Regardless of the speed of change in our “modern” times, the idea of planning for the longer term remains a critical endeavor, perhaps even more critical than ever before because of the tools for rapid communications which help us to transcend time and space as never before.

As thinking creatures we plan by nature; indeed, we have an urge within ourselves to engage the future by imagining it. This is what strategic planning is all about in my view. This idea of visioning the future is what motivates us in what we do now and gives us some sense of urgency in our daily activities.

To me future strategic time frames are not as important as simply being able to anticipate future accomplishment and move toward it.

In our community we do this through an old tool but new to us…Biennial Budgeting. It may seem contradictory that we actually have extended the former annual budgeting to 24 months, but we do this to give us more time to work with rapid change daily and not spend more time in details of short term planning while at the same time helping us to extend our vision first from 12 to 24 months and then using strategic planning as a broad vision and as “guidance” for the future…the two processes go hand in hand.