless, as the following example illustrates. While in Japan as a professor (1924 to 1929), Eugen Herrigel experienced Japanese culture and became a student of archery from a skilled and somewhat controversial teacher, Awa Keno.

As your strategy map tells your interrelated strategy story, your road map shows you mileposts from current to future. Strategic planning is as much about the strategy, as depicted in your strategy map, as it is about the planning, as illustrated in your road map. The road map view is extremely helpful to visualize what needs to be prioritized year-by-year to achieve your vision.