day 153: Strategic Planning

While some leaders don't believe that a company or organization should have a strategic plan, I do. After many years of bring in business and being also involved in non-profits and educational institutions, the ones that I have seen do the best and succeeded beyond others have been the ones who created, adopted, aligned the organization against, and executed to a 3-5 year forward looking strategic plan. These strategic plans consisted of an agreed upon vision and mission, an understanding of the strategic challenges and pillars that can drive the organization, a set of short-term goals that underpin the plan and a supporting culture, talent base and people practices to make it all come together. It is a lot of hard work to create a strategic plan but when it is completed well and made real to everyone in the organization so they know their role in making the plan come to life, then all the hard work and time becomes well worth the efforts. There are people who make a living from facilitating and leading these plans because it is not easy to see around the corner and conceptualize the future. Most can't do it without the help of someone else to ask the right questions and open our minds to new possibilities and potential. Any one of us might be one who is looking at the same problems in our business the same way and getting the same poor results, when what we really need to be doing is to zoom way out until we can see the whole picture and think strategically. Again, it is not easy to do. How we think about our roles (as believers) in our work is a similar challenge. We can get caught up in the details and the worries within our work that we forget to remember that we are to be living out the purpose of bringing glory to Go with our work. We have to be continuously asking God to let us remember to see the biggest picture so we can work within that visible picture. God gives us a verse to help with seeing the full landscape strategically. He say in Jeremiah that we can call on Him to help see the unknown: "Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." It may be that today you wish you could see around the corner to the future, or see the bigger picture so that you know more to be better or to not make mistakes that could be avoided. God says that we can call on Him to help us in this area. This doesn't mean that any of us are going to for sure become great strategic planners and certainly He is not saying that we are going to become fortune (or mis-fortune) tellers. What I take from this verse is that when we get stuck and we need to see things from a different angle, perspective or vantage point, that when we call on Him to open our eyes and minds to new possibilities that God will provide us the vision that we need to be strategic in how we approach our work and our lives.

Reference: 33:3-4 (New Living Testament)