How to Steer Your Organization Towards the Future You Want

SME Strategy is a strategy consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations align their teams and operations around a shared vision, mission, values, goals, and action plans. Our strategic planning services offer guidance on how a strategic planning facilitator can provide support in constructing an effective strategic plan that ensures your strategy is communicated and implemented across your entire organization.

When developing a strategic plan, we break it down into 6 areas: Vision, Mission, Strategic Priorities,  Objectives, Measurable Goals, and Tactics. A strong strategic plan is developed in this order, starting with the vision. Developing your organization's vision is so much more than jotting down a few quick lines and calling that a vision statement.

Your vision serves as the roadmap to your strategy, which will help to guide each decision you and your team make. Though your strategic plan should be reviewed regularly, three to five years is a good amount of time to set your vision as it's not so far away that you can't imagine where you will be, and it's not so close that you won't have time to take the necessary steps to make it there. To get the process started, ask yourself and your team where you would like your organization to be at a certain point in time, what strategic planning timeline are you following? three to five years down the road (i.e. set a specific date).

Having a strategy session soon? Make sure you're asking the right questions:

Probing questions to get the ball rolling can include:

• If success was a place, how do we know when we've arrived?
• What does success or winning looks like to our team or organization?
• What do we want the future to look like for our team, our customers, our bottom line, and so on? 

Once you've worked through these questions and made some notes with your team, describe your vision of success as vividly and in as much detail as possible. The vision statement you come up with will hopefully invoke a feeling of inspiration among your team. The vision you create will be your blueprint for your future, and the rest of your strategy will support how you reach this place of success: You can create the future you want your organization to have. 

Watch our video walkthrough for how to create a vision statement: 

Ready to develop your strategic plan?
Our 'How to Create a Strategic Plan' course is full of tools, templates and video walk-throughs
that will guide you through the entire process: