Strategic Planning with the Youth Board: Ways to Identify Issues

1
Strategic Planning with the Youth BoardWays to
Identify Issues
http//texasvolunteer.tamu.edu

• Chris Boleman
• ct-boleman_at_tamu.edu
• Angela Burkham
• ab-burkham_at_tamu.edu

2
What is Strategic Planning?

• Determines where an organization is going over
  the next year or more.
• It a management tool, period.

3
Why Strategic Plan?

• Focus energy
• Ensures that members of the organization are
  working toward the same goals
• Adjust the organizations direction in response
  to a changing environment

4
The Process of Strategic Planning

• Disciplined to keep focused
• It calls for the raising of sequenced questions
  that help planners anticipate the future
  environment of the organization.
• It is about fundamental decisions and actions
  because choices have to be made to shape the
  future.

5
Group Planning Strategies

• Brainstorming
• Nominal Group Technique
• Multi-voting

6
Brainstorming

• Group freely exchange ideas and generate lists in
  response to an open-ended question.
• When To Use Brainstorming
• When you want to generate a larger number of
  ideas or gather a lot of information for
  decision-making, priority setting or planning.
• When you want all participants to contribute
  freely.
• When you want to inspire creativity.

(Osbourne, 1963)
7
Guidelines for Brainstorming

• Clearly Frame an Open-ended Question
• Do Not Censure or Make Judgments About Any Ideas
• List All Ideas Generated on a Flip Chart.
• Encourage Hitchhiking.
• Focus on Quantity.
• The Best Comes Last.

8
Nominal Group Technique

• Effective way to make pooled judgments or
  decisions in groups which meet face-to-face.
• When To Use NGT
• To generate a lot of ideas and to assure all
  members participate freely without influence from
  other participants.
• Identify priorities or select a few alternatives
  for further examination.

(Delbecq Gustafson, 1975)
9
Guidelines for NGT

• Provide tables for participants.
• Develop the focus question.
• Silently brainstorm ideas.
• Round robin sharing of ideas.
• Discuss and clarify all ideas on the flip chart.
• Ranking of alternatives.
• Ranked items are discussed.
• 2nd Ranking.
• Final rankings are discussed.
• Format for sharing results.

10
Multi-voting Votes

• When to Use Multi-voting
• When you have a list of options and need to set
  priorities
• When you want an indication of the priorities of
  the group 

11
Multi-voting Steps in Delivery

• Brainstorm a list of options
• Review the list from a Brainstorming activity
• Ask participants to Vote
• Total the votes for each item
• Review the voting and items which are the highest
  priority
• Select priorities 

12
Summary

• This is an excellent exercise to use with the
  Youth Board after a Visioning lesson.
• This can be implemented every fall with the Youth
  Board to develop and prioritize county youth
  issues.
• Results from this exercise should help develop
  ideas for outcome and output programs.