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1. Strategic Planning: • The Environmental Scan • www.powernoodle.com 1

2. Strategic Planning: the Environmental Scan Created with Powernoodle ExpertKatheryn Wiedman Ph.D. “A navigator at heart, I love to guide groups toward the best decisions for their organization's vision, mission, and values. Powernoodle provides an inclusive, highly participatory environment that allows for diverse voices to be part of decision-making.” An accomplished author, speaker, and trainer, Katheryn has worked with more than 160 organizations across North America in strategic planning, board development, and other organizational development initiatives. Katheryn is a creative and dynamic leader, educator, facilitator, and listener. She champions diversity and inclusion in all of her projects.

3. About Powernoodle • Welcome to Powernoodle, a customizable, step-by-step decision process that allows group members to contribute at their own speed. • Each Powernoodle session has an Organizer and Participants. • While a Powernoodle session can be organized using in-house expertise, many teams find that an outside facilitator brings added value and objectivity to the process of strategic planning. • An in-house leader holds valuable content knowledge about the organization and its industry – knowledge that may be lost if he/she also serves as the session’s facilitator. An outside facilitator holds the process knowledge needed to keep the group moving forward, freeing the leader to participate fully, contributing his/her knowledge to the question before the group.

4. The Organizer’s job • The Organizer creates the session and leads the group through the steps: Brainstorm, Categorize, Combine, Vote, Rate, Prioritize, and Action Plan. • Depending on the session’s purpose, the Organizer is able to customize the process in a number of ways, including skipping stepsand changing other features. • Every Powernoodle session ends with a Powernoodle Report.

5. The Participant’s job • Respond to the invitation from the Organizer and log on to Powernoodle. • Review any resource documents provided by the Organizer. • Post their ideas and observations on sticky notes in the Brainstorm step. • Vote on which are the most important. • Rate each statement to determine relative merit of each of the ideas/observations. • Prioritize the ideas/observations in terms of their impact on the organization.

6. Using Powernoodle in strategic planning A strategic planning process usually includes the following steps. This set of slides describes a Powernoodle session for step 3, “Environmental Scan.” Plan for Planning : agree on the details of the process Mission Check Environmental Scan Vision Strategic Initiatives Implementation Celebration and Communication

7. Why use Powernoodle for environmental scanning? • In environmental scanning, the planning team assesses their organization’s internal condition along with its position in the operating environment vis-a-visthe competition, societal factors, and other dynamics. • This Powernoodle session will help you design and lead an environmental scanning session. • With Powernoodle, you can invite a large, inclusive group to participate and reach consensus on priorities quickly and effectively. This Powernoodle session will deepen the planning team’s understanding of the organization’s operating environment. As a result, they will be able to make more informed decisions.

8. Launching your Powernoodle environmental scanning session Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos www.powernoodle.com To get started, the Organizer: • Creates the Powernoodle session. • Creates an environmental scan question, for example: “What are the problems and issues – both internal and external – facing our organization?” • Invites Participants via email into the Powernoodle session. The next slide shows the “Session Room” which the Organizer creates to launch the session.

10. How the session unfolds… After the session is created, the Organizer leads the group through Brainstorm, Vote, Rate, and Prioritize steps. • Brainstorm – encourage Participants to add all their ideas. • Vote – set the number of votes per Participant and make sure everyone has a chance to vote. • Rate – set the ‘single-criterion’ rating for the Powernoodle sticky notes of 1=strongly disagree, 2=disagree, 3=agree, 4=strongly agree for the criterion statement such as: “This item has the greatest impact on our ability to achieve our goals.” • Prioritize –assign $1,000 in Powernoodle money to each Participant to allocate toward degrees of impact. • The next slide shows the Prioritize step.

11. The Organizer can filter ideas to show highest priority ideas

12. After the Prioritize step: The Powernoodle Report! • The Powernoodle Report is a powerful tool in any decision-making process. • It captures every discussion thread for future reference and action and helps participants remember how they got to the decisions they made. • The Report is created automatically, moments after your session ends. • It is available as an excel spreadsheet download to all Participants. • The next slide shows a typical Powernoodle Report.

13. Powernoodle Spreadsheet Report Spreadsheet available for immediate download for all participants. Saves time and maintains buy-in to decisions. Each tab captures all content from each step.

14. Powernoodle help and support For detailed examples and directions, you can: • Watch the Powernoodle Organizer Training Series videos. • Log in and visit the Help section. • Contact us at support@powernoodle.com. • Join the user groups online.

15. Katheryn Wiedman, Ph.D. CenterPoint Institute www.centerpointinstitute.com Follow Katheryn on linkedin.com www.powernoodle.com To purchase a Powernoodle plan, please visit our website. 15

16. Powernoodle Template: Strategic Planning Environmental Scan by Katheryn Wiedman and PowernoodleInc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.centerpointinstitute.comand www.powernoodle.com.