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Devda community was not a very old village. Only twenty years earlier people migrated from the mountains of Nepal south to the forest and created the village. The village had no services of any kind, no infrastructure, no real organization of any kind, and NGOs did not operate in the village. There were, altogether about 50,000 people, and one specific site near the edge of the village had around 6,000 people. Most of the people had very little awareness of themselves as an actual community, with very little awareness of any leadership within the entire group. About 40 people decided to be part of a participatory strategic plan including some of the key people within the village. The planning session was a major awareness-building event, including environmental, social, cultural and personal awareness. For the first few months after the plan there was not much implementation, but soon after that heavy implementation of the strategies began. They launched a community market every Monday morning, which had an immediate positive impact during which people began to bring and to sell their products including chickens and goats. A one kilometer road was built from the outer sector of the village to the market, with beautification including lots of directional signs. Next they installed 4 acres of drip irrigation to increase the crop potential of about 200 families. Cultural development occurred as people explored their inner capacity with social artistry. Tatwa Timsina, Nepal, 2010

The Request by the Organization The national board of a health profession made up of twelve people from several different provinces wanted to hold a two and a half day retreat to come up with a plan that would be cohesive across the country and that would allow a potential membership of many thousands of people to “row in the same direction.” They wanted to revisit the organization’s mission because the external global problems and pressures on the members of the profession were never anticipated by the old mission. They were aware that the structure of the organization was not up to the task and that structural adjustments would be needed, even though they did have an administration company that handled membership dues and some communication. They were all aware of their small financial reserves. None of these people had any particular solutions in mind, but just knew that urgent decisions and actions were needed. The Situation and Factors at Play The profession needed to create an important plan for the next four years. The organization had a membership of 1,600 from a potential of 36,000 members, but it was an unincorporated association, under the umbrella of another organization. A series of problems on a global scale and of a life-threatening nature, was taking its toll on the general population and the media was quick to publicize anything that was linked to those problems. The profession had members who were on the front line dealing with some of the issues and therefore was under constant scrutiny by the media. Media seized on unflattering facts and shortfalls of any body that was related to the issues. The profession was being constantly negatively portrayed in media in spite of being on the front line trying to work in the midst of the chaos. In this actual case, the profession was under siege by events in society, professional credibility was shaken, and some among the membership were depressed. The board of directors had all been members for many years, and wanted to get the profession back in good stead in society. They wanted the membership to grow and the association to give quality service to all its members. The problems that were created by the global issue became a rallying point for the board and they decided to seize the moment and make sure that the profession moved ahead in spite of the difficulties and by the media. They decided to strategize deeply and signal that common action was needed by all members, not just a few leaders. The Planning The two and a half day ToP Participatory Strategic Planning session was preceded by five telephone interviews with separate board members. The event process included an historical scan, mission discussions, vision, contradictions and strategy workshops, organizational structure discussion, two year action planning and team assignments. After the event a first draft of documentation of the planning was sent to the board members within two weeks. Impact and Results The organization was registered as a corporation. A new board and committee structure was created that spread the workload and responsibility across the country and the membership. The administration of the organization was shifted from the third party management firm to a full time Administrator. Before the strategic plan, the annual budget was about $10,000. Five years later the organization handled about $500,000 in various project grants and initiatives. The new structure has enabled the organization to handle about twenty major projects over the years. A series of Annual Conferences with high attendance has increased membership, membership interaction and the public profile of the organization. The profession has extended its influence into several other partnering bodies and professional groups through joint task forces, joint research and subsequent collaboration. Executive Directors and high level experts from other professions regularly collaborate and work with the organization. It is now a credible voice for the profession and is sought for advice, for partnerships and to develop funding proposals. Several seminal pieces of work have been undertaken with funding from various government bodies. Standards of practice of the profession which existed before the strategic plan have now been extensively used to shape curriculum, create toolkits, write research papers and books to support the standards. A set of competencies with a process to certify professionals has been refined, implemented and partially evaluated. So many of the strategies were accomplished within three years that another round of strategic planning was undertaken earlier than expected. The practical components of the vision of the second strategic plan were not very different from the first one but envisioned a desire to effect society rather than just organize the profession. The strategies and action plans of the new strategic plan exhibited greater confidence that the original plan. An expectation of success was built into the more recent plan. Learning When a new structure is being created it is better to form the organizational structure after strategies have been developed, rather than before. This is because some strategies may be large and important and may give rise to specific structural forms. Structural change is developed according to the plan that is being implemented and not vice versa. A mission changes according to changes in the environment and as the organization evolves; etc. Bill Staples, Canada, August 2010

