Human Behavioral Controls in Decision-Making Processes

The desire to understand the dialectical relationship between an organization’s strategic plan objectives and the requirements of its planning stages necessitates identifying the optimal means and choices among available alternatives. This increases confidence in achieving objectives through the most effective means.

Strategic planning represents a future vision encompassing the organization’s founding purposes. Naturally, this planning involves achievable goals through a system employing appropriate tools to develop the organization’s activities.

Practical Assessment of Reality

In this sense, planning is an organized process based on a sound practical assessment of reality, accurate estimations of available resources, and those potentially acquired to address likely changes during operations. This concept involves using planning to formulate the psychological foundations and controls for leadership policies, balancing leaders with ambitious long-term goals and those who prefer short-term objectives. Strategic planning begins with the relationship between short-term driving and activating goals and deeper, longer-term visions.

An organization’s success hinges on the clarity and maturity of its leaders’ vision, and their understanding of the feasibility and challenges of the set objectives.

Mature Management Thinking

During implementation, planning standards often become necessary controls to ensure adherence to operational parameters—deadlines, product quantity and quality—as agreed upon. Mature management thinking is useless if narrowly focused, detached from reality, and ignores the demands of change imposed by the external environment.

The Interplay of Thought and Action

A key aspect of strategic planning is the interplay between thought and action—rationally selecting means or alternatives based on the relationship between achieving the objective and the chosen means, considering whether benefits outweigh costs, and vice-versa. A strategic plan is worthless if its cost exceeds its benefits.

Strategic planning cannot create material or qualitative value for society without human participation as decision-makers and strategic planners, combining human resources, organizational thought, technology, and time. The absence of any of these elements leads to operational chaos.

The vast amount of information transmitted through modern communication has revolutionized economic growth efforts and the development of strategies that account for real-world complexities.

Assessing Organizational Performance

The human element in planning and execution raises the question of their readiness to understand planning’s nature, organizational and individual performance evaluation methods, self-accountability, and identifying plan weaknesses hindering implementation.

Quality Circles

The success of group problem-solving in what are known as “quality circles” is well-established. These circles discuss the flexibility of the action plan, the organization’s philosophy, the realism of the expected goals, and allow leaders to gauge the effort involved in plan implementation and the effectiveness of communication channels.

A leader’s managerial skill lies in identifying factors leading to problems by linking cause and effect. This expands their holistic perspective, allowing for clearer phenomenon analysis, objective assessment of real-world variables, and identification of future challenges.

A persistent challenge for many managers is leveraging efforts to streamline spending, creating conditions to avoid waste, and preventing the organization from incurring unnecessary costs. Effective planning is strongly linked to an organization’s ability to effectively utilize its human resources and to have a team that actively contributes to the plan’s objectives, as human resources are the foundation upon which the organization’s plan is built.