– What are you going to do on this mission, mum?

– Help an organisation with strategic planning, sweetheart.

– What’s strategic planning?

Explain this to a five-year old. And then to a group of 20 board members, all of whom are lawyers. And the only “strategic” they know is “strategic litigation”.

So the strategic-planning-explained-to-kids-and-adults-story goes like this:

You are happily playing with your Lego. At some point you’ll hear me “Dinner is ready!”. You know you want to finish building your lego – that would be your aim/objective in strategic planning. Dinner time is your timeline, same in strategic planning.

You follow your Lego instructions-that would be your activities in achieving your objective. Your bricks are your resources. If the time to dinner is too short and you want to finish on time, you may need to call for help. That would be your parents/partners’ support.

Your satisfaction with the Lego built and its compliance with the picture on the box would be the criteria/marks to assess your result.

That in short, my dear, is strategic planning.