• MOBIS is an acronym for Management, Organizational, and Business Improvement Services. It is a competitively awarded Federal Supply Service Multiple Award Schedule contract. The purpose of the contract is to provide Federal Agencies and State and Local Governments with access to carefully qualified contractors who can assist them in improving the way they manage their responsibilities, their structure, and the business processes they utilize to accomplish their missions.

• First, a process of deciding:
  • What the organization is
  • What it is for
  • What it will be in the future
• Second, deciding how and where to commit its resources of all kinds to ensure that it gets there!

• They are based on historical trends and data
• They are generally mechanistic
• They are unable to handle unanticipated events or discontinuous change
• They are unable to cope with the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of the future
• They are generally based on a supply-push view of the organization.

• The future cannot be apprehended by the analytical techniques used in most planning methods (thought --- there is no data about the future !)
• Strategic planning is as much about people (as employees and customers) as it is about operations, technology and finance --- most methods do not consider people explicitly
• Mechanistic strategic planning does not result in buy-in and personal commitment from the people who must implement the plans
• Planning done by a special planning staff frequently excludes leaders who have line or budget execution responsibility.

• An approach which invokes the imagination of the organization's leadership which gets them truly "out of the box" --- enabling them to visualize their organization in new and innovative ways
• A method which provides for synthesis of all available information and innovative ideas about the future into a coherent whole for the organization
• A method which deals with people as stakeholders, and which considers demand-pull as well as supply-push
• A method which enables the organization's top leadership and implementers to be involved directly in the establishment of Shared Vision, Goals, Strategies, Performance Measures, and Milestones.

• Intensive, interactive, specially tailored Workshops with the client's leadership, applying vision-based planning approaches, which include
  • Creative, imaginative techniques for getting the leadership "out of the box"
  • New ways to examine and handle the complexity of multi-dimensional nature of the organization's future operations, including approaches to understanding and exploiting change
  • Explicit consideration of both supply-push and demand-pull
  • Identification of new business opportunities.

• Simply stated, Vision-Based Planning is a way of enabling a complex organization to realize their strategic vision, through achievement of their strategic goals, despite a future filled with change and uncertainty.
• Features of a robust, vision-based strategic planning process include:
  • Helping the organization to form a new, robust strategic vision, ideally based on a re-framed view of the organization, shared by all or most of its key stakeholders
  • Helping the organization to develop and implement the appropriate means for working towards and realizing the vision, by defining clear top-level goals and strategies
  • Preparing the top leadership of the organization to understand, anticipate, and deal with change, however discontinuous or unanticipated --- ideally, to understand and exploit change !
  • Providing and developing information of value to the top leadership serving to allow minimization of unanticipated events affecting the future of the organization
  • Producing but-in and consensus throughout the organization.
• Ideal, robust strategic planning --- such as supported by The Team --- will establish a shared vision and a broad sense of direction for the organization which will remain valid despite substantial changes in the operating environment. With the vision and strategic plan in place, leaders at all levels of the organization can make appropriate decisions that move the organization in the desired direction, since:

A typical Vision Based Planning Project can take as little as six weeks from the date we are commisioned to do it, to the delivery of the final report. This compares to the six months required by most of our competitors.

For a complete Vision Based Planning Project, including the Strategic Plan and the Implementation Plan, a total of six to eight working days is required by each member of the top leadership/managment in the form of participation in two, successive three-day or four-day workshops. Our workshops are tailored to meet the specific needs of our clients, and thus may vary in length.

In our experience, Strategic Planning is much more effective if it is done by the leadership of the organization. An organization's Strategic Planning Department can provide input into the process, can participate in the workshops, and can be highly valuable in assisting the leadership in ensuring implementation. However, the establishing of priorities and the actual decisionmaking needs to be done by the leadership. If the Strategic Planning Department participates in the workshop process, they can be ready to hit the ground running in implementation of the plan, as the workshops are completed.

• The Team provides the best of:
  • Vision-Based Planning and Strategic Management capabilities
  • Understanding of complex systems and problem solving
  • Innovation and imaginative systems approaches
• With the best psychological and creativity techniques to:
  • Develop the capability to understand, deal with and exploit change
  • Foster imagination and creativity
  • Generate high-level personal commitment and enhance cohesion in the group and organization
• The Team, working directly with the top leadership, tailors each Vision-Based Planning Workshop to their organization's specific requirements and needs.