When completed, your Strategic Plan will have four key parts:

• Your vision of your future.
• Your strategies for achieving that vision.
• An Action Plan for implementing your strategies
• A Contingency Plan

Your vision of your future- 

This will be a sentence or two that describes your image of what you would like your life to be in the future. Emphasis here is on your desired or preferred future. You can have a vision for your entire life, and a more specific one for one stage of life.If you find it difficult to envision your future, review your domains and your scenarios. A helpful tool for developing a vision of your future is the Personal Futures Wheel, which builds on basic mind maps or futures wheels. You can downoad an example on the Downloads page.  Ask yourself what you want your future to be in each domain of your life, then summarize that into a statement.If you have trouble coming up with a vision, try going somewhere quiet, where you can be alone, close your eyes and think about your preferred future, and what you want life to be like for you at that time. If you aren’t used to thinking or contemplating like this, try it. It works!

Strategies to achieve your vision-

For your preferred scenario, develop strategies to achieve that scenario. Review your other scenarios and devise strategies to deal with futures that may occur. For the negative or “worst plausible” scenario where everything goes wrong, devise strategies to prevent or avoid that future. Also consider “If…then” strategies. “If this happens, then my strategy becomes…”

Scanning your environment-

It is important to be aware of changes in your community and the national economy as well as changing social or technological trends in the world around you. This awareness of your environment should be built into your strategies and action plans. This can translate into simple awareness – for example, when you make travel plans be aware of trouble spots and know where your currency is strong or weak.

Action plans for your future-

Now you must turn your strategies into actions. What actions must you take, starting today, to achieve your preferred future? One technique to help develop action plans is called “backcasting.” Imagine yourself in a future scenario, having achieved your goals and preferences for that stage of life. What year is it? Write that year at the top-left of a page of paper, then list each year backward to the present. From the top, identify the steps you took in each year to achieve your vision and that scenario. Identify key steps, which will become goals as you work toward this future.

Contingency plans

Contingency plans focus on high impact, low probability events that are not included in your strategic plan. Your contingency plans prepare you with strategies or actions in case such an event actually occurs. Where I live in Texas, hurricanes are a low probability event, but they are a clear possibility. So we have a plan. If a hurricane appears headed our way, we start executing the plan, continuing through the steps as the hurricane approaches. The same approach can work for positive events or negative events.