The Request by the Organization The Economic Development Commission of a small city and its surrounding rural area wanted regional planning that was long term, fair, with lots of opportunity for input from various stakeholders. The planning had to be highly participatory with neutral facilitators and consultants to engage a large part of the general public to create the economic development plan. The Economic Development Commission wanted teams of citizens in action by the end of the planning cycle. They did not want a plan on the shelf. The Situation and Factors at Play Three small towns were mandated to amalgamate into one city with a large rural catchment area in order to reduce administrative costs and to rationalize the large patchworks of regulations that can affect business and day-to-day living. The entire area depended heavily upon a resource- based economy, but most knew that this could not be sustainable over the very long-term. City councillors and business leaders had formed an advisory group to create an economic development plan to provide a solid foundation for everyone in the region. This advisory group had very little luck in creating a plan that everyone would back. After almost a year on their own without getting very far in their planning, they decided on the ToP approach. The Planning This planning process involved demonstration sessions with the original advisory committee of politicians and business leaders. After that three dozen open focus groups and input sessions from the general public were held within the entire catchment area promoted by the local media. Since the sessions were open and public no one knew how many would show up for any particular session, therefore the process had to be robust enough to work for handful of people or a hundred people, whoever showed up. These sessions were held in local community halls, golf clubs and hotels. Two months after all of the public sessions were completed, the advisory group held two sessions to vet the emerging vision, obstacles and strategies, and plan a large plenary in a local college gymnasium to which everyone was invited. This plenary, open to all, was to view the emerging consensus plans, comment on them, and launch implementation teams. The Premier opened this last big session and remarked that it was a “good example of democracy in action.” There were additional opportunities for people to participate through email, fax and surveys. In total about 540 people attended the various sessions. Impact and Results By the end of the plan eight new strategy teams were in place. Strategies to promote regional attractions was the largest set of strategies. The schedule of town celebrations among all the towns and villages were revamped to help touristm so that there were no conflicting schedules between towns. A new Downtown Business Network was created with a full-time marketing and event coordinator to replace the three previous competing business associations. The business district became the provinces first historic district under the Historic Sites Protection act. New coordinated websites with a wider variety of tourism information were created. Tourist income had increased to $35M per year within five years after the plan was complete. A one-source business team has been created to encourage local investment. They help coordinate business associations, create local investment pools, seek out entrepreneurial efforts, and help micro-business startups. Learning If large public consultation strategic planning is held too soon before an election, politicians will tend to stake out their favourite topics and use opportunities to be very public about it. This can create public conflict over high profile choices. This can be easily seen in “tough on crime” posturing played by politicians that have very little to do with good public policy. Large municipal planning exercises are often not held immediately after an election because people expect political leaders to make decisions, not start a planning process. A good planning process can be held midterm because people are ready to listen to each other, and electioneering has not yet started. Bill Staples, Canada, August 2010

The Request of the Organization The CEO of a major national bank wanted to involve his management staff across the country in innovative and creative thinking regarding the operations of the bank. Specifically he wanted to ensure that major board decisions had the benefits of the thinking of managers who were the direct link to front line operations. The Situation and Factors at play In the 1990s a Malaysian/Singapore bank hired a new CEO to run a cluster of eighteen branches in Malaysia. That CEO had experienced ToP earlier in a job with another organization and it had impressed him helping him to renew his interest and passion in his occupation as an economist. After becoming the CEO of this national bank, he brought in LENS International to facilitate a number of ToP planning sessions in order to involve a wide spectrum of people in developing strategies for the bank. The Planning Over a seven year period 12 participatory strategic planning sessions were facilitated both with branch managers and with different departments such as trade finance and new business marketing. The CEO opened each session to talk about why the participatory planning was important. A secretariat documented each session, and after reading through the documentation, the CEO gave a closing speech to affirm the participants' work, to let them know what he thought was exciting in their document, and to let them know what the Board was thinking in terms of bank strategies. The ToP work also involved training team leaders who assisted with the planning sessions. Results and Impact Interviews with the client were held over a period of years. The CEO indicated that whatever changes the bank was planning to undertake, it became much easier to make the changes because people had already come to the table to come up with ideas similar to those the board was contemplating. Over time the style of the main branch shifted from primarily a top down to a collaborative, participatory approach and culture. Learning One of the important values in this planning was that it had been blessed by the higher levels and therefore was taken quite seriously throughout the organization. Ann Epps, Malaysia, 2010

