I have a friend who has invested in several alternative energy companies. He even runs a few. I thought about him when I read an article in the most recent Time magazine.

Titled “Tech Pioneers Who Will Change Your Life,” the article introduces eight innovators and their innovations. Three specifically target alternative energy:

• Bloom Energy has made an efficient, affordable fuel cell that could allow villages, businesses, and residents to produce their own power rather than relying on centralized power, a big deal in areas of the world that lack an energy infrastructure.

• VNL serves the same need with a low-cost, voice-only, solar-powered mobile telephone base station, a big deal when a quarter of the world’s population has no electricity.

• Boston-Power is developing the next-generation lithium-ion battery, a big deal for everything from portable computing to electric vehicles.

These are disruptive technologies. If you are involved in alternative energy and fail to see the impact of these technologies, your investment of time and money may be lost, and your business may not survive.

The Baldrige Criteria try to prepare you for this. They ask about key changes taking place that affect your competitive situation and key strategic challenges that affect your organization’s sustainability. In the strategic planning category, the Criteria ask how your strategic planning addresses early indications of major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment.

In my experience, organizations tend to take this step in the strategic planning process for granted—and it’s a critical step. The quality of your strategic plan depends on the quality of the information that feeds it.

Baldrige Award recipients have processes in place to identify and capture information that may affect them in the near or longer term. They have processes to analyze and share that information throughout the year as well as in preparation for developing their strategic plans. While these processes cannot protect them from disruptive change, they can put it on the radar so that such change does not threaten their future.

Here’s an example of the analyses and inputs to the strategic plan of Mercy Health System, which received the Baldrige Award in 2007.

To find out more about strategic planning, read:

• Strategic Planning Definitions
• What Are Your Critical Success Factors?
• Planning for the Longer-Term
• 10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning

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