Q.- What is the real benefit of Strategic Planning?

A.- Decision support.

Q.- About what?:

A.-

1. It's about major decisions, "turns" or shifts that affect your direction and future capabilities. They drive other decisions. They should concentrate on specialization and strength. Examples of the downstream effects of strategic decisions include:
   1. Resource commitments;
   2. Training initiatives;
   3. Personnel effects; staffing.
2. Specialization exists in tension with degrees of freedom of action. Opportunity costs are the options that are closed to you, not just the expenditure of finite resources. Thus planning should focus on the unstated options that strategoc decisions will forclose. Bob Metcalfe, developer of Ethernet, has addressed a similar concept which he calls FOCACA: Freedom of Choice Among Competing Alternatives.
3. Strategic review addresses the following question: "What decisions did we make in the past that "locked us in" to the present situation, and create high barriers to change and adaptation now? These decisions usually take the form of resource allocation/ financing/ infrastructure/ mission statements/ CSFs.
4. Resource allocation is akin to placement of playing pieces on a board game like chess, or especially like the oriental game of go. If you haven't established a presence in an area, you allow an opponent the option to dominate it, and your later response is less influential and more constrained. This is validated by the concept of "positioning" popularized by Trout and Reis (1980. Trout, Jack & Ries, Al. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. McGraw-Hill Book Company).
   If you do commit resources, these are at risk, and bend or distort your decisions later by an effort to utilize them (even if no longer useful to a new mission), or to "save" them from destruction or waste.
5. In diplomatic and military thinking, what are our over-arching goals or concerns? What locations or capibilities have the most importance for our present interests, while possessing some flexibility for future changes.
6. Examine your own thinking for hidden assumptions. Can your view be classified as positive or negative? Use DeBono's PMI (plus, minus, interesting), or similar technique. DeBono has much to say about how to think.
   Swartz's techniques can modify PMI by deliberately trying to justify the opposite happening. Two great quotes from Swartz's book The Art of the Long View speak of strategy as "the long shadow of a small decision (p. 46)"; and "we are the sum total of the decisions we have made (p. 48)."
   As I have told many accounting students: "Most numbers on a financial statement are evidence of management's decisions." Swartz has his own techniques (mindset, focus, information-gathering, etc.). I have my own techniques, which I collectively call "Thought Management."
7. If a company or organization was an animal collecting food, how would strategy guide it?
   1. let its food come to it?
   2. move to where its food is?
   3. as the food increases or decreases, so does the preditor population
   4. "animal's" goal: survival for replication.

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