ABSTRACT
Strategic planning and strategic plans may take many forms, but for our purposes, this chapter considers strategic planning a collaborative process used to inform the development of a plan that, at a minimum, describes the strategies, resources, actions, outputs and outcomes needed to move from the current reality to a desired future state. A well formed strategic plan, which I. Stevenson and J. M. Weiner also refer to as a logic model, “seeks to make transparent the relationship between a strategy and its ultimate outcome to determine if the actions performed in the service of the strategy accomplish what they were intended to accomplish. Coherence, the fourth of Stevenson and Weiner's principles, concerns how well each part or component of a strategic plan supports and aligns with the organization's vision. Strategic planning is simply outlining “what needs to happen for the organization to meet its goals”.
