High Impact Tools and Activities for Strategic Planning: Creative Techniques for Facilitating...

High Impact Tools and Activities for Strategic Planning: Creative Techniques for Facilitating Your ... | Rod Napier, Clint Sidle, ... | Intelligent and Interesting

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High Impact Tools ...

	High Impact Tools and Activities for Strategic Planning: Creative Techniques for Facilitating Your ... Rod Napier, Clint Sidle, ... McGraw-Hill, 1997 - 424 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Not just another book on the theory of strategic planning, here are dozens of recipes for creative group activities to facilitate strategic planning in any organization. Designed for use by consultants, facilitators, and management team leaders, step-by-step instructions guide you through exercises for gaining employee and management participation, gathering feedback from management about the current state of the organization, creating an organized mission, vison and values statement, and planning so that the vision becomes reality. Ready-to-use reproducible materials and handouts are also included.

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Invaluable tools for Organizational Planning

I have had the opportunity to use the designs in this book over the past year. The designs or "strategic activities" are creative and guarnateed to advance the planning process for a wide range of organizations. The instructions have just the right amount of detail to adaquately prepare the facilitator. There is tremendous felxibility with each acitivity to accomodate longer or shorter amounts of time. The designs are
crip, imaginative, thoughtful, rooted in practice. Its a book I refer to again and again. Its been an invaluable tool to my work.

Intelligent and Interesting

impressive, interesting and different ideas .I like the down to earth , inclusive quality of this book. Thing are explained well and frameworks are provided, so that you can conduct these activities with confidence.I highly recommend it.

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Unique

Thee is little written for facilitators and this is a complete summary and approach to the topic with all the tools. I just wish there had been more stories of how each of the tools worked.

Useful, but not well-reproduced

I wavered between giving this book three stars or four, but ultimately settled on three. Although this book was exactly what I was looking for, namely a guide on strategic planning activities that could be used in a range of settings, I was not impressed with the way the book was put together. Some of the other reviews date back a number of years so perhaps the versions of the book they received were better then than they are now.

The good: The authors did a good job of presenting their theories on strategic planning and the first five chapters form the basis for their approach. Next is a lengthy section that provides a variety of strategic planning activities that can be used in a number of different settings. To me this is the most useful part of the text as the activities are clearly described in an easy-to-follow format. Each activity description includes practical information for its implementation such as a synopsis, materials needed (e.g. large comfortable room, newsprint and easels, paper and pens, markers, tape), goals, background, step-by-step instructions for the activity, time required for each step, adaptations or variations for different settings, and tips for the trainer/facilitator. They additionally include a chapter on follow-up activities for an organization following the strategic planning session, a chapter with a few case studies and a Toolbox chapter that describes some of the generic "tools" that can be used in planning sessions such as Mindmapping, Las Vegas Voting, Collapsing Consensus, etc. The "book" is a three-ring binder with - as the product description indicates - "ready-to-use reproducible materials and handouts." This last feature obviously offsets the price.

The bad: Although the content was good, the book feels like something that was put together at my local Kinkos. The pages aren't printed, they're photocopied, and the source they used for the copy I received included hand-written notes in the margins and dog-eared corners. Another issue: the authors reference the work of a prominent anthropologist and author as the basis for their Fourfold Path to Strategic Planning, but then misspell her name in the text and bibliography, an error one would expect in a college paper, not a professionally published text.

In summary - a useful book with practical suggestions that was reproduced somewhat sloppily.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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