In the process of drafting the slide deck our Strategic Planning group presentation, I went back through the course materials and lecture note summaries posted here and distilled them down to a course materials outline (which ended up being a surprising 27 page long Google Doc). I then went back through that and pulled out key these concepts, mostly from the lectures and Prof Bryson’s book, to keep top of mind.

The most important thing that jumped out was the structure of our purpose mapping activities:

Vision -> Goals -> Strategies -> Operations

Another way I saw this articulated in the notes was Actions -> Strategies -> Goals -> Mission

As a result of honing in on that structural concept, the slides under each geography were organized so that they illustrate how each entity articulates Vision, Goals, Strategy, and Actions

Other key concepts noted from the pass back through the outline:

• Who are the stakeholders? Success depends on their satisfaction
• Mission, mandates, vision are all about purpose
• A key challenge is that people often don’t understand what the mandates are
• Mission + mandates + values = public value
• Importance of an authentic vision
• Strategic issues exist on the boundary of an organization and its environment
• Leadership matters
• Leadership from the middle is crucial
• Power of storytelling
• Shared understandings are important