The Request of the Organization The director of a branch of a government department wanted a strategic plan created by his managers. The branch was mandated to roll out new information technology across the entire department and potentially several other government departments and the director wanted the managers to figure out how this would get done and to lead their respective front line staff in all aspects of the rollout. The Situation and Factors at Play In the late 1990s new technology and increased capacity of the internet were leading government departments to envision new e-services in which people could access government information directly rather than having to visit branches and make requests. Up until that time, most government departments purchased their own computers and bought their own programs, and were generally incompatible with each other. Some departments, however, had similar needs and were beginning to form clusters also know as departments with a matrix reporting structure. For instance social services has similar technology needs to education, and agriculture has similar technological needs as environment. Resources. This particular branch was within a large department that had similar technological needs as three other large departments. The plan created by this branch would have repercussions on all four departments. The Planning Event The director and his seven managers allotted two full days to create a strategic plan for the branch. The managers had already done considerable research on the needs of the branch, their department and the three other departments. The planning event included a trend analysis for the past several years, a session to envision their best case technological requirements, an analysis of the blockages they were experiencing in their work, the development of a set of strategies that would set the direction for all the staff, and a timeline of milestones for the next two years, along with key topics to be covered on agenda for the monthly meetings for the next year. They also created a framework of the complete set of stakeholders that would be affected by their plan. Results and Impact The branch director and managers were able to immediately report back to their Assistant Deputy Minister that they had a comprehensive plan of action that would create a set of deliverables that the other branches in the department could depend upon. The Assistant Deputy Minister shared this with the ADMs of the three other departments. One by one, the information technology branches of each of the other three departments requested a similar strategic planning retreat. Within four months all the information technology branches in that cluster of departments had their plans in place. The Chief Information Officer (Deputy Minister Level) of all four departments then requested a similar retreat for the 65 managers of all the departments at once to ensure that the plans all had synergy between them. Within three years the new technology, information architecture, information management, and knowledge management were in place, and the legacy data for the four departments had been consolidated. Help desks were up and running for government staff and for external users, and voice over internet protocol was being used to allow staff across the province to access the system, and create update new systems. Learnings The strategic plan that was created by the 65 managers across the four departments had efficiencies beyond the four separate plans created by each department. While many of the milestones and planned accomplishments of the smaller plans were also included in the larger plan, the larger plan was able to remove some redundancies and duplication of effort that would have occurred in the four smaller plans. Therefore, creating the larger plan together from the beginning would have reduced the need for the four smaller ones. On the other hand, the creation of the four smaller plans first, allowed all staff to condition themselves to the behavioural changes necessary for such a large project. Participatory strategic planning is very effective in matrix organizations where there is a great need for communication across the reporting systems as well as up and down. Bill Staples, Canada, August 2010

The Request by the Organization An international non-government organization was anticipating a period of expansion and needed a long range plan. The executive knew that they needed something long range because they intended to expanding staff in the near future, and needed specific long range goals on which to focus, but did not have any specific ideas in mind. The staff were mainly scientists and said they had little familiarity with any form of long range or organizational planning. The Situation and Factors at Play This INGO started in Canada in the late 1990s with modest beginnings, a small staff within a related government department, some international grants and a passion to increase the health of populations around the world. The staff were primarily scientists who were all experts in their own individual fields of endeavour. The government was preparing to spin this group of staff out on their own and to cut direct government ties. To act on its mandate to become autonomous from the government, the entire staff embarked on a participatory strategic planning process that would launch the organization and its new mission, affect its registration as a corporation and its potential funding, create its public face to the world and make plans for multi-lateral relationships with organization in many other nations. The Planning The participatory strategic planning occurred over 3 months with the ToP practitioner leading the 14 staff and leadership over five days of sessions, and the staff doing additional datagathering between sessions. The facilitated sessions included an historical scan, a societal trend analysis, a frameworking session on potential partners, vision, contradictions and strategies workshops, and action planning to the strategic objective level. Over the next four years the ToP practitioner worked with the executive and senior management on another 25 days of curriculum building, international conferences, operational planning and several think tanks all of which were related to actual implementation of the strategic plans. Results and Impact One of the strategies was to promote advocacy and social marketing seminars. Within four years international training programs had been held in Europe and the Middle East with trainees from twenty nations who were then able to promote and launch government funded programs in each of those nations with compelling scientific evidence from around the world. Another objective was to conduct continental needs assessments on three continents. These assessments were all completed and the partnering organizations and governments that participated in the assessments became allies in the INGO’s efforts. The major objective of holding partnership open forums was accomplished through several forums, one the biggest being held in southeast asia. Government ministers, officials and industry owners from several nations attended for five days, and the President of the host country attended. The partnership forum resulted in goals and objectives being established for each of seven nations. Hundreds of scientific papers have being written and shared across nations to accelerate the health benefits in each nation. Media campaigns were targeted in 30 nations to people who had the authority to change health policy. During the slow and steady growth of this INGO now with offices on three continents positive health impact have been documented for 250 million people in 65 countries. Learning When working with a civil society group or with charitable organizations, participants and stakeholders are generally driven by a high ethical standard and are very interested in creative strategies. They are willing to work across functions and teams and outside of their normal areas of work and interest in order to create plans that maximize impact. Participants have little problem “telling is like it is” so the analysis of root problems and contradictions tends to be very revealing. Bill Staples, Canada, August 2010

