Personal Strategic Planning
By Verne Wheelwright. From Futureorientation 6/2006
Do you have a model for your future? Do you have a real vision of the future for you and your family over the next ten to fifteen years, complete with written strategies to achieve that vision? Successful businesses and institutions have visions of their future and strategic plans that they not only follow, but monitor and update on a regular basis. This is an effective model that can be applied to personal lives, including your life.
Developing a vision of your future and a personal strategic plan is not a complicated process, but it does take some thought and time. The process starts with personal research that includes an understanding of your life stages, the forces that drive your life and plausible events for your current life stage. The next step is exploring plausible futures with personal scenarios. At that point, you are ready to define a vision of your future then create a plan that will help you achieve that vision.
Your personal vision
What is a personal vision, and how do you define it? A personal vision is simply your statement of what you want your future to be. When asked, some people say that their vision is to be healthy, wealthy and successful. That’s a good start, but you should recognize that those terms might have different meanings at different times in your life. “Healthy” to a young person may mean healthy enough to compete in competitive sports, while someone in their seventies may consider health to mean the absence of illness or the ability to walk moderate distances comfortably. Views or measurements of wealth and success may also vary between individuals and at different stages of life.
To develop your vision of the future, start with this small worksheet, and ask yourself “What?” What do you want for your future? What would your future look like if there were no financial restraints? No time constraints?
Now, ask yourself about your values. What or who is really important in your life? Family? Career? Wealth? Ethics? Knowledge? What do you want to achieve during this life stage? Career advancement? Raise family? Educate your children? Travel? Accumulate? Change the world?
Summarize all of this into one sentence about your preferred future. Two at the most. This written vision should give you direction, declare where you are going, what you want to achieve and, by implication, what you want to avoid.
Your personal mission
Do you feel that you have a mission in life? This is something different than a vision. This is something that you feel you must accomplish. Not everyone feels they have a mission during each stage of life, but others do. Whether it’s to get your children or grandchildren educated, to write a book, to bring about social change, achieve a certain social status or any other mission that is a motivating force in your life, you should write it down, next to your vision of your future.
Are the vision and the mission compatible or are the mutually exclusive? You will have to decide how to resolve any differences, but the important thing here is to recognize how the mission and vision can work together, and how you can reconcile them if necessary and plan to accomplish both in the future.
Your personal strategy
With your vision and mission defined, the next step in strategic planning is to devise strategies to achieve your vision. A strategy is simply a way to do something, but some strategies are better than others. Good strategies are what make the difference for winning generals or championship chess players. The winners develop better strategies than their opponents.
You won’t have an opponent to deal with, but working to improve and fully develop your strategies will improve your likelihood of success. So, for each component of your vision, ask “How?” How will you achieve that component of your vision of the future? What strategy will you use to advance your career? Working harder in your present position? Changing firms? Changing industries? Getting more education? Any of those strategies may work, but you will have to pick the best combination for your situation.
As you go through the various components of your vision, written and unwritten, you will develop a list of strategies: strategies for your career and your family, and others for health, housing and finances. Some may be relatively short-term strategies, but most will be long-term strategies. For example, decisions to stop smoking, to follow a nutritious diet, to exercise regularly may appear to be short tem strategies, but they are all part of a long-term strategy for good health that will have its biggest payoff well after you reach retirement age.
Events in your future life
In addition to strategies to achieve your vision of the future, you should consider life events that are likely to occur in your future. Specifically, you should develop strategies for high probability/high impact events. In the earlier section about strategies to achieve your preferred future, you considered mostly positive events or achievements, but now you should look at any event that has both a high probability of occurrence and will have a strong impact on your life.
As an adult, one event may be the emergence of teen-age children. Another might be the risk of divorce. Both require strategies. In middle age, your children will probably leave home and start their own lives, and you may need a strategy to deal with the impacts of this change. You may find that your parents will need your assistance during this stage due to health problems. You will also want to start preparing for your retirement years. If you are in the Independent elder stage, you will need strategies for the time in your future when you or your spouse is not be able to make sound decisions, particularly during a health crisis. For any stage of life, strategies developed in the present can make life in the future move more smoothly during turbulent times.
Try to develop strategies that have some flexibility. You should be prepared to modify or change a strategy if it becomes appropriate, and you will not want to be locked into a strategy that is failing.
Your personal action plan
When you have decided on your strategies to achieve your vision and to deal with life events, you can start laying out an action plan. This is the portion of your strategic plan that answers the question “When?” Your strategic plan should reach ten or fifteen years into the future, usually linked to the end of a life stage. Your action plan will be a listing of actions you want to take each year to implement your strategies for achieving your vision and for dealing with high impact life events.
You can approach the construction of your action plan from either direction from the present working toward the future, or from the future working backward to the present. The latter, working backward from a perspective in the future is a technique used by futurists and termed “backcasting.” Whichever approach you take to developing your action plan, the result will be a sequence of actions to be listed and taken over the years. The action plan should be reviewed frequently, and analyzed to determine
- if the appropriate actions are being taken and
- if the strategies are proving effective.
