Business Strategy 8: Step 4 Identify Strategic Issues Facing Organizations

This continues our series highlighting John M. Bryson’s strategic change cycle

John M. Bryson wrote Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations. He says “Together, the first four steps in the Strategy Change Cycle lead to the fifth, the identification of strategic issues. Strategic issues are fundamental policy questions or critical challenges affecting the organization’s mandates, mission and values, product or service level and mix, clients, users, or payers, cost, financing, structure, processes and management.” In short, everything about the organization.

Typical Issues Facing the Organization

“The first four steps of the process are designed to slow things down so that planning team members have enough information and interaction for the needed wisdom to emerge” writes Bryson. The process is designed, in other words, to unfreeze people’s thinking so that knowledge exploration and development may occur.”

“A statement of strategic issue should contain three elements:

• “The issue should be described succinctly, preferably in a single paragraph…”
• “The team should list the factors that make the issue a fundamental challenge…”
• “The planning team should prepare a statement of the consequence of failure to address the issue…”

Process for Identifying Strategic Issues

You may use seven approaches to identify strategic issues:

• Direct approach goes straight from a discussion of mandates, mission, and SWOT to the identification of strategic issues
• Indirect approach begins with brainstorming about different kinds of options before identifying issues
• Goals approach starts with goals and then identifies issues that must be addressed before the goals can be achieved
• Vision of success approach identifies issues that must be addressed before the vision can be achieved
• Oval mapping approach creates a word-and-arrow diagrams in which ideas about actions the organization might take, how it might take them, and why
• Tensions approach argues that any strategic issue always presents four basic tensions
  • Human resource
  • Equity concerns
  • Innovation
  • Change maintenance of tradition and productivity improvement
• Systems analysis approach discerns the best way to frame issues when a system contains complex effects in order for the organization to fully understand it.

Saturday we will examine how to formulate strategies to manage the issues