“Above all, the AANS Strategic Plan provides a roadmap to guarantee that your association will adhere to a robust, forward-thinking mission of continual growth that identifies your needs now, anticipates your needs in the future, and stays on a fiscally responsible growth track to support those needs as the most multifaceted resource for neurosurgeons.”
Most strategic plans collect dust in a three-ring binder. That certainly has been my experience with the professional and trade associations where I have worked in the last 19 years.
And if management staff of membership associations endlessly debates the many Gordian knots of operating an organization driven by volunteer leadership, the one dilemma we all seem to agree on is this: how do you demonstrate the intellectual need for a strategic planning mechanism when you know how easily-and how often-all that work and “future casting” can be relegated to a boardroom bookshelf?
The Need for a Strategic Plan
Demonstrating the need for a bona fide strategic plan at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) was the easy part of the process. As he mentions in his President’s Column in this issue, last year A. John Popp, MD, added an additional goal to his duty as president-elect of chairing the Long Range Planning Committee (LRP). Coming out of the rebuilding phase-stabilizing the AANS infrastructure and finances-I discussed with Dr. Popp the need to “close the AANS governance loop” by having the newly instituted financial system integrate annually with a similar leader-driven, goal-setting process for planned organizational growth.
Dr. Popp immediately set about leading the LRP through the hard part of the process: conducting a detailed assessment of the AANS infrastructure, both internally and externally. After an all-day facilitated retreat in November, followed by weeks of task force conference calls and a final editorial evaluation this past April, the AANS now has an operative strategic plan that completes the three-year process of stabilizing this association’s finances and refining its mission.
Does this mean that the AANS Strategic Plan always will be able to accurately forecast and prevent with precision all the environmental forces that may adversely affect the specialty, and do so far enough in advance to always prevent them? No. That is the most common myth of any strategic planning process or product.
The Strategic Plan Benefits Every Member
What it will do is assure that when problems and setbacks do occur to you, to the specialty, or to your association, the AANS will be financially stable enough, nimble enough, and structurally sound enough to make critical changes in its short-term member services without losing sight of its goals and objectives for long-term growth.
What does this mean to you as an AANS member? First and foremost, you can be assured that your organization will always be driven primarily by your specifically identified needs. The new AANS process of annual strategic planning contains mechanisms that assure your needs are regularly identified, and then are kept at the forefront of AANS leadership and management decision-making. It means greater accountability to your needs by AANS committees and governance. And it means that both leadership and management will direct the AANS with an open and comprehensible fiscal accountability that guarantees the prudent expansion of the services that specifically meet its members’ expectations.
Above all, the AANS Strategic Plan provides a roadmap to guarantee that your association will adhere to a robust, forward-thinking mission of continual growth that identifies your needs now, anticipates your needs in the future, and stays on a fiscally responsible growth track to support those needs as the most multtifaceted resource for neurosurgeons.
With the AANS Strategic Plan now operative and its ongoing assessment mechanisms operative, you can be assured that the proper balance of staff, leadership, and general membership participation in the direction of the AANS is finally in place.
This is one strategic plan that won’t collect dust.