John M. Bryson - Creating Your Strategic Plan A Workbook for Public and Nonprofit Organizations

Third Edition

Copyright 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-0-470-40535-2 (paper)

ISBN: 978-1-118-06725-3 (ebk)

STRATEGIC PLANNING IS a way of life for the majority of public and nonprofit organizations. We are pleased to have played a role in bringing about that change through our publications and through the more than 500 major strategic planning processes we have helped facilitate since the publication of the first edition of this workbook in 1996 as a companion to the revised edition of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations (Bryson, 1995). This third edition of the workbook accompanies the fourth edition of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations (Bryson, 2011). The workbook has a new nameCreating Your Strategic Plan (rather than Creating and Implementing Your Strategic Plan)because it is joined for the first time by a second workbookImplementing and Sustaining Your Strategic Planthat provides far more detailed information and worksheets about how to approach the challenge of implementing a strategic plan (see Bryson, Anderson, & Alston, 2011).

The basic approach we outlined in the first edition has proven as useful today as when we first proposed it. However, the field has changed as the world of theory and practice has evolved. This third edition embodies much of what we have learned since publication of the last edition.

Why has strategic planning become standard practice for most public and nonprofit organizations? There are a variety of reasons. First, many public organizations are now required by law to undertake strategic planning, and many nonprofit organizations are required to do so by their funders. Second, strategic planning is now seen as a mark of good professional practice, so organizations pursue it to enhance their legitimacy. And many organizations simply copy what everyone else is doing. But we believe the most important reason strategic planning is so widely used is that public and nonprofit leaders find that it can help them to think, act, and learn strategicallyprecisely what is required for these leaders to grasp the challenges their organizations face, figure out what to do about them, and follow through with effective implementation. In short, strategic planning at its best fosters strategic thinking, acting, and learning and is a crucial component of change management.

The challenges are all too familiar. Public and nonprofit organizations and communities are confronted with a bewildering array of difficult situations requiring an effective response, including the following:

• Changing and significantly increasedor reduceddemands for their programs, services, and products
• Greater difficultyand often much more difficultyin acquiring the resources they need to fulfill their missions
• The need to collaborate with other organizations and often across sector boundaries, so that somehow, competing organizational logics must be at least accommodated if not reconciled
• A demand for greater accountability and good governance
• More active and vocal stakeholders, including employees, customers, clients, funders, and citizens
• Heightened (sometimes staggering) uncertainty about the futurein terms of the economy, politics, social and demographic changes, the environment, public safety, and so onalong with the subsequent need to assess risks and prepare for at least some of the possible contingencies
• Pressures to restructure, reengineer, reframe, repurpose, or otherwise change themselves; to constantly improve the efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and quality of their processes; and to collaborate or compete with others more effectively to better serve key external or internal customers
• The related need to make best use of the expanding array of information, communication, and social networking technologies
• The need to integrate plans of many different kindsstrategic, business, budget, information technology, human resource management, and financial plans and also short-term action plans

Leaders and managers of organizations and communities must think, act, and learn strategically, now and in the future, if they are to meet their legal, ethical, professional, organizational, community, and public service obligations successfully. Taking a strategic planning approach is a must if these organizations and communities are to compete, survive, and prosperand if real public value is to be created and the common good is to be served.

This workbook addresses key issues in the design of an overall strategic planning process, from the initial stages through plan preparation, review, and subsequent implementation and evaluation. However, it only touches on the major elements of these processes. We therefore recommend that this workbook be used in tandem with the fourth edition of