The ToP® Strategic Planning process builds on your learning from the ToP® Facilitation Methods course, showing you how to weave those methods into an integrated approach to strategic planning. This course is best for those responsible for the successful implementation of organizational strategies. Using this method results in a plan that is realistic, strategic, achievable, and easy to monitor.
Preparation and Design
From the moment a client contacts you, there are opportunities for achieving a successful facilitation that incorporate the clients’ objectives and needs. This includes who will be involved, what led to the decision to do planning now, and what decisions have already been made or need to be made before starting
Practical Vision
Shared excitement arises when the unarticulated desires, hopes, and dreams for the future are elicited from the group and participants come to consensus around a practical vision for a specific time frame.
Underlying Contradictions
Before participants trip over obstacles in their rush to the future, they need an in-depth understanding of the blocks and barriers that stand in the way of their vision and what keeps them in place. This step enables a group to talk about their contradictions in an objective way.
Strategic Directions
Having glimpsed the future and being clear about what is blocking it, a group can then craft strategies that will address the underlying contradictions and move them toward their vision. This step brings focus to the work ahead.
Focused Implementation
After considering what final success looks like for each of the strategic directions and clarifying the current reality in relation to each one, a group is able to determine realistic accomplishments for the first year, lay out specific responsibilities and deadlines and create a plan for ensuring implementation.
What You Will Learn:
An in-depth understanding of the dynamics of strategic planning to help groups and organizations align for accomplishments that exceed expectations.
An effective and common sense five-step approach to strategic planning that actively engages implementers in the planning process.
Ways to move groups from beyond buy-in to ownership.
Approaches to improve follow-up communications.
Tools for immediate and on going implementation.
Looking for In-House Training for Your Group?
You provide the space (need long walls or a whiteboard to place sticky walls with painter’s tape; movable tables and chairs), the participants and the refreshments. We supply everything else! Please contact us if you wish to schedule a ToP course inside your organization.