Strategic Plan Meeting Agenda, 1-26-11
Weaverville Fire Department & Commssion
Introductions
Overview of the Strategic Plan process
Ground rules
Mission Statement Review
Why does FD exist?
What are the Core Values of the Weaverville FD?
What is the philosophy of the WFD?
What are the external forces and internal forces that we affect us?
Strategic Issues we are facing
Finally…What is the vision of our FD?
Short Term
Mid Term
Long Term
What next?
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I have enclosed several sections of articles regarding the process of developing a Strategic Plan. I have enclosed these for your information. Enjoy. Scott
Strategic plans simply address the issues or problems we face in our fire department today and will face in the foreseeable future. If we can identify the strategic issues we face, the strategies follow easily. Therefore, strategic planning can be thought of as a process designed to identify those big-picture issues we are facing now and in an undefined future. Dr. John Bryson, author of Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, describes strategic planning as “organized common sense.” Strategic plans provide guidance and direction. Specific plans explaining how to solve a problem or what to do about a particular situation involve creating tactical plans or operational plans. Operational plans should be SMART. SMART is an acronym designed to suggest that operational plans are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, and Time-limited. For emergency incidents, we usually call them tactical plans. For management or nonemergency purposes, we refer to them as operational plans.
THE ENVIRONMENT
The next essential component of strategic planning is to understand the environment within which your department operates. There are two environments, an external environment and an internal environment. The external environment involves everything the fire department does not control. The external environment is the reason for the very existence of the fire department. We must understand, react, and respond to the needs of our external environment. To understand this environment, we must ask those outside of the fire department to help us understand it from their perspective. From inside the department, we can only guess and often get it wrong. The external environment provides us with challenges and opportunities in relation to the success of our fire department. The external environment must be a driving force for the entire fire department.
Those things that we can control within the fire department involve components of our internal environment. With an understanding of this internal environment, we can assess some parts of our internal organization as they involve our strengths as an organization. Other parts can be described as weaknesses of the organization. We would like to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. These are sometimes thought of as opposite sides of the same coin. Some consideration, however, should be given to the opposite of a strength or the opposite of a weakness. Not strong is not necessarily weak, and not weak is not necessarily strong. The best organizations spend as much of their time as possible using their strengths to control their internal environment. These are usually called the distinctive competencies of the department or what the department is “known for”—i.e., the McKinney Fire Department is known for its high-quality customer service and for being especially skilled at auto extrication. (This concept is intended to explain that departments should highlight their strengths and find “work-arounds” or ways to make their weaknesses less weak.)
Once you have effectively assessed the external and internal environments, you should be able to easily identify the strategic issues your fire department is facing as an organization. Understanding these strategic issues is the main purpose of strategic planning and its key component. These are those big-picture issues your department is or will be facing in the next time period. Dealing with rapid growth is an example of a common strategic issue. Analysis of these strategic issues is often accomplished by posing the issue as a question. Although growth may be the problem/issue, the real strategic question involves how we will achieve acceptable outcomes in light of the rapid growth our community faces. This may lead to a strategy that says, “The department needs a new fire station when 500 buildings are located outside of the six-minute-response-time-designated area of an existing fire station.”
The strategic plan is just entertainment unless it results in action. Actions result from effective operational planning, and the best operational plans are developed using the guidance provided in the strategic plan. Operational plans can be broken down into long-range plans, mid-range plans, short-range plans, and action plans. There is a planning continuum that must exist with the action plans on one end and the strategic plan at the other end. What the organization is doing today will impact the direction of the department in the future. This entire process is described as master planning. The master plan of a fire department is a composite of the strategic plan and the operational plan, including all of the various time horizons
SEPARATE ARTICLE
After a few years of answering those questions, I decided to take the ones that I've been asked the most and use them to create a companion piece to my original exploration of strategic planning. So now, without further ado, on to the questions.
Q: What is strategic planning? What can it do in addition to what was in your article?
A: "Strategic planning is a process of questioning that channels us into critical thinking on important issues to improve bottom-line service for our customers." I think most practitioners would agree with this definition, but to fully understand strategic planning we need to realize that planning isn't a recent invention.
In fact, it's something successful organizations have practiced for ages. When Henry Ford gave us the Model T, he was practicing strategic planning; Bill Gates does the same when he produces software. Both made decisions based on their knowledge of people's needs and desires, now and in the future, creating an organization of people and technology to implement those decisions.
The concept of long-range planning is much older than strategic planning, which most observers would agree focuses on the most important issues without getting bogged down in endless problems that don't advance organizational goals. Perhaps more organizations would use strategic planning if they understood that they could pinpoint priority issues, eliminate less-effective programs and the effort that goes into them, and maximize their energy on programs that provide the greatest good.
Over time, strategic planning has evolved with modern management and leadership thinking, becoming a much more effective tool than it was 25 years ago. Much of this change centers on how personnel are perceived and used. The most effective organizations emphasize information sharing, bottom-up management, shared leadership and collegial organizational structure.
All of these initiatives empower employees, and strategic planning is an excellent tool to foster such concepts. However, we must also provide a context and meaning for these efforts. Planning achieves this through the development of a mission, vision, values and goals package to provide a sense of where the organization is headed. In this way employees aren't only participating, but working in complementary directions.
A necessary adjunct to employee participation in strategic planning is information sharing. It's well understood that a planning process needs information to nourish it, so we've become very good at producing a cornucopia of data, stacked high on our desks, hard drives full of it. But what does it mean? What patterns and messages are hidden there?
