Most managers can describe their organisation's mission in a sentence. Far fewer can turn that mission into a set of goals a team can actually execute against, week by week. That translation step — from big-picture thinking to a workable plan — is where this course puts its focus, treating strategic thinking as a practical management skill rather than an abstract exercise.

Management, at its core, is the achievement of goals through five basic functions: planning, organising, staffing, directing, and controlling. Planning sits at the start of that chain — it is the function concerned with anticipating the future and choosing the best path to the organisation's goals, and work that begins without it tends to drift into errors and, eventually, failure. Strategic thinking takes that planning function further: it draws on the past, present, and future together, applies quantitative methods and cause-and-effect reasoning, and leans on creativity to imagine what comes next. The Arab British Fellowship Training Academy designed this programme to build exactly that combination of analytical and creative capacity in participants.

Who Should Attend

• Managers of commercial institutions and companies, and heads of management departments.
• Heads of corporate development, planning, and implementation departments.
• Supervisors, department managers, and institutional staff generally.
• Business administration students in management colleges.

What Participants Will Be Able to Do Afterwards

• Develop the supervisory skills needed to lead a strategic planning process.
• Build and manage effective teams around a shared strategic direction.
• Apply strengthened strategic planning and thinking skills as a manager.
• Reduce administrative risk through better-informed leadership decisions.

Module 1: The Strategic Plan — Definition, Vision, and Purpose

• Strategic thinking and the strategic plan.
• Strategic thinking, vision, and goal-setting.
• Objectives and stages of an effective strategic plan.

Module 2: Reading the Environment Before You Plan

• Analysis of the internal and external environment.
• Types of strategic plans, and their strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.

Module 3: Communication, Goal-Setting, and Follow-Up

• Methods of good communication between management and staff to implement objectives.
• Proper methods of goal-setting that stay consistent with company policy.
• The concept of administrative follow-up meetings on the strategic plan and how they are held.

Module 4: Turning Plans into Action

• Planning methods that account for real cost and organisational capacity.
• Work mechanisms required before and during the implementation of plans and ideas.
• Managing strategic planning workshops and strategy formulation skills.

Module 5: Leadership Thinking and Mental Skills

• Administrative genius and supervisory leadership.
• Mental skills, typical thinking strategies, and the diplomacy of managerial leadership.

Module 6: Innovation and the Working Reality

• Innovative and analytical thinking to achieve excellence in the work environment.
• Preparing work maps and designing and developing the working reality.
• Basic information relevant to supervisory performance.