Ideally, strategic plans provide practical guides for decision making. For employees at all levels of any organization, the strategic plan should offer guidance and support for making personnel, acquisitions, and other decisions that are critical to the organization’s accomplishments of goals and objectives. Yet, as most of us have witnessed, these planning documents are typically created every few years only to sit on the shelf.
And while these potentially valuable documents gather dust, employees are increasingly being relied on to make critical decisions, often without clear guidance or direction based on the strategic directions of the organization and its clients.
This seems to me to be far from the most effective way to provide useful leadership to those individuals throughout an organization that are making increasing difficult decisions. From decisions regarding which products to recommend to potential clients to questions regarding the most effective delivery tools for training, all decisions in an organization should be aligned—either formally or informally—with the organization’s vision and mission.
For instructional designers, trainers, online instructors, and others involved with improving the performance in individuals, aligning the strategic plans of their organization with the results they contribute through effective instruction is especially important for achieving success. After all, success of instruction is dependent on it meeting an array of objectives representing the goals of multiple internal and external partners, stakeholders, clients, and clients’ clients; ensuring that instructional interventions will meet these broad requirements for success is among the responsibilities of instructional designers.
The diversity of criteria for determining the success of a training or education program is part of the reason that it is especially critical for those involved in classroom or distance education to be familiar with the strategic directions established for the organization. The odds of successfully meeting these multiple standards for success are nearly zero if you are not even familiar with an organization’s vision for the future.
Consequently, the strategic direction established by the organization (i.e., the objectives to be accomplished by and through the organization, including strategic plans, missions, goals, objectives, etc.) provide indispensable input for the design of online or classroom instruction. Moving forward with instructional design steps (i.e., needs analysis, task analysis, media selection, objectives development, instructional strategies design, formative evaluation, etc.) without a clear analysis of how the instructional intervention is linked and aligned with the strategic objectives of the organization, can be costly when instruction fails to meet the requirements of various stakeholders.
For example, it is not uncommon for training departments to take a “Band-Aid” approach to the development of new course offerings. When a manager from another division identifies a “need” (e.g., “We need to have a course on XYZ management principles”), too frequently the training department’s response is to quickly create a new course curriculum that can be pilot-tested and launched within a matter of weeks. Often, this is done without anyone questioning either the performance problems that led to the stated “need” or the alignment of the new training curriculum with the strategic direction set for the organization. As a result, organizations regularly end up expending valuable resources on developing training that has limited applicability as the organization moves forward in achieving its objectives.
Strategic plans can be most valuable to organizations when they outline the results that are to be accomplished (e.g., zero deaths or injuries from our products, 35% increase in production output, learners demonstrating success on all instructional objectives), rather than the processes and resources that may be used to achieve organizational goals (e.g., using quality management we will reduce waste). Results-oriented strategic plans can thereby focus all decision making within the organization on the achievement of measurable accomplishments, thereby allowing employees throughout the organization to align their daily decisions with the measurable standards related to the organization’s performance objectives.
Now and again, strategic planning has been criticized as being irrelevant in the ever-changing environments of today’s businesses and educational institutions, although the opposite is actually true for strategic plans that offer guidance for decision makers throughout the organization. Strategic plans that provide a clear picture of the useful results to be achieved through the organization, without micromanaging the daily decision making that is essential to functional organizations, are still effective tools for aligning the performance of people with results that add value. And, as organizations become more fluid in their decision-making at all levels, it is progressively more critical that all employees (including instructional designers, online instructors, media developers, classroom instructors, and others) have the necessary and appropriate guidance for their daily decision.
So, before you develop your next training course or consider adding a new online course to your curriculum, take a few minutes to review the strategic directions of your organization and it partners. Using annual reports, vision statements, missions, and strategic plans to align your decisions with the strategic directions of your organization is a first step toward ensuring the success of any project. And, you may find yourself approaching performance problems (i.e., the impetus for many training or education solutions) with a new set of questions—questions that link your decisions with the strategic direction of the organization.
“So, before you develop your next training course or consider adding a new online course to your curriculum, take a few minutes to review the strategic direction of your organization.”
