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Lessons Learned and Challenges Facing Strategic Planners

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Please provide additional insight with regard to the following questions I created:

1. What are the lessons learned relative to the importance and effectiveness of environmental scanning, strategy formulation and choice, and the formulation of action plans and goals?

2. Please provide in-depth feedback/analysis about the challenges facing strategic planners.

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Solution Summary

This solution explains the lessons learned relative to the importance and effectiveness of environmental scanning, strategy formulation and choice, as well as to the formulation of action plans and goals. An in-depth feedback/analysis about the challenges facing strategic planners are also detailed. Supplemented with an exceptional article on effective leadership characteristics.

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1. What are the lessons learned relative to the importance and effectiveness of environmental scanning, strategy formulation and choice, and the formulation of action plans and goals?

The importance and effectiveness of environmental scanning, strategy formulation and choice, and the formulation of action plans and goals is about managing uncertainty. To some extent, that is possible, but strategic planners also recognize that implementing the strategic plans is often far more challenging than is developing the plan and strategies. This has a lot to to do with the human side of change. It also has to do with commitment, credibility, and communication being employed by the planners throughout every stage in the process, especially in the implementation process.

Lessons learned

Ideally, besides the personal satisfaction of taking charge of the organizations future, strategic planning offers at least five compelling reasons for its use:

1. Forces a look into the future and therefore provides an opportunity to influence the future, or assume a proactive posture.
2. Provides better awareness of needs and of the facilities related issues and environment.
3. Helps define the overall mission of the organization and focuses on the objectives.
4. Provides a sense of direction, continuity, and effective staffing and leadership.
5. Plugs everyone into the system and provides standards of accountability for people, programs, and allocated resources. (2)

In summary, ideally, strategic planning is the key to helping us collectively and cooperatively gain control of the future and the destiny of our organization. For example, environmental analysis and forecasting are based upon a number of assumptions, among them the following (Boucher and Morrison, 1989)(1):

· The future cannot be predicted, but it can be forecasted probabilistically lacking explicit account of uncertainty.
· Forecasts are virtually certain to be useless or misleading if they do not sweep widely across possible future developments in such areas as demography, values and lifestyles, technology, economics, law and regulation, and institutional change.
· Alternative futures including the "most likely'' future are defined primarily by human judgment, creativity, and imagination. (1)

The aim of defining alternative futures is to try to determine how to create a better future than the one that would materialize if we merely kept doing essentially what is presently being done. This part of ...

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