The following exercises can be useful for supporting thinking and discussion at different stages of the strategy design cycle.

The big questions: Clarifying mission and vision

Both mission and vision can be developed from the strategic planning team’s answers to these five questions. Teams may need time for reflection, and much discussion may be needed to achieve consensus on the answers. Have someone keep notes of the discussion, including areas of agreement and disagreement, enabling further discussion at a later point.

1. Who are we? What is central or distinct about your early childhood service? How would you describe your service to someone?
2. What are the basic needs or problems that we exist to meet? This helps justify the reason for the early childhood service’s existence, and identifies the service as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
3. What do we do to respond to these needs or problems? This question highlights the purpose of the early childhood service as meeting particular needs, and promotes attentiveness to regularly determining how well the service is meeting needs.
4. How should we respond to our key stakeholders? What relations do we want to establish with our key stakeholders and what values do we want to promote through those relations? This question helps services to focus on what stakeholders value and how well the early childhood service meets the needs and aspirations of stakeholders, as well as helping services to think about the sphere of influence that they have in their work.
5. What are our values, philosophy, and culture? Clarity about core values, philosophy, and culture is hugely important to the development of strategy, and also helps an early childhood service maintain its integrity.

Shared visioning

Here leaders might ask teams and communities to create a vision of success for the service – in other words, what the early childhood service would look like if it were to successfully fulfil its mission.

• Provide a review of the service’s mandates, mission, and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges identified in internal and external assessments.
• Ask teams and communities to imagine a review of the service  in the future (perhaps 3 -5 years), and the types of comments they might expect to receive if the service was being highly successful and effective in its mission.
• Record each of these comments on large sheets, with discussion focusing on similarities and differences between different people’s visions. Pause the session there.
• Away from the group, take some time to formulate some alternative visions, and in the next session put these forward to provoke further discussion. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of each vision.
• Ask people to rate each vision according to the strategic issues associated with each (How well does this vision support our mission? How well does it fit with our philosophy? How easy would it be to get the support of stakeholders?).

The snow card technique: For creating vision or for environmental analysis

The aim of the snow card technique is to provide a focus for individual thinking and group deliberation. It can be used to support teams to develop shared values to feed into a vision statement, as well as create lists of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges identified within the early childhood setting and in the environment around it. Having individual ideas on cards enables teams to discuss, debate, compare, contrast, and analyse ideas so that their implications for strategic development can be drawn out. The last part of the exercise can be returned to later, as it is useful in helping to identify potential strategies.

• Collect ideas by having each individual write a list of important values, or of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges on small pieces of card, paper, or sticky note (one idea/answer per card).
• For visioning, ask the group to engage in synthesising the cards according to common themes, sticking them to the wall in themes. For example, individual values may be grouped within a larger value (a series of values focused on community, or on manaakitanga). This can help teams to articulate the links between values and determine the important overarching values that are shared by everyone.
• For environmental analysis, draw arrows to show the way different strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and challenges identified for the early childhood service fit together and relate.
• Play with the arrows between environmental strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and challenges, or the links between different values. If you think of these arrows and links as threads, and play with them, you may find other ways to weave them. Good strategies are about creatively building effective linkages between different potentials and resources.

Timeline exercise: For environmental analysis and its relation to outcomes

On a whiteboard or flipchart, draw a long horizontal line to divide the space into top and bottom halves. Write the current year at the right hand end of the line, and at the left hand end, choose a date 5 or 10 years ago.

Ask people to individually brainstorm on paper all the highs and lows that have occurred within that timeframe. This might include the arrival or departure of key members of staff, changes in organisation or administration of the service, particular families’ involvement, the purchase of particular resources, or changes to the physical environment.

Have members write each event on a separate piece of paper, with a date, and label it as a high or a low, before sticking it onto the timeline at the appropriate place, using the distance above or below the line to indicate just how high a particular high was, or how low a particular low was  (in other words, the biggest highs will be placed much higher than smaller highs).

To prompt discussion and analysis, ask:

• What themes are common to the highs? To the lows?
• What opportunities have we had? Did we take advantage of these? If not, what stopped us? What strengths have we shown in taking up opportunities? What weaknesses? What could we do about this?
• What challenges have we had? Did we handle these successfully? If not, why? What strengths have we shown in dealing with challenges? What weaknesses? What could we do about this?
• How have our achievements been linked to our strengths and to our aspirations for our service?

