ABSTRACT
The following three chapters examine the processes required to determine the current position of the sport development organisation with regard to its internal and external environments, prior to making the strategic choices which give direction to its work. As with everything else covered in the book these activities should not be thought of as taking place at a fi xed point in time: we have already discussed the limitations of long-term strategy which is launched on the back of a period of analysis that is not returned to for some time. Assessing the organisation’s capabilities and place in the wider sport development environment should be an ongoing endeavour in order to maintain the currency and relevance of the organisation’s work. A product of these processes should be the successful alignment of the outcomes with the organisation’s sense of purpose in order to ensure strategic fi t. This is captured effectively in the ‘E-V-R congruence’ model (Thompson 2001), where E stands for environment, V for values and R for resources. This is represented diagrammatically by Thompson in a deceptively simple Venn diagram, but the task of achieving true congruence is anything but straightforward.
