On his Church of the Customer blog, Ben McConnell defined common strategic planning terms that often confuse people. I’ve sprinkled in the Baldrige definitions of related terms to provide a guide to the language of strategic planning, with CoC for Ben’s definition and BC for a definition from the Baldrige Criteria.

Mission. The overall function of an organization. It answers the question, “What are we attempting to accomplish?” (BC)

Vision. The desired future state of your organization—where it’s headed, what it intends to be, or how it wishes to be perceived in the future. (BC)

Values. The guiding principles and behaviors that embody how your organization and its people are expected to operate. (BC)

Core Competencies. Your organization’s areas of greatest expertise, those strategically important capabilities that are central to fulfilling your mission or provide an advantage in your marketplace. (BC)

Strategic Challenges. Those pressures that exert a decisive influence on your organization’s likelihood of future success. (BC)

Strategic Advantages. Those marketplace benefits that exert a decisive influence on your organization’s likelihood of future success. (BC)

Objective. A high-level achievement, like “improve customer loyalty” or “grow market share.” Objectives sit at the top of the strategic plan, and an ideal plan has no more than a handful of them. (CoC) The Baldrige Criteria refer to these as strategic objectives.

Goal. Anything that’s measured such as revenue, customer satisfaction, productivity, and quality. Goals determine how you fulfill an objective, and multiple goals support a single objective. (CoC)

Strategy. A way to describe a series of tactics or very specific actions performed by a team or group of people. Each strategy description begins with a verb such as create, hire, develop, and launch. (CoC)

Tactic. A very specific action like creating a new program or improving an existing one. Each tactic has an owner responsible for making it work and its own action plan.

Action Plan. Specific actions that respond to short- and longer-term objectives and strategies. An action plan includes details of resource commitments and time horizons for accomplishment. (BC)

Alignment. Consistency of plans, processes, information, resource decisions, actions, results, and analyses to support your organization’s goals.

To find out more about strategic planning, read:

• 10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning
• KEYSTONE: Mission and Vision
• Alignment and Integration
• KEYSTONE: Core Competencies
• Planning for the Longer-Term
• The 90-Day Action Plan

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