Strategic planning is a management tool, period. As with any management tool, it is used for one purpose only: to help an organization do a better job - to focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, to assess and adjust the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future. (Adapted from Bryson's Strategic Planning in Public and Nonprofit Organizations)
Strategic planning is only useful if it supports strategic thinking and leads to strategic management - the basis for an effective organization. Strategic thinking means asking, "Are we doing the right thing?" Perhaps, more precisely, it means making that assessment using three key requirements about strategic thinking: a definite purpose be in mind; an understanding of the environment, particularly of the forces that affect or impede the fulfillment of that purpose; and creativity in developing effective responses to those forces.
Strategic planning has also been described as a tool - but it is not a substitute for the exercise of judgment by leadership. Ultimately, the leaders of any enterprise need to sit back and ask, and answer, "What are the most important issues to respond to?" and "How shall we respond?" Just as the hammer does not create the bookshelf, so the data analysis and decision-making tools of strategic planning do not make the organization work - they can only support the intuition, reasoning skills, and judgment that people bring to their organization.
Everything said above to describe what strategic planning is can also provide an understanding of what it is not. For example, it is about fundamental decisions and actions, but it does not attempt to make future decisions (Steiner, 1979). Strategic planning involves anticipating the future environment, but the decisions are made in the present. This means that over time, the organization must stay abreast of changes in order to make the best decisions it can at any given point - it must manage, as well as plan, strategically.
As much as a strategic plan is a management tool, it is also a disciplined process. A process that is dependent upon the synergy developed within the creation team. We at the Keller Consulting Group will facilitate this synergy and the creation of a strategic plan for your police department. This is accomplished by an introspective assessment of the organization’s environment. Taking into consideration an organization’s resources and having established clear goals, objectives, tasks, time frame, accountability, and follow-up schedule, a strategic plan can come to fruition, responsive to the dynamic policing environment. We will integrate into this plan what we call the P.O.L.I.C.E. Leadership Methodology (Planning, Organizing, Liability, Information, Control, Ethics). This is an integral part of a Strategic Plan that ensures that the plan is not placed in a drawer and forgotten about.
