Many people find it hard to believe that good planning can significantly improve performance. Yet the same people are happy to subscribe to the belief that ‘poor planning produces p*** poor performance’. Clearly dissonance, on a fairly major scale, is in play here.

Don’t get me wrong, strategic planning won’t solve all your problems. Planning can never be entirely accurate because it involves prediction and no one can tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone next year. However, the act of planning requires you to think about the future and consider what might happen and how you will deal with different eventualities should they arise. That in itself is valuable. Planning also provides you with a road map of where you want to go. Yes, events may require you to make a detour and road closures and traffic jams may disrupt your journey, but if you know your final destination you can constantly update your route, even if you can’t avoid the 22 miles of road works on the M6/M1.

There are two types of plan that you will almost certainly be involved in, namely business and strategic. A business plan usually covers a period of one year, whereas a rolling strategic plan may cover three to five years. Personally I think any plan over three years contains more conjecture and wishful thinking than useful information. If you don’t think that you are involved in strategic or business planning, then I bet you either control or work to a budget. Well, a good budget is a business plan with a price ticket on it. And if it isn’t then it’s not a very good budget. Too often, the budget drives the business plan when what you really require is a realistic business plan which, when costed, becomes the budget. That business plan then feeds into year one of your strategic plan.

The theories discussed in this section will help you understand and contribute to either the business or strategic planning cycle in your organisation. Depending on your level in the organisation some theories will be more useful to you than others. However, all of them will provide you with different ways of looking at your organisation. The knowledge and understanding gained from this will make you a better manager, prepare you for future promotion and provide you with the ability to analyse and understand many of the apparently random changes that impact on your work.