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Action Planning

Action PlanningWhat is Action Planning?
Action Planning brings to life all the hard work that has gone before in Horizon Scanning and Strategic Thinking.

Action Planning is a process for defining organisational strategy (preferred future), or direction in the face of what has been learned from Horizon Scanning and Strategic Thinking and making decisions on allocating resources to pursue this strategy.

D - Define the problem or challenge you are facing
E - Explore the choices that you have
C - Choose your strategy (from the above choices)
I - Identify the consequences of the choices
D - Do-act out the choices you have made
E - Evaluate - look back at your decision and see if it was a good one. If not, choose another one and repeat the process.

Action planning involves the following elements:
  • Horizon scanning: Describing the results of the exercise
  • Breakout thinking: Finding new paradigms
  • Scenario planning: Creating alternative futures
  • Competitor analysis: Undertaking an external scan
  • Stakeholder mindset: Understanding customer needs and desires
  • Organisational critique: Preparing an honest internal assessment
  • Plausible responses: Developing response strategies
  • Agreed strategy: Determining the way forward
  • Action plan: Preparing and executing the response


    Decision-making

Ensuring success
Whatever your strategy, whatever stage you are at in the decision making process, you are most likely to make progress if you break down the tasks you have to do into small steps and then identify the actions you need to take for each step. Many action plans fail because the tasks appear too difficult or vital steps are missed.

Planning models
 There are many different models of action planning, but a comprehensive starting point which breaks all the elements above into small, sequential and logical steps is shown here. Action planning is very often not sequential in its execution but this model allows you to dip in and out of each element until the process is complete and coherent.

Action planning
You can use this model from the outset of your project and programme to retain all your working papers, budgets and decisions made as well as your Action Plan outputs.

Further reference
Next: Futures Networking Back: Strategic Thinking To: Shaping Tomorrow



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