Funny, I was thinking about that when I wrote my blog about two goals I had a few years back, one of them completed and one of them now rather obsolete. Just having gone through the entire CAE training regimen, I saw the importance of strategic planning pounded in again and again, but in most real-world activities I have been involved with, I have seen the strategic plan be very abstract, lofty, and taking a lot of work & group consensus to create a document, which usually stated what everyone already knew. I just read a book called "Rework" by 37 signals, and they put it best. They advocate to start calling plans "Guesses". As you stated above, you are basically predicting the future, or trying to, so a plan is a guess as to which actions will make your association relevant in an uncertain future. Not to sound too down against planning, I firmly believe it is still important to have goals, but these goals should be a flow, a conversation, something that is continuously updated & scrutinized. Making a goal for goal's sake may not always be the best course of action if the context has changed. Thanks for a nice blog. -Garry