Practical Practitioners Guide to Strategic Planning

A planning guide for professionells and laymen who believe it is possible to be serious and creative at the same time!



A well written and well thought out plan is a very good start if you want to reach your objectives in an efficient way. However, planning often becomes a complicated process, using experts and jargon that tend to exclude and aggravate people.

This is a planning guide for the rest of us – professionals and laymen who believe it is possible to be serious and creative at the same time!

In a pedagogic, simple and very personal way, Anders Ingelstam takes you through the critical steps of planning.

This is not a book for people who enjoy long discussions about definitions and other details, nor for you who have as ultimate purpose to fill in a project matrix. Instead, this guide is written as an inspiration for practitioners who want to get things done with a high level of focus and participation.

The guide is written mainly for people involved in international development cooperation, but the principles could definitely be applied to many other initiatives for change.

Table of contents

  1. The Basics
    • Experiences
    • Strategic planning – what it is, and what it isn’t
    • Why strategic planning?
    • This guide and the LFA
    • But, what exactly is ‘LFA’?
    • Talk the walk
    • Some questions to be answered (before starting)
  2. The steps
    • The framework for a good planning process
    • The steps
    • The actual situation
      • Tell us about your reality!
      • Participation
      • How?
      • Risks
      • Are you ready for next step?
    • The problem and the vision
      • Tell us how you would like it to be
      • Tell us now what you don’t like about the current situation
      • Formulating a problem
      • Participation
      • How?
      • Risks
      • Are you ready for next step?
    • The problem and the vision
      • Tell us how you would like it to be
      • Tell us now what you don’t like about the current situation
      • Formulating a problem
      • Participation
      • How?
      • Risks
      • Are you ready for next step?
    • Formulating useful objectives
      • Now we turn the problems into objectives
      • Method
      • Empowering, strengthening, increasing… and other forbidden words
      • Are you being realistic?
      • Risks when writing objectives
      • Are you ready for next step?