NACA Strategic Plan - Introduction
NACA’s strategic long-range plan describes a desired vision and what will be essential to achieving that vision. It is grounded in core ideology and driven by an envisioned future that realizes the full potential of NACA’s ability to support its stakeholders and the industry. NACA’s commitments are articulated in goals that declare the outcomes or attributes the organization intends to achieve. Objectives represent key metrics affecting NACA’s ability to achieve the goal and articulate the direction in which these issues must be moved.
In the future, NACA will not be able to be all things to all people. As the plan evolves to meet the needs of a constantly changing professional environment, however, NACA may determine it needs to focus resources in new areas. Therefore, underlying this plan is the adoption of an ongoing process of planning and thinking strategically, designed to ensure relevance of direction and action over time.
In developing this strategic plan, a framework for planning was utilized, based on a model that organizes conversations about the future into four distinct planning “horizons.” Tecker Consultants has found the use of this framework to be a powerful tool. It helps organizations in prioritizing and executing outcomes as well as in ensuring relevance of an organization’s long-range direction over time.
Envisioned future
The “four planning horizons” framework consists of crafting a comprehensive strategic direction based on the balance between what doesn’t change--the timeless principles of the organization’s core purpose and core values (core ideology) -- and what the organization seeks to become within a 10- to 30-year horizon--what would be possible beyond the restraints of the current environment. The 10- to 30-year horizon is characterized by the articulation of an envisioned future--a BAG (big audacious goal)--and a vivid description--what it will be like to achieve the goal.
Critical factors
The articulation of the envisioned future guides the organization as it considers the factors that will affect its ability to achieve its goals. Building foresight about the 5- to 10-year horizon--assumptions, opportunities, and critical uncertainties in the likely relevant future as well as emerging strategic mega-issues--suggests critical choices about the potential barriers the organization will face. This foresight also suggests the responses the organization will need to consider in navigating its way toward achievement of its 10- to 30-year goal, or BAG.
Strategic plan and operational planning
The linkage continues into the 3- to 5-year horizon through the development of a formal long-range strategic plan, in which the organization articulates the outcomes it seeks to achieve for its stakeholders. How will the world be different as a result of what the organization does? Who will benefit, and what will the likely results be? Further, the articulation of strategies will bring focus to NACA’s annual operational allocation of discretionary resources. Action plans, checkpoints, and milestones will be developed through a process of operational planning, indicating NACA’s progress toward each goal in every planning year.
A strategic long-range plan is not intended as a substitute for an annual program or operating plan. It does not detail all the initiatives, programs, and activities the organization will undertake in the course of serving its membership and the industry, nor can it foresee changes to the underlying assumptions on which key strategic choices were based. Instead, the strategic plan identifies what NACA is not doing today, but must be doing in the future to be successful. Consequently, the strategic plan implies change--doing new things or doing more or less of current activities to ensure successful outcomes.
Ongoing Re-evaluation
Strategic planning for NACA should become the methodology for the organization’s operations. If it is successful, this process will not have yielded a plan to be placed on the shelf, but will have served as a catalyst for the “process of planning strategically,” at all times and at all levels throughout the organization. In order to achieve its vision, NACA must not look at strategic long-range planning as a one-time project that produces a milestone document of its best thinking at the moment. Instead, NACA must adopt strategic planning as an operational philosophy of ongoing re-evaluation of the critical knowledge bases that form the framework of its world, including:
• Sensitivity to member needs, insight into the future environment of the industry,
• Understanding of the capacity and strategic position of the organization, and
• Effective analysis of the ethical implications of policy and program choices.
NACA’s strategic long-range plan represents a compass the organization will use to guide its work over the next five years. Each year of its life, the plan will be updated based on experience or new circumstances or as new opportunities or challenges emerge. In 2010, NACA should author a new strategic long-range plan based upon the new environment expected to exist in a rapidly evolving world.