Strategic planning is regarded as an essential component of sustainable tourism planning. A ‘strategy’ is a means to achieve a desired end. Porter who focused on the idea of thinking competitively, stated that ‘essentially, developing a competitive strategy is developing a broad formula for how a business is going to compete, what its goals should be, and what policies will be needed to carry out those goals’. Strategic planning is the process by which organisations effectively adapt to their environment over time by integrating planning and management in a single process and seeks to deal with the questions of -
- where are we now? – check (monitor or evaluate)
- where do we want to get to? – plan
- how do we get there? – do (action)
The strategic plan is therefore the document which is the output of a strategic planning process and which serves to guide future directions, activities, programmes and actions. The outcome of the strategic planning process is the impact that the process has on the organisation, its activities and its environment, including the various stakeholders. Such impacts are then monitored and evaluated through the selection of appropriate indicators as part of the ongoing revision and readjustment of the organisation to its environment. Strategic planning therefore emphasizes the process of continuous improvement as a cornerstone of organisational activity in which strategic planning is linked to management and operational decision making, with the three key mechanisms required to achieve this being;
- a planning framework which extends beyond organisational boundaries and focuses on strategic decisions concerning stakeholders and resources
- a planning process that stimulates innovative thinking and provides a capacity to adapt to environments
- an organisational values system that reinforces commitment to the organisational strategy.
very good.