Imagine projecting the line 5 or 10 years into the future. Consider:

• What do our previous achievements and challenges suggest for the future?
• What themes and patterns would you like to continue in the future? And which would you like not to continue?
• What new themes or patterns would you like to see in the future?
• What future opportunities and challenges might exist and how might the service use its strengths or improve on its weaknesses to address them?

Visual strategy map: For backward mapping actions to underpinning theories of action

This exercise is a variation of the snow card technique. It helps team members identify and map strategic issues by exploring what causes what, and the type of logic being followed. It can help teams to determine goals and the strategic actions that will help with achieving those goals, which will be related to the outcomes and consequences at the end of the sequences of arrows on the map.

• Have people brainstorm possible actions they might undertake to achieve a particular vision, writing them on pieces of paper or sticky notes, and group them into themes.
• Identify what the outcomes of the actions might be.  Strategic issues may be revealed at the point where potential actions cluster, with the actions themselves being suggestive of strategies.
• Ask questions to clarify intentions. For example, where many of the actions suggested by the planning team focus on building relationships (with children, with families, with communities), what specific outcomes do the planning team hope will result? Does this suggest there are strategic issues with relationships in the service at present? If many of the actions are intended to improve children’s challenging behaviour, does this suggest that challenging behaviour is a strategic issue? Do the actions that cluster around improving challenging behaviour suggest a focus on positive social climates or on social and emotional competence as a strategy?
• Compare and contrast options, and examine how they interrelate. Use arrows to show which options cause or influence the achievement of other options, as well as the potential consequences (both desired and not desired)  of each strategy.

Purpose-mapping: For backward mapping actions to mission

Purpose maps can be used to support clarification of purpose. The aim is to create action statements (beginning with a verb, such as ‘create’, ‘provide’, or ‘develop’) and link these to the anticipated outcomes of the action with an arrow. There are likely to be networks of statements, as one statement may have more than one arrow leading into or out of it. The statements nearer the end of the chains of arrows will reveal the overarching purposes of an early childhood service, and leaders, teams, and communities will need to discuss and deliberate which are the most important purposes.

• Ask members of the group to brainstorm what they think the early childhood service’s purposes and aspirations might be, and to record them on sticky notes or small cards.
• Ask ‘how would we do that?’ and ‘what would it take to achieve that?’ to determine the actions needed to achieve a purpose. If team members describe particular actions, ask ‘what would the consequences be if we did that?’ to determine the purposes of particular actions.
• Examine what the chart shows about how purposes and actions are connected to each other.
• Have each member of the group place coloured dots on the three to five that are most important to them. You may also be able to remove some statements that are not relevant.

The five-step process model: For planning strategies, goals, and actions

The five-step process model works teams through answering five questions about the strategic issues and/or goals they have identified. This process helps to keep groups from moving too quickly to specific solutions.

The following five questions move teams through the model (Note that the last three questions can be collapsed together if this easier for the group):

1. What dreams might we pursue to address this issue or achieve this goal?
2. What are the barriers to achieving these goals and dreams? Articulating barriers early on helps with the later questions, in that team members will be cognisant of addressing or avoiding barriers as they formulate ideas.
3. What actions can we propose to achieve these goals and dreams? It is worth spending considerable time on this question to raise many possibilities.
4. What major actions would the early childhood service staff need to take within the next year or two? Here the team needs to consider where the early childhood service is now and therefore where they might need to begin.
5. What steps would they need to take in the next six months? Who will be responsible for these? This is where strategy turns into an action plan.

This process helps to sort through suggestions, as ideas will be discarded as groups work down the questions if no one can suggest a way to handle the next question in relation to that idea. It also keeps strategy strongly grounded and linked to what people can actually imagine doing. However, the questions do not help to link and connect different ideas and proposals, and it is worth having the group think about how different strategies fit together and interconnect, as the more synergy between strategies that can be created the easier strategies will be to implement.

Adapted from Bryson, J. M. (2018). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/auckland/detail.action?docID=5215307

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