Welcome to the Mega Planning blog - a place where Roger Kaufman & Associates (including Roger Kaufman, Ingrid Guerra-Lopez, Ryan Watkins, Doug Leigh and Stephanie Moore) discuss strategic planning for all types of organizations starting with societal impact. Each of us will post discussions around our various foci, and from time to time we'll also invite other to post starter discussions on their implementation of Mega or related ideas.
All organizations - whether you're part of a corporation (for-profit), government organization, education (K-12 or higher education), non-profit, military or some other shape - are subsystems of our shared system of society. As Dale Brethower puts it, you are either adding measurable value to society or you are subtracting value. Often, the planning of what value your organization adds is left to chance or is simply assumed - and that leads to negative consequences, or negative societal impacts. We all have lived through too many of these.
Through decades of working with organizations all around the world, Roger Kaufman has developed a model for measuring societal-level outcomes and strategically planning for the outcomes you deliver to external clients and society, including how that value-added is planned down into the Macro and Micro level planning of an organization, then on into processes, tasks and inputs. In this blog, we discuss all different aspects - what is the rationale, why do this, how do you do it, what are examples of where this has been applied, what does assessment and evaluation look like, what are the implications for education or national security or higher education or business, and to governments at all levels. We also present the theory, research, and practical experience that validates this approach.
For too long, our de facto planning has meant we don't truly strategically plan. As William McDonough states, that means we have become strategically tragic. There have been dire consequences for the lack of planning at the societal level. It's time to stop being strategically tragic and instead add value to our shared society.