Professional Development: Part 2 - Strategic Planning

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     Welcome to the second article in EMS Magazine's Professional Development series. These articles are meant to stimulate and challenge you, and provoke further inquiry. They will examine fundamental concepts and structures that underlie successful practice. You can apply each of these leadership and quality improvement processes to every level of your professional and personal life. Utilize them as steps to guide your professional growth and development. Apply them to your work group, shift or platoon, or to any organization, large or small, public or private, career or volunteer. In this installment we will examine strategic planning.

     Strategic planning is a cyclical process with five main steps:

• Stakeholder identification
• Articulation and sharing of a vision for the future
• Environmental scanning
• Setting goals and objectives
• Evaluating outcomes.

     Unfortunately the planning process sometimes ends when the plan is completed, placed in a binder and put on a shelf. If this is your outcome, your effort was wasted. The strategic plan directs progress toward goals and objectives to realize a shared vision. The planning process is a dynamic and continuous cycle—your plan needs to be a living document. Let's look at the steps in the process.

     A stakeholder is anyone with an interest in the operation, organization or product. The stakeholders in an EMS system would include patients, providers, management and leadership, the medical community (both hospitals and private practices), civic organizations, politicians and elected officials, as well as the unions, vendors, insurance companies and anyone else who has a stake in the system. For a smaller group like a training unit, stakeholders might include field providers, training staff, adjunct instructors, field training officers, supervisors and operations staff, upper management, the medical director, the CQI unit, students and perhaps even textbook publishers and vendors of educational products. With any group or system, carefully consider whom all the stakeholders might be.

     Once you've identified your stakeholders, you have to get them to sit around a table and talk. You'll need a moderator or facilitator—someone who keeps the discussion focused and moving forward. That could be you. If the plan is for a large organization, the facilitator might be a consultant hired specifically for that purpose. The goal of stakeholder meetings is to determine each stakeholder's needs and wants, and the resources each brings to the table.

     Vision is a leadership function. Processes begin with the leader's ideas, then develop with input from an organization's members. The leader must determine where the group will go and what it will become. In conjunction with the vision, you must identify and articulate clear organizational mission and values. Together the leader and followers collaborate in developing a shared vision based upon these. For the process to succeed, the members must participate in developing the vision and be committed to making it reality. Inspirational leadership is required here: You must inspire your followers to work together toward a common goal. Your tools are passion, trustworthiness, knowledge, competence and listening skills.

     The concept of "visioning"—communicating a clear view for the future, based upon your mission and values—is scalable, and can be applied to any group you supervise, as well as your own professional development. Ask yourself or your group some questions: What do you want to be doing next year? In five years? Ten? Where do we want to be? If you aren't thinking about these things, you're not really in control of your career or group. If you're not actively looking toward your future, you are likely not in control of your life.

     The environmental scan is just what it sounds like: You look around at your environment inside and outside the organization. The acronym SWOT (for identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) represents one way to structure this process. Strengths and weaknesses are the interior component; opportunities and threats are the exterior component. This examination of interior and exterior circumstances requires you to accurately and honestly take stock of where you are and what you're doing, as well as where others are and what they're doing. The point is to help build a plan that capitalizes on your strengths, improves your areas of weakness, takes advantage of opportunities and avoids or minimizes threats. The purpose is to lay the groundwork for determining the goals and objectives of the strategic plan.

     By this point you've articulated your mission and values, communicated your vision, and the stakeholders have all bought in. Now you must figure out how to make the vision a reality. It is done through short-, mid- and long-term goals and objectives. Goals are the large components of the vision; objectives are smaller targets that together comprise the performance criteria that make goals achievable. The SWOT analysis should help guide their development. You want your objectives to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-limited.

     After you've set your goals and objectives, begin to determine how you'll achieve them. You'll have to work out strategies and tactics. As an example, consider an objective that might be part of an EMS agency's strategic plan: "Our paramedics will improve endotracheal intubation success rates by 5% in the next six months." Is this a SMART objective? How would you achieve it?

     In the example above, you'd begin by determining each paramedic's endotracheal intubation success rate. You'd then assess the reasons for unsuccessful attempts. Are failures related to equipment? Is the laryngoscope poorly designed? Are the bulbs too dim? Are the tubes themselves the problem—for instance, the balloon won't hold inflation? Is the skill performed too infrequently? Is there a lack of training, or are medics using poor technique? After identifying likely causes, you must implement changes to eliminate them, then reassess success rates. If you've met your improvement target, you move on to another performance area. If you haven't, why not?

     This is called continuous quality improvement or process improvement (there are other names). The important thing to note is the relationship between strategic planning, outcomes and measures, and system improvement—they are all interrelated. The strategic plan drives your quality or process improvement efforts, which in turn should help your organization achieve the goals and objectives in its strategic plan.

     So what does all of this mean? Why is it important, and how can you use it?

     On a basic level, you can apply the strategic planning process to take control of your career and your professional development. If you're a supervisor, you can apply it to your work group or platoon. If you want to move up the promotional ladder, using these proven methods will help you develop your leadership skills and achieve success. You can also improve things wherever you apply the process.

     I know a paramedic who's been in EMS for over 20 years. He never really planned on being a paramedic; it just sort of happened. He worked for a couple of agencies but wasn't making any career progress. Though he was a good practitioner, at some point he decided he wanted to do more than "ride the box." He wanted to work toward solving some of the problems he saw in EMS. He set five career goals that he wanted to meet in five years. He created a personal vision. He went back to school (one goal was to finally get a college degree) and wrote a personal mission statement for one of his classes. He thought about where he wanted to be and articulated a personal vision. Then he figured out how to make it real. He followed his mission statement. It took more than five years, but by the end of 2008, he met all his goals. Now he is already working on creating a new vision, setting his next goals and objectives and figuring out how to achieve them. If he can do it, you can do it too.

     Next time - In the next installment of this series, we'll discuss the art of delegation.

     Michael Touchstone, BS, EMT-P, is chief of EMS training for the Philadelphia Fire Department. He has been involved in EMS since 1980 as an EMT, paramedic and instructor. He has participated in EMS leadership, management and educational development initiatives at the local, state and national levels.

Sidebar:

Strategic Planning Resources

• Alliance for Nonprofit Management Strategic Planning FAQs--www.allianceonline.org/FAQ/strategic_planning
• Center for Simplified Strategic Planning--www.cssp.com
• Developing a Strategic Plan--www.planware.org/strategicplan.htm
• Setting Goals and Objectives--www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/sgno.html
• Setting SMART Objectives--www.thepracticeofleadership.net/2006/03/11/setting-smart-objectives
• Strategic Planning (in Nonprofit or For-Profit Organizations)--https://managementhelp.org/plan_dec/str_plan/str_plan.htm
• Strategic Planning Tools--www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/spt.html

In some cases, strategic planning can be approached using a simpler three-step process. This model frequently looks to identify three elements:

• Situation--Current conditions and how they came about;
• Target--Goals and/or objectives (aka ideal state);
• Path--A proposed route to the goals/objectives.

Another option is the "draw/see/think" approach:

• Draw--What's the desired end state or ideal?
• See--Where are we today, and what are the gaps to close?
• Think--What actions must be taken to close these gaps?

A variation on this is "see/think/draw":

• See--What is today's situation?
• Think--What are our goals/objectives?
• Draw--Plot your path to meeting your goals/objectives.

Related:

• Professional Development: Part 1 - Becoming an EMS Leader