Develop a shared vision for the future.

Learn more about strategic planning at OPG.

Where should we be heading?

Is your organization at an inflection point in its growth? Is it looking to stay competitive in an ever-changing environment? Does your leadership understand how to measure overall performance? Strategic planning offers the opportunity to ask and answer the big questions that shape your organization’s direction.

Our strategic planning services bridge the known and the aspirational through development, decisions, and direction. In addition to producing a plan and generating commitment to that plan, our process builds camaraderie, expands expertise, empowers internal planners, and creates energy. At OPG we pull from our extensive roster of analytical tools and planning methodologies to create the best planning process for your organization.

Vision, mission, and values clarification
Breakthrough ideas to transform direction
Scenario planning
Paradoxical tensions
Strategic destination statements
Hypothesis testing
Iterative goals that move core organizational functions to a higher level of productivity and impact
Meta-Metrics™ that measure success for the entire organization
Communication plans
Implementation assistance
And more

Learn more about our process:

Every decision in an organization is a choice with a degree of uncertainty; the choices are based on possible outcomes and best-case predictions about where the future is going to go. People generally agree that decision-making should be based more on data and analysis than intuition and gut feelings. There are two problems with this focus on data: First, data may be difficult to gather. Second, date reveals past patterns but does not indicate what will happen in the future. Scenario planning can help.

Scenario planning makes assumptions about what the future is going to be like, and how the business environment will change over time in light of that future. Scenario planning identifies a specific set of uncertainties in the current and future business environment. For example, farmers use scenarios to predict whether the harvest will be good or bad, depending on the weather. It helps them forecast their sales and their future investments. Military institutions use scenario planning in their operations to cope with any unlikely situations, anticipating the consequences of every event.

In this case, scenario planning can mean the difference between life and death. Scenario planning is a subjective technique enabling more dialogue within the company than a data-driven analysis; this is one of its strengths.

The idea is simple: Scenario planning defines critical uncertainties and develops plausible scenarios, the impact on the business in each scenario, and the needed response. Scenario development involves four steps. After identifying the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the months or years to come, four distinct scenarios are developed. The best way to perform these steps is to organize workshops during which all the participants work together.

Identify driving forces

To begin with, we discuss the big future shifts in society, economics, technology, politics, and other societal trends and see how these will affect the company.

Identify critical uncertainties

Once the driving forces are identified, we pick two (those that have the most impact on the business). For example, two of the most important uncertainties for agribusiness companies are food prices and consumer demand.

Develop a range of plausible scenarios

We form a matrix with the two critical uncertainties as axes. Depending on what direction each of the uncertainties will take, there are now four possible scenarios for the future.

Discuss the implications

During this final step, we detail the realities in each scenario, and the discuss the various implications and strategies for surviving and thriving in each scenario

All organizations must balance competing demands and factors. For example, a dairy farm must balance the minimum level of milk production for sustainability with space provided for the cows. Many organizations balance generosity and compassion toward staff with the need for minimum levels of output and productivity. At OPG, we call these paradoxical tensions. In our experience, most organizations have somewhere between 4-8 paradoxical tensions that are present all the time and are constantly being balanced in most decisions.

An organization should not be working toward eliminating the tensions; the goal is to define and articulate them so that everyone is aware of how these tensions are being played out in any given moment in the organization. These tensions are played out in situations such as providing a staff member with cancer additional paid time off to deciding which new line of service to offer a customer.

When paradoxical tensions are named and used regularly by leadership, management, and staff, it becomes easier to talk about difficult topics. Disagreements are de-personalized, and the dialogue turns to how the tension can be balanced, or which end of the tension needs to hold sway in that moment. On a more ‘meta’ level, when an organization knows its paradoxical tensions, it might decide that it has focus on one tension in particular or one end of a tension too much, causing lost revenue or other issues. For example, the tension between the wisdom of old-timers and the frame-breaking approach of newbies is one that must be examined regularly to ensure that the company remains relevant and successful in future decades.

A group of leaders, managers, or staff, or a mix of roles, can work together to name the tensions and articulate how and where the tensions are played out in the organization. Then the group can talk about how and if they want to change their orientation to the tensions.