You should recognize at the start that the future will not unfold exactly as you have planned it, so you will have to adjust your strategies and your actions as you progress into the future.
There are other futures techniques or methods that can be incorporated into personal strategic planning that can be applied to your personal life. Without pursuing too much detail, you might ask yourself a few questions. What are your vulnerabilities? What one event could completely change your future? Your strengths? Weaknesses? What opportunities are available? Are there any threats on the horizon? Now or in the future. Are there any gaps between your plan and your capabilities? Can you actually perform the actions you are planning? These thoughts are not intended to undermine your vision of the future, but to recognize reality wherever you must face it, now or later.
Change of plans – if… then…
The last step in creating your strategic plan involves designing contingency plans, strategies for dealing with unexpected events, or “wild cards.” Futurists use the term “wild cards” in reference to low probability, high impact events. Accidents, fires, and natural disasters are often cited as wild cards, but not all wild cards are negative events. An unexpected financial windfall, multiple births, an unexpected child or grandchild and recognition for your personal or business achievements may also be wild card events.
Contingency plans may rely on “if… then…”-strategies: “If this happens, then I will take this action.” In your action plan, you started implementing strategies in advance of an event. In contingency planning, the strategy is executed after the event, although preparation may take place in advance. One example of a strategy to prepare for a wild card event is insurance. Insurance is purchased in advance of the event in order to provide funds to help offset losses and aid recovery from the event.
For your contingency plan, list possible wild card events that might occur in your future. Is your geographic area susceptible to earthquakes, floods, hurricanes or other natural hazards? If so, how will you prepare? Insurance is one possibility, but an evacuation plan for your family may be more important. Can you reinforce your home to withstand unexpected natural forces? Should you have food, water, medical supplies or equipment available? On a more personal level, what would you do if your spouse suddenly became very ill, or died? Asking yourself questions of this type while constructing your contingency plan will help you think through your strategies and the actions you will take if one of these wild cards occurs.
Live your personal plan
The final step in strategic planning may be the most important … Live your plan!
One of the frustrations that professionals who work in the area of strategic planning with businesses and institutions is that often an organization will go through the entire strategic planning process, then never execute the plan. Hopefully, by the time you complete your plan you will recognize that you not only have an investment in your plan, but you have the opportunity to improve the future for your family and yourself.
As you live your plan, be sure to monitor how your life is unfolding. Are you living the scenario you expected or sought? Or is another scenario developing? By monitoring all aspects of your life and maintaining an awareness of the world as it changes around you, you should be able to adjust your plan, modify your strategies where necessary and take your life in the direction that will be most favorable to you and your family. This process of monitoring your progress and changing direction when necessary is very like tacking a sailboat as you sail into the wind. You can alter your course many times while successfully proceeding toward your destination.
Strategic Planning in companies and organizations
Globally, Strategic planning is one of the most widely used tools to develop business models in companies and organizations. Strategic Planning is long range planning; in other words, work with the strategies that show where the company will go in the next few years and how to get there. It is often a long and continuous process. Strategic planning can consist of different elements, and there is no one recipe for them. For many companies and organizations, strategic planning consists of these five elements and applies to the entire organization, though it is sometimes applied to a division:
- Mission: What would the world lose if x did not exist? A mission statement is a short description of the purpose of the company/organization.
- Vision: How do we accomplish the mission? Presentation of prioritized, measurable goals with deadlines.
- SWOT-analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. Companies can use megatrends, for example, or other Early Warning Systems and compare the findings to the mission and vision.
- Strategic goals: Some use the SMARTER method to ensure the goals are: Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic, Timely, Extending (in relation to the skills that those who must meet the goal have), and Rewarding
- Action Plans: Typically include sub-strategies – tactics, policies, values, roles, etc. – that must be implemented to meet the overall goal. The action plan can also include methods of continuous monitoring and evaluation. An annual plan with budgets and assignment of responsibilities for each goal is often made.
Personal Strategic Planning – how to
Personal Strategic Planning consists of seven steps. Steps one and two together are about your desired future, while the other steps focus on how you can achieve it and other probable or possible futures.
- Personal vision – ask “what?” and start by making visions for each domain in the table below.
- Personal mission – the things, you must do or wish to accomplish in your future life.
- Personal strategy – ask “how?”
- Life events – consider events with high probability and high impact in your future life.
- Action plan – ask “when?” and list actions you want to take each year dealing with your vision, mission, strategy and life events.
- Contingency plan – ask “if… then…?” and consider events with low probability and high impact (wildcards) in your future life.
- Live your plan! – and monitor how your life is unfolding.
| Domain | Vision for each domain |
|---|---|
| Activities | What do you want to do? Career? Travel? Sport? Religion? |
| Finances | What’s important financially? Income? Net worth? Insurance? Estate? |
| Health | How do your see your health? What care will you need? |
| Housing | Where will you live? |
| Social | Who will be close to you? What groups will be important? |
| Transportation | How will you be transported? |