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Strategic Planning:

Developing Strategic Initiatives

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Strategic Planning: Strategic Initiatives, Created with Powernoodle Expert: Katheryn Wiedman Ph.D.

An accomplished author, speaker, and trainer, Katheryn has worked with more than 160 organizations across North America in strategic planning, board development, and other organizational development initiatives.

Katheryn is a creative and dynamic leader, educator, facilitator, and listener. She champions diversity and inclusion in all of her projects.

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“A navigator at heart, I love to guide groups toward the best decisions for their organization’s vision, mission, and values. Powernoodle provides an inclusive, highly participatory environment that allows for diverse voices to be part of decision-making.”

About Powernoodle Welcome to Powernoodle, a customizable, step-by-step decision

process that allows group members to contribute at their own speed.

Each Powernoodle session has an Organizer and Participants. While a Powernoodle session can be organized using in-house

expertise, many teams find that an outside facilitator brings added value and objectivity to the process of strategic planning.

An in-house leader holds valuable content knowledge about the organization and its industry – knowledge that may be lost if he/she also serves as the session’s facilitator. An outside facilitator holds the process knowledge needed to keep the group moving forward, freeing the leader to participate fully, contributing his/her knowledge to the question before the group.

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The Organizer’s job

The Organizer creates the session and leads the group through the steps: Brainstorm, Categorize, Combine, Vote, Rate, Prioritize, and Action Plan.

Depending on the session’s purpose, the Organizer is able to customize the process in a number of ways, including skipping steps and changing other features.

Every Powernoodle session ends with a Powernoodle Report.

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The Participant’s job1. Respond to the invitation from the Organizer and log on

to Powernoodle.

2. Review any resource documents provided by the Organizer.

3. Post their ideas and observations on sticky notes in the Brainstorm step.

4. Vote on which are the most important.

5. Rate each statement to determine relative merit of each of the ideas/observations.

6. Prioritize the ideas/observations in terms of their impact on the organization.

7. Engage in action planning to ensure ideas are implemented.

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Using Powernoodle in strategic planning

A strategic planning process usually includes the following steps. This set of slides describes a Powernoodle session for step 5, “Strategic Initiatives.”

1. Plan for Planning: agree on the details of the process

2. Mission Check

3. Environmental Scan

4. Vision

5. Strategic Initiatives

6. Implementation

7. Celebration and Communication

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Why use Powernoodle to develop strategic initiatives?

Strategic initiatives are 3-5 areas of work that an organization commits itself to achieving, over and above “business-as-usual.” The work is considered essential – often mission-critical – and usually has to do with improving the organization’s position.

This Powernoodle session will help you design and lead a strategic initiatives session.

With Powernoodle, you can invite a large, inclusive group to participate and reach consensus on priorities quickly and effectively.

At the end of this session, the planning team will have a shared agreement and commitment to the organization’s strategic initiatives.

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Launching your Powernoodle strategic initiatives session

To get started, the Organizer:

1. Creates the Powernoodle session.

2. Creates a strategic initiatives question, for example:

“What do we want to see in place in 3 years as a result of our actions?”

3. Invites Participants via email into the Powernoodle session.

The next slide shows the “Session Room” which the Organizer creates to launch the session.

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Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos

www.powernoodle.com

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Powernoodle Session Room

A session can have more than one question.

List of invited Participants

How the session unfolds…After the session is created, the Organizer leads the group through Brainstorm, Vote, Rate, and Prioritize steps.

Brainstorm – encourage Participants to add all their ideas.

Vote – set the number of votes per Participant and make sure everyone has a chance to vote.

Rate – set the ‘single-criterion’ rating for the Powernoodle sticky notes from 0 = strongly disagree to 10 = strongly agree for the criterion statement such as:

“This item is the most important for our future.”

Prioritize – assign $1,000 in Powernoodle money to each Participant to allocate toward degrees of importance.

The next slide shows the Prioritize step.

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Prioritising in Powernoodle

After the Prioritize step: Action planning

Powernoodle’s Action Plan step presents an opportunity to figure out just how the various strategic initiatives will be accomplished.

The Action Plan step presents the strategic initiatives your team generated and each Participant has the opportunity to assign tasks to each of the ideas.

Now is the time to make certain that people are assigned responsibility for carrying out tasks that will ensure the ideas are implemented.

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After the Action Plan step: The Powernoodle Report! The Powernoodle Report is a powerful tool in any decision-

making process.

It captures every discussion thread for future reference and action and helps participants remember how they got to the decisions they made.

The Report is created automatically, moments after your session ends.

It is available as an EXCEL download to all Participants.

The next slide shows a typical Powernoodle Report.

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Powernoodle Report in excel format

Tabs capture all input at every step for full decision-making transparency. Saves time; maintains commitment and buy-in.

For detailed examples and directions, you can:

Watch the Powernoodle Organizer Training Series videos.

Log in and visit the Help section.

Contact us at support@powernoodle.com.

Join the user groups online.

Powernoodle help and support

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Katheryn Wiedman, Ph.D.CenterPoint Institutewww.centerpointinstitute.comFollow Katheryn on linkedin.com.Join Katheryn in the Powernoodle group on linkedin.com

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www.powernoodle.com

To purchase a Powernoodle plan, please visit our website.

Powernoodle Template: Strategic Planning Strategic Initiatives by Katheryn Wiedman and and Powernoodle Inc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.centerpointinstitute.com and www.powernoodle.com.

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