Strategic Planning: Real-World Contingency Planning

The Challenge: A major federal intelligence organization attempting to develop a strategic plan was stuck. Its planners produced a meticulous mission analysis, but no plan. In essence, they had a static picture of the status quo that failed to include any contingency planning to account for the dynamics of the real world.

Fuel hit the ground running, working with the client to backtrack through the analytical process, diagnose the problem, and move the organization’s thinking into the future. Our team was able to energize the planning process by establishing a recurring, integrative dialogue among the stakeholders, forgoing the all-too-common trap of creating a coffee-table plan.

The result: All levels of the organization — from management to planners to partners — were engaged to assess, understand, reorient, and, at times, modify their tactics to respond to their dynamic environment.