Unless responsibilities are clearly defined and assigned, it is not possible to accomplish any task in business or organizations. Without responsibilities, people in business or organizations would not be able to establish goals for themselves and without such goals; business or organizations would come to a standstill. The strategic planner has certain responsibilities that have to be clearly understood. What are the primary task that he should perform? How does it contribute to business or organizations?

The Strategic Planner Conceptualizes

The fundamental resource of the strategic planner is thinking. He is there to think, not about anything else but the future of the business or organization. His thinking should be a kind of thinking that is solely focused on the business or organization. This kind of dedication hones the skill of the strategic planner in his craft. The more his focus is on the business or organization, the more his mind becomes razor sharp and sensitive to the erstwhile indistinguishable behavior of business or organizations.

The strategic planner starts with thinking and conceptualizing the planning process. What is the business terrain? What sort of information do I need to generate advantage? Who is the competition? What are their strengths and their weaknesses? How do they wage war? Do they follow the rules or do they practice guerilla tactics? These are the kind of questions that aid conceptualization.

In uncertain times such as today, asking the right questions produces a strategic advantage. When you ask the right questions, it will necessitate the search for the right answer. You ask the wrong question and you will surely get the wrong answers, answers that may be of little value to the business or organization you are in. But asking the right questions brings you to a totally different level, a level where you have that confidence that you have made the right thing and the answers will be there in time.

The conceptualized plan would be of little value to the strategic planner if he keeps it to himself and starts the planning process alone. Conceptualization has to be translated and transmitted to other planners in the business or organization. In this manner, the power of mental alignment and mental disparity will be harnessed, elevating the strategic plan to a new status. This new status is excellence, a far cry from mediocrity that is normally a result of plans done by lone individuals.

The Strategic Planner Generates

Another crucial responsibility of the strategic planner is generation. Conceptualization should somehow result in something, that something is generation. Conceptualization and the thinking process should generate into something concrete, which then can be the basis of an assessment to move on or the judgment to repeat the conceptualization. The concrete thing might be something obvious or something obscure.

The obvious can be the mundane, everyday office routines: answering inquiries, taking sales orders, reading and replying to the emails, and so on. It can also be someone obscure: a new but insignificant player in your industry, the President of your top customer playing golf with the President of your toughest competitor. These are a mix of old tasks and new tasks. How do you take the boredom out of routines? How do you confront that President in the most civil manner?

The strategic planner must generate new ways to perform difficult tasks. This is the consequence of the thinking process. Task upon task will demand to be performed; work upon work will be in the picture. But how can it be performed efficiently and excellently? New ways have to be designed to perform them. As one person says it, there are many roads leading to the same destination. Difficult tasks have to be simplified in order to make them less time consuming and to maximize the results. Difficult tasks have to be shortened in order to gain and accumulate advantages of time. Difficult tasks have to segregate in order that the parts will contribute to a bigger whole.