Facilitation of Strategic Planning Efforts
When organizations, companies and state and local government agencies begin to think about the best ways to move forward and address long-term concerns, they often engage in a strategic planning effort. The power of such an effort is that it focuses everyone’s attention on these long-term issues and concerns; the difficulty in doing it well is that it is hard to get people’s focus off of the immediate.
A facilitator can assist in this task in a number of ways. Working closely with the leadership team, the facilitator can put together a professional, objective and structured approach to the process. Then a skilled facilitator can assist the organization in virtually every aspect of the strategic planning process from conducting surveys to running focus groups, from working with internal constituents to identifying key stakeholders and customers, and from facilitating meetings to writing up plans.