If you believe that developing a strategic plan for the NCAA is an exceptionally difficult task, step to the head of the class because your assessment is absolutely correct.

"If you divide the association community into quartiles, the NCAA is in the top quartile," said Glenn Tecker, president and chief executive officer of Tecker Consultants.

"A way to think about this is to think about the key stakeholder segments that exist within the organization. You have divisions, you have geographic areas, you have positions, you have different business lines. Each of those parts of the operation has its own unique set of stakeholders, of desired outcomes and processes that it uses to get the work done."

Because of that complexity, it's no wonder that the Association has allocated more than 14 months to collect and digest the information that will go into the plan, which is to be functional by April 2004.

NCAA veterans will note that the Association has attempted to develop strategic plans before. As far back as the late 1980s, the NCAA Presidents Commission carefully planned multiyear athletics reform initiatives. In the 1990s, the staff was asked to plan strategically, and after membership restructuring in 1997, Divisions II and III developed plans that they continue to use.

So if the membership and staff previously have acknowledged the complexity of the enterprise and the necessity of planning, what makes this particular initiative special?

The answer is that this is by far the most ambitious and systematic effort ever to frame the membership's vision and to make it happen. Also, the plan promises to be strategic rather than tactical.

"The process is more participative of all parts of the NCAA community than previous planning approaches have been," Tecker said. "It also is likely to be more outcome-oriented in the sense that it is meant to clarify the basic reasons the NCAA exists and then make decisions about what it will do and how it needs to do it based on that clarity of purpose."

While the previous planning exercises have been useful, they have not necessarily been strategic, Tecker said. Jean Frankel, a principal partner with Tecker Consultants, said that strategic planning contrasts sharply with organizational planning, which typically becomes a "job description" of ongoing functions.

She said that strategic planning needs to link to operational planning, which involves making decisions based on three kinds of work: support of ongoing programs and services, work that achieves a new series of outcomes and work done in support of emerging opportunities.

Frankel said that the first kind of work, the support of ongoing programs, is "the stuff that your members consistently rely upon (the staff) to do. The stuff, for instance, that your strategic plan today probably calls for." However, she said that any organization that undertakes true strategic planning is obligated to perform the second and third kinds of work (new outcomes and support of emerging opportunities).

"Smart associations will actually organize their annual planning around what percentage of resources they want to put among those three," she said.

The Tecker approach to strategic planning involves the use of four planning horizons, all based on an agreed-upon core ideology. Tecker said the concept consists of crafting a comprehensive strategic direction based on the balance between what doesn't change and the vision that drives change -- what the organization seeks to become within a 10- to 20-year horizon. That horizon is characterized by the articulation of an "envisioned future" consisting of an audacious goal and a vivid description of what it will be like to achieve that goal. The model incorporates an innovative adaptation of the balance between core ideology and envisioned future (originally articulated by Collins and Porras) into a comprehensive model for association planning.

Tony Capon, chair of the Division II Management Council, participated in the first of three divisional strategic-thinking sessions March 23 and came away impressed with the Tecker method.

"I did like their approach, which works from the distant future in," said Capon, a member of the sociology faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown. "I like the approach that you try to focus on what the end result is going to be and then work your way back to the beginning, which is different from a lot of strategic planning processes."

Frankel said that distinction is important.

"One of the problems in starting with the present and trying to move toward the future is that sometimes you never get past all the barriers that are always going to be out there," she said.

In fact, Tecker said that beginning with the present may be more likely to assure destruction than construction.

"One basic approach is to look at the moment, identify all that is wrong and try to fix those things," Tecker said. "The difficulty with that is that it's an inherently negative experience, and you quickly move from problem-solving to guilt and blame.

"The second approach is to take the time to reach some consensus on what you're trying to achieve, what will constitute success and then to expend the same amount of energy working together to identify what must be done to achieve that success. The second of the two philosophies is the premise on which this approach to planning is based."