The Request by the Organization A new hospital board and senior management staff wanted to assure themselves and the community that big changes mandated in the hospital would not affect the same care and compassionate service that had been available in the past. The strategic plan was explicitly about a transformation from being a hospital into becoming a district health centre with added emphasis on prevention, wellness and public education. The stakeholders knew very well from experience how to run a hospital and wanted a strategic plan that would put them on the right course for long term future as a district health centre. They were open to whatever would emerge from the plan. The Situation and Factors at Play This small town hospital was undergoing two major changes at once. The first change was the shift of the hospital from being a Roman Catholic-run organization to becoming a public institution. This was happening because the Roman Catholic religious order that had opened the hospital and served the population over many decades was stepping back after having trained local professionals to take over the administration of the hospital and care of the patients. The second shift was from being a hospital which mainly helps sick and injured people, to becoming a regional health centre with a much larger mandate including wellness, education and even prevention. For many decades the population, which had great trust in the religious order, was able to leave hospital staffing and administration to people whom they knew to be guided by care and compassion. With the shift to becoming a public institution a new set of values, especially financial ones, were added to mix. Hospitals attract loyalty and commitment from the surrounding population because of the intensity of the experience that people have with them. Hospitals have to shift the services they offer as the community changes with age, with growth or decrease in population and from technological changes. Hospitals are generally slow to make changes because of the expensive infrastructure needed, the training and new staff, and the difficulty and expense of attracting staff. Canadian hospitals, due to the nature of their public funding, have even more hurdles because of additional layers of bureaucratic and occasionally political management. The Planning The strategic planning process included 31 people; 12 board members of the hospital, 11 management staff, and 8 people representing partnering organizations. The board members were a very good representation of the small rural area, so there was no need to hold public sessions beyond the thirty involved in strategic planning process itself. The management team had done some data gathering in advance and had given the board members briefing notes about current programs, services and government mandates, so that the whole group could launch straight into the participatory process. The planning process itself was held during a three day session including Friday night, all day Saturday and again on Sunday morning, and included an historical scan, a visioning session, contradictional analysis, a strategies workshop with phasing of strategies, and an action planning workshop. The draft of the documentation was sent to the client within three weeks. The staff took the results and did further implementation planning. Results and impact The plan was created eight years ago and there have been three different CEO’s since that time. Fortunately the current Chief Executive Officer was present at the planning session (the new Chief Nursing Officer at that time) and was able to reflect on the results of the plan eight years later. According to him about 70% of the long range practical vision has been realized. A seamless care model for seniors was a large part of the vision and has been largely implemented with expanded community support services, with apartments for assisted living, and many supports for people living in their own homes. Future requirements for senior services is constantly monitored and projected. The transit system for seniors is planned to expand to allow greater accessibility. The Health Centre offers acute care services, long-term care services and community support services, along with preventative and health promotion programs. A missing part of the puzzle is a retirement home which would complete the seamless model, as it would provide a medium-care alternative to the long term care home. Higher, stable levels of trained, satisfied staff was a very large part of the vision. As a result of the plan many different things were tried to stabilize the part-time, professional health care staff. Eventually the decision was taken to make all the part time nursing positions into full time positions which included both registered nurses and registered practical nurses. This made a big difference in stability, but there are still some RPN shortages. The District Health Centre partnered with a nearby college of applied arts and technology. This resulted in seven individuals choosing to study in a health care profession via videoconference and actually staying in the area, rather than moving out. It also resulted in students from outlying communities coming to the District Health Centre for both theoretical education and laboratory experience. It took a long time for the vision of satisfied staff to be realized. Four years after the strategic plan was created, a staff survey still showed a satisfaction level lower than 50%. This was largely a result of constantly changing CEOs. Many improvements were introduced in the following three years and a similar survey showed staff satisfaction increasing to well over 80%. State of the art equipment was envisioned. A fair amount of investment occurred that led to changing and upgrading the diagnostic imaging suite, along with tele-diagnostic system, which permits patients to remain, rather than having to travel long distances for diagnostics. Learning Hospitals are open to scrutiny by the public and by government stakeholders. Since health care is almost always expanding, long term strategic planning of a hospital must take into account community needs, government mandates, professional and union requirements, and new modes of service. This means that the stakeholders in a hospital strategic plan need to include health professionals, unionized staff, administration and management, other health delivery partner organizations, and segments of the population that most use the hospital. In the hospital setting innovation in strategies is not nearly as important as clarity and steadiness. Measurable accomplishment will tend to stress process rather than content to ensure that as many stakeholders as possible are on board during every step of implementation. Bill Staples, Canada, August 1, 2010