Strategic tools for RIM professionals: three strategic competencies--vision, electronic scanning, and scenario planning--can work together to support an organization's overall strategic process.

• Author: Orndoff, Keith
• Position: Management Wise

At the Core

This article:

* Introduces three professional strategic tools

* Explains how they can support an organization's strategic plan

"Strategic planning provides a vision of what you want to become, a way of describing the end state toward which you are journeying, and then the process for getting there." So wrote Ray Stata in his 1988 Interfaces article, "The Role of the Chief Executive Officer in Articulating the Vision."

"In this sense," he wrote, "every individual uses strategic planning to help take charge of his life since it provides a personal vision of what one wants to become, a description of the end state of the journey, and a road map for getting there."

Eugenia K. Brumm was most definitely referring to the application of strategic thought as applied at the organizational level when she wrote that "RIM managers have acquired the knowledge and expertise to manage information tactically [emphasis added], from birth to death, but to think strategically [emphasis added] requires them to learn how to

* develop an awareness of the organization's core capabilities

* understand the vulnerabilities of the organization

* understand the industry--the line of business that the organization is in

* understand the associated industries

* understand the competition

* understand the place of the organization in relation to its competitors"

The following three tools can help fulfill these requirements for RIM professionals who want to think and act strategically: vision, environmental scanning (also called "strategic intelligence"), and scenario planning. This trio of strategic competencies can interact with and support each other as well as an organization's overall strategic process.

What is Vision?

No strategic management topic has received more commentary in the past decade than vision. And, with the public's heightened sensitivity to issues of corporate governance, this interest will intensify. As the debate on leadership and vision is re-framed around such issues, the "integrity" variable in the definition of what constitutes vision will increase.

The problem with defining vision is that asking 10 management experts what a vision is will likely result in 10 different answers. In his book, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, Peter Senge suggests that vision is "A picture of the future you seek to create, described in the present tense, as if it were happening now. A statement of `our vision' shows where we want to go and what we will be like when we get there." Senge notes that "Because it is of tangible and immediate quality, a vision gives shape and direction to the organization's future. And it helps people set goals to take the organization closer."

Brumm calls vision "the single most important factor for leadership success." New quantitative research supports and even expands on this contention to include not merely success in leadership but in the organization as well. According to Warren G. Bennis in his 1989 book On Becoming a Leader, "The first basic ingredient of leadership is a guiding vision. The leader has a clear idea of what [he] wants to do--professionally and personally--and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures. Unless you know where you're going, and why, you cannot possibly get there."

While a vision need not be written to be effective (though most are), it must contain certain elements. A powerful and effective vision will

* look forward in time (future-oriented)

* point toward some better reality to be achieved

* contain references implicitly or explicitly to important values

* appeal to these values in a call to action

Virtually all visions contain these elements, regardless of how they are constructed or communicated. But what do visions accomplish? Anyone fortunate enough to work in an organization with a strong vision understands the power of effective vision because they see it every day. There are the inevitable distractions of emergencies and daily crises requiring immediate solution, but amidst this daily grind, people in a vision-driven organization have a sense of where they are going and why. This sense informs their activities, giving the work meaning beyond the immediacy of the latest predicament.

In Visionary Leadership, Burt Nanus says articulating the right vision is the toughest task of a true leader but also the test of great leaders. When it is finally achieved, "The organization is already well on its way to the realization of the dream [i.e., vision]. To understand why, consider the forces that are unleashed.

* The right vision attracts commitment and energizes people.

* The right vision creates meaning in employees' lives.

* The right vision established a standard of excellence.

* The right vision bridges the present and future."

If the organization does indeed have a clear and effective vision, the next step in practicing RIM strategically might be to create a departmental vision. If the existing organizational vision is powerful, explicit, and effective, the job of creating a parallel or supporting departmental vision should be relatively easy. A likely approach would be to create a smaller, mirror-like departmental vision that supports the larger organizational vision.

A RIM department wishing to create a supporting vision statement could start by emphasizing its departmental commitment to the wider...