Think about your strategic planning brainstorming sessions you have with management team maybe even including the board. The facilitator poses the question: "Where do you want to be in 5 years?" For the next hour everyone offers their gut feelings, the ideas get written on the flipcharts and after a break the team comes back and as a group decides what the future should look like.
This is all by gut feel with no empirical data to support these conclusions which is why most credit unions are fearful of taking bold steps. They don't trust the process, and frankly, they shouldn't.
Let's say for example you wanted to invest $100,000 of your retirement funds and you decided to make this decision without any research or expert input. You just decided one day watching television you liked the ads for Burger King and you felt in your gut that with the new ads, their stock will rise and you would be making a good investment. How sound of a decision is that? How comfortable are you with that decision making process when $100,000 of your own money is on the line?
Strategic planning maps out the process of how a credit union can go from Point A to Point B. With the tenuousness of the credit union industry, with government regulations and competition changing daily, and with merger sharks in the waters, simply a gut feel on a Saturday morning at a retreat center just isn’t enough information to be planning that navigation to the next point.
When using the Simplified Strategic Planning process everyone involved in the planning must do their share of research on the specifics they have been assigned before the actual planning steps happen. Good information gathering makes for better choices, and better choices make for a smoother ride through difficult transitions. Credit Unions failing to properly research the necessary information are gambling with the future of the credit union and the members. Today is a completely different era than even only 7 years ago. Now is the time to focus like never before.
-- Russell
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment