The Strategies Page (Worksheet 5.4 in the Simplified Strategic Planning manual) is designed to be an outline of the company's intended future course and direction. It should be a useful tool for both guidance and assessment of progress for the company's management as well as for other stakeholders. As such, it should present a sufficient amount of detail to make the future vision clear, but not so much as to mire the reader in the details or lose sight of the "big picture".

For example, in describing the strategy for a particular core business segment, a company may choose the strategic choice "Maintain". By its very definition, a "Maintain" strategy tells us that the company intends to vigorously defend its market share and grow in proportion to the market's growth. A well articulated strategy should go beyond this to include the key strategic initiatives required to executive their strategy and achieve the desired strategic positioning. This can be accomplished with a few brief bullet points. It would not, however, go into extensive detail. Remember, your strategy should represent a vision to be achieved over several years, not a detailed activity checklist for the next 30-60 days.

A majority of the work and thinking that went into previous strategic planning cycles is detailed in the Simplified Strategic Planning workbook. As a start, any new team members each should be given a workbook and they should review it thoroughly. What cannot be captured in the workbook is the more subtle nature of the group discussion that went into developing thoughts and ideas in building team consensus. Current team members should participate in a review with the new members to shed some light on this aspect of the previous planning sessions. Many teams also find it useful to send new team members to our seminar Simplified Strategic Planning for Small to Mid-sized Companies to give them a good understanding of the concepts behind the planning process and the tools that they will be required to use.

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