Meeting Facilitators International has facilitated hundreds of strategic planning sessions. When strategic planning is done right, it is an indispensable management tool. Done poorly, it can be a waste of time or worse. So what does it take to do it right?
We believe that there is no one right way to do strategic planning. Each client who calls us has their own unique situation and unique needs. A small not-for-profit, an Entrepreneurial start-up, and a division of a Fortune 500 company all have different needs. We believe that it is up to the facilitator to help the client articulate their needs and to then show them the tools and techniques that will help them get the results they want in a manner that will work for them.
Having said this there are some common requests that we frequently recieve, and over the years we have experimented to see what works best. Following is a brief description of our approach to:
Vision Facilitation – Creating a Vision of Success We believe that a good corporate vision describes in great detail what success looks like. We believe that it should be used as a planning tool and not as a marketing slogan or motivational tool. Over the past several years Meeting Facilitators International has been using a [...]
Almost every retreat winds up with action planning. In fact action planning is typically interwoven throughout the retreat. There are two basic approaches that Meeting Facilitators International uses for action planning. The first is a one step approach based on what we call offers and requests. The second is a two step approach that includes [...]
Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats or SWOT analysis may be one of the oldest techniques in the book, but it still brings results. Meeting Faciltators International has facilitated hundreds of these sessions and we find that by making some changes to how the analysis is created, we can make this old standby even better. Strengths [...]
Setting Goals and Objectives In many organizational settings goals and objectives are cascaded down from above. This is not the situation we will be discussing here. Rather we will focus on the situation where a management team wants to jointly establish goals and objectives, and a first step in developing a strategic plan for achieving [...]
Environmental Scan The purpose of the Environmental Scan is to identify the major trends in the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, and Competitive environments that will effect your future success. Meeting Facilitators International believes that the difference between a useful environmental scan, and one that is completed then forgotten depends on three things. How carefully have [...]