Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations, 5th Edition

CHAPTER SIXIdentifying Strategic Issues Facing the Organization

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

—Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Johnson

Identifying strategic issues is the heart of the strategic planning process. Recall that a strategic issue is a fundamental policy question or challenge affecting an organization's mandates, mission and values, product or service level and mix, clients or users, cost, financing, organization, or management. The purpose of this step (Step 5), therefore, is to identify the fundamental policy questions—the strategic issue agenda—facing the organization. The way these questions are framed can have a profound effect on the creation of ideas for strategic action and a winning coalition, along with the associated decisions that define what the organization is, what it does, and why it does it—and therefore on the organization's ability to create public value (see Figure 2.3). If strategic planning is in part about the construction of a new social reality, then this step outlines the basic paths along which that drama might unfold (Bolman & Deal, 2013, 2014; Bryant, 2015).

An organization's mission often is explicitly or implicitly identified as an issue during this phase. In other words, organizational purpose is almost always an issue, at least implicitly, and strategic planning efforts revisit the issue often, if only to reaffirm existing purposes. In addition, ...