What’s your experience with 
           strategic planning?
    Does your union have a “strategic plan?”
  Strategic planning
   – The good 
   – The bad
   – The expensive 
   – The forgotten
   Strategic planning
     – a road map
  If you don’t know where you are 
  going, any road will do but you may 
  discover that you have little control 
  over where you end up.
  In today’s world, where all other 
  organisations and institutions are 
  planning (and where many of their 
  plans include actions that will impact 
  on your union and your members) a 
  union without a strategy and a clear 
  vision about what it wishes to 
  achieve is not likely to be successful.
  Strategic planning – beyond “reacting”
         All too often unions simply react to management and government 
         initiatives, or seek short-term objectives.  
                                          Most unions do some planning mostly 
                           around a schedule dictated by their                    regular duties: 
                           disputes, handling                      grievances, contract 
                           negotiations,                      regular union meetings, 
                           elections,                    political lobbying, organising, and 
                                          participating in labour bodies 
                           conferences and various other                     activities which are 
                           all part of the                    regular demands of union life.  
      
     Strategic planning 
     means looking beyond these important activities and analysing your 
     situation to develop long-range goals, and working out the specific 
     steps to get from where you currently are to where you need to be.  
   Strategic planning charts a course
   to organise what we have,
    
   to acquire what we need,
    
   to get what we want