Creating Collective Action that Lasts: The Compass Guide to Participatory Strategic Planning

Strategic planning can produce plans that don't work or are not implemented due to a narrow focus on categorical problems and solutions, a top-down approach, unresolved turf issues, and a lack of commitment to real learning and change. Altarum Research Institute has over 25 years of designing, conducting and evaluating strategic planning processes at the organizational, community, State and federal levels. Through our successes and our failures, we know that for strategic planning to lead to sustainable improvements, it must have a systems focus and be participatory by tapping into the collective intelligence of the group.

Altarum senior staff from different disciplines worked together to identify foundational principles of successful strategic planning processes. An environmental scan of existing strategic planning models, promising practices and tools was conducted to supplement our own experience.

Altarum has developed Compass: A Guide to Creating Collective Action That Lasts to define the foundation and approach for a participatory strategic planning model with a systems focus. Compass defines a set of beliefs that support participatory strategic planning, as well as defined steps a facilitator and planning body can take to move the process forward. The guide will be field tested with Altarum facilitators in projects spanning community-based public health and health systems planning, among other areas.

A model such as Altarum's Compass, which recognizes that participatory planning must be defined by a core set of beliefs and specific steps in the pre-planning, planning and evaluation phases, is a key resource for creating a participatory, actionable plan.