T.S. Eliot asked, "Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" The knowledge is in the minds of people, and the more minds that can be effectively brought to bear, the better. We must look at the data and ask the right questions, decipher the problems and opportunities, and envision solutions. No computer can do this; it requires the insight, creativity, intuition and inspiration of the human mind.
Q: So strategic planning is just a different method of data collection?
A: No, strategic planning provides a framework for employees to use information by creating a new planning group within the existing organization. This group is unfettered by much of the structure that preserves the status quo, which is maintained by the same people in the same staff meetings using the same organizational processes, policies and procedures to continue down the same paths to do the same things.
While the typical fire department is structured through this decision-making inertia to do the same things in the same way, the world is changing. New citizen needs are emerging, technology is advancing, the economy is evolving, politics are creating new perspectives and priorities, and social mores and values are evolving. Obviously, the organization must be aware of these changes and be able to change itself to operate effectively in the new environment.
Strategic planning provides a structured and controlled means to do this through a system of new teams, new perspectives and new processes, which in turn produce new ways of looking at things, new ways of doing things and new things to do.
For example, I believe that strategic planning can help us to better use our fire stations to serve citizens. Now I know that this concept has been around for several years, and some fire departments are successfully pursuing a program or two. However, from my (unscientific) discussions with several chiefs who called to discuss strategic planning issues, it seems that the practice is only finding limited use among very few departments. The overriding and always expressed concern is that we can't disrupt our personnel and hinder our emergency response capability.
Certainly, we must maintain our emergency response service. But the pervasive emergency response-only orthodoxy blinds us to the leveraging of a valuable resource that only the fire service possesses: the untapped service capabilities of fire stations and highly trained personnel as neighborhood resource centers.
This is an example of how we're slaves to decision-making inertia and trapped by existing policies and rules. Creativity is stifled, compliance to old policies is paramount, and the organization is stagnant and unresponsive to its changing environment. Strategic planning can provide a fresh flow of ideas to break the status-quo dam, which is blocking the surge of new services and energy.
Q: Our department found strategic planning disorganized. What did we do wrong?
A: Probably nothing. There are some characteristics of strategic planning that not only help us to understand it, they may also dispel some myths that keep it from being used more widely. Much of strategic planning is unsystematic and unscientific, or to put it more bluntly, just plain messy and chaotic. In today's world of scientific precision, these characteristics are unfortunately and mistakenly perceived as evidence of planning failure.
Chaos occurs because the human mind, when in a creative, playful mood engendered by an open and questioning planning process, can't be constrained by policies and rules. Structure and boundaries are merely hurdles to be cleared as people make intuitive leaps from data to meaning, physical leaps from normal work routines to planning teams, and relationship leaps as supervisors and subordinates become equal team members. A chief who has initiated a strategic planning process would do well to keep out of the way while planning teams steer their way through the swirling currents of their own creative juices.
So strategic planning is neither orderly nor wholly susceptible to scientific rigor. Computer programs, statistical rendering and modeling can be useful, but the degree to which they're used, or whether they're needed at all, depends on the issues at stake.
Most of the analysis needed for strategic planning in the public sector is qualitative. Political trends, voter moods, citizen welfare and organizational values can't be dissected, stretched taut and pinned to a board for detailed inspection like a frog in a biology class. They can be addressed only as forces or parameters with more or less influence; they're given shape and meaning through insight, judgment and reason.
If clearly called for, planning should be supported by all the quantitative tools available to the social sciences for citizen surveys and data collection and manipulation. But when gauging the need for these techniques, remember Mark Twain's adage about "lies, damned lies, and statistics." Properly used, statistics and modeling can strengthen a plan by adding factual substance, but they shouldn't be used to add muscle to feeble use of judgment and creative analysis.
Q: Why did you present elements of a strategic plan, but no actual model to follow?
A: There are two reasons. First, I believe it's far better to understand the concepts of planning and design your own model.
Second, when it comes to strategic planning, one size doesn't fit all. I question the competence and experience of authors or consultants who proclaim that a stringent, step-by-step adherence to their planning model will reap great rewards for any department that uses it.
For example, I'm currently participating as an advisory committee member in a neighboring jurisdiction's strategic planning process. After a nationwide search, consultants were selected who had responded to the request for proposals with every current strategic planning buzzword imaginable. They also sported an impressive stable of planners, all with advanced degrees. Things proceeded relatively smoothly with data collection and the initial development of the mission, values and long-range goals.
However, once the consultants recommended a reorganization and some short-range goals, the process began to wobble out of balance. Committee members questioned several of the recommendations, believing that some of the data was packaged and interpreted incorrectly.
The consultants willingly accommodated these concerns by taking another run at plugging all this information back into their model. Not surprisingly, the model yielded much the same results as before. Of course, the consultants were bewildered at the committee's reluctance to accept the results. After all, they were neatly printed in black and white with crisp color diagrams, and generated by one of the most sophisticated and adaptive strategic planning programs in existence.
The point here is that there are both good models and bad models, and even the good ones won't fit every need. You need to identify what you want to accomplish and the strengths and weaknesses your department will bring to the planning process. This will help you determine if you need a consultant and, if so, select the right one.
This assessment will be more easily accomplished if you're familiar with good texts on planning in the public sector. Two sources I recommend are "Creating and Implementing Your Strategic Plan: A Workbook for Public and Nonprofit Organizations" by John Bryson and Farnum Alston (Jossey-Bass), and "Strategic Planning Workbook For Nonprofit Organizations" by Bryan Barry (Amherst H. Wilder Foundation).
I like Bryson's workbook because he flat-out knows more about government institutions, what makes them tick, the environment in which they operate and how strategic planning can best be applied than anyone else I've read. Barry's workbook is readable and concise in presenting a straightforward, flexible and adaptable planning model