Synopses & Reviews
This highly visual workbook is a step-by-step guide for individuals and groups to developing a strategy map. The workbook will make strategy visual and help users see patterns across mission, goals, strategies and actions while helping to identify areas of alignment and misalignment, and determine where elements are needed, missing or not useful in a strategic plan.
The book directly supports the following chapters in the main text, Strategic Planning in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, 4e:
Chapter 4: Clarifying Organizational Mandates and Mission
Chapter 5: Assessing the Environment to Indentify Strengths and Weaknesses
Chapter 6: Indentifying Strategic Issues Facing the Organization
Chapter 7; Formulating and Adopting Strategies and Plans to Manage the Issues
Chapter 8: Establishing an Effective Organizational Vision for the Future
The primary components of the book are an Introduction to Mapping and Strategy Maps followed by seven chapters with detailed examples, worksheets process guidelines and an articulation of the outcomes and deliverables that might or should be sought when using mapping in each scenario.
SUBSTANTIVE CHAPTERS:
2. Getting Started. The chapter will include sections on: recognizing when mapping can be helpful, facilitation guidance, and logistics and supplies needed. The chapter will also include an introduction to the formalisms of mapping and general guidance on how to create a good map. Worksheets will help the reader create a personal strategic plan around something he or she wants to do personally or professionally.
3. Clarifying Organizational Mandates and Mission. The chapter will emphasize how mapping can be used to clarify both the purpose of the strategic planning effort and also organizational purposes. The chapter will also emphasize that participants’ sense of the organization’s mission is like to change as a result of addressing issues and formulating strategies.
4. Creating Strategies Out of an Assessment of Organizational Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Challenges or Threats. The chapter will show briefly how possible strategy elements can be drawn out of SWOC/T analyses
5. Identifying Strategic Issues Facing the Organization and Figuring Out What Might Be Done About Them. The chapter will emphasize issues identification and management, with attention to questions of issue framing. This chapter and the next are in many ways the real heart of the workbook.
6. Formulating and Adopting Strategies and Plans to Manage the Issues. The chapter will overlap some with the previous chapter, but in particular will emphasize pulling together ideas and information developed in Chapters 3 – 6.
7. Establishing an Organizational Vision for the Future. The workbook will show how to pull together purpose and key elements of strategies as a way of informing a vision of success for the organization.
8. Summary and Conclusions.
Resource A. The Basics of Analyzing a Map
Resource B (perhaps). Action-Oriented Strategy Maps, Balanced Scorecard Maps, and Mind Maps – Comparisons and Contrasts.
Resource C. Where to Find Additional Resources
References.
Synopsis
Strategic planning becomes visual with strategy maps and the tools, techniques, and guidance for turning them into effective action.Developed as a companion workbook to John Bryson's best-selling Strategic Planning in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, Visual Strategy: A Workbook for Strategy Mapping in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, goes beyond making the case for good and effective strategic planning to making strategy visual through effective strategy mapping. Strategy mapping prevents groups of people from talking over one another and going around in circles. It helps people speak and be heard, produce lots of ideas and understand how they fit together, make use of causal reasoning, and clarify ultimately what they want to do in terms of mission, goals, strategies, and actions. Strategy mapping can join process and content in such a way that good ideas worth implementing are found and the agreements and comments needed to implement them are reached. The result is living strategic plans that act as useful guides to action.
With detailed examples, actual strategy maps, process guidelines and hand-drawn illustrations, the book will help leaders, managers, students and other professionals see patterns across mission, goals, strategies and actions while helping to identify areas of alignment and misalignment and determine, real time, where elements are needed, missing or not useful in a strategic plan.
For leaders and managers of public and nonprofit organizations, facilitators and consultants, professors and students of strategic planning, strategic management, strategic mapping, and public policy, professional development workshops focused on strategic planning and strategy mapping.
Synopsis
THE WORKBOOK FOR MAKING STRATEGIC PLANNING MORE EFFECTIVE“Visual Strategy clearly helps users chart the journey from hopeful vision to effective action. The approach integrates strategic thinking and visual understanding, with each reinforcing the other. The result of using strategy mapping is palpable: a shared vision guiding collective action that makes a demonstrable positive difference.”
—Michael Quinn Patton, author of Utilization-Focused Evaluation and Getting to Maybe: How the World Is Changed; past President of the American Evaluation Association
“John Bryson is the go-to resource on strategic planning in public and nonprofit organizations. The mapping techniques illustrated by Bryson and his colleagues in Visual Strategy helped our nonprofit navigate through the great recession and come out on the other side in a stronger position. Every nonprofit leader should read this book and the associated books by these authors.”
—Jocelyn Hale, Executive Director, The Loft Literary Center; National Arts Strategies CEO Fellow
About the Author
JOHN M. BRYSON is McKnight Presidential Professor of Planning and Public Affairs at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.
FRAN ACKERMANN is a Professor of Strategy and Dean of Research and Development at Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
COLIN EDEN is Vice Dean and Professor of Management Science and Strategic Management in the Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
Table of Contents
Icon Key
Preface
Acknowledgments
Authors and Illustrator
Part 1: Introduction to Strategy Mapping
Part 2: The Loft Literary Center's Experience with Strategy Mapping
Part 3: Doing Strategy Mapping (ViSM)
Part 4: Facilitating Strategy-Mapping Workshops
Resource A. Comparing Visible Strategy Mapping with Other Mapping Methods
Resource B. Mapping Kit
Resource C. Software Support
Resource D. Supplemental Reading and Other Resources
Glossary
References