What happens to an organisation that stops trying to read what's coming next? Chaos and improvisation take over, goals turn elusive, and even a well-run team starts drifting. Planning and extrapolating the future — essentially strategic thinking — reshaped the global economy once before: it fed the Renaissance that began in medieval Europe, and today we're living through economic and social shifts just as deep as those the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution once triggered, forcing organisations to rethink their purposes, patterns and norms all over again.

From a management standpoint, achieving organisational goals runs through five basic functions — planning, organising, staffing, directing and control — and planning is the one most concerned with anticipating what's ahead. It is the starting point for any project: skip it, and work drifts into distraction and errors that eventually cause it to fail. Because future events can be sudden or drawn out, management has to build working assumptions early and keep following up on execution — the one step that turns a good forecast into an actual result.

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Apply the five basic management functions to real forecasting and planning work.
• Turn signs of economic and social change into concrete planning assumptions.
• Set up the follow-up systems that keep a forecast from staying just a forecast.
• Formulate strategies and lead planning workshops with confidence.

Who Should Attend?

• Managers and owners of companies.
• Heads of corporate development, planning and implementation departments.
• Supervisors and department managers.
• All institutional staff.
• Business administration students.

Module 1: Planning as a Response to a Changing World

• How planning and future-extrapolation reshaped economies before.
• What happens to work and goals when planning stops.
• Proper methods for setting goals consistent with company policy.

Module 2: The Five Functions Behind Every Plan

• Planning, organising, staffing, directing and control in practice.
• Communication mechanisms between management and staff.
• Work mechanisms needed before and during execution.

Module 3: Building the Strategic Plan

• Concepts of strategic plans and objectives.
• Types of strategic plans and when to use each.
• Analysis of the internal and external environment.

Module 4: Strength, Weakness and the Unexpected

• Mapping strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities.
• Managing strategic planning workshops.
• Strategy formulation skills.

Module 5: Leading the Forecast

• Administrative genius and supervisory leadership.
• Mental skills and model thinking strategies.
• Innovative and analytical thinking for workplace excellence.

Module 6: From Forecast to Reality

• Preparing work maps and developing the working reality.
• Diplomacy of managerial and leadership genius.
• Core knowledge for strong supervisory performance.