The Importance Of Strategic Planning In Canada

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According to Allison & Kay strategic planning is broadly defined as a management tool used to help an organization focus on it’s vision and it’s priorities in response to a changing environment and ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goal(2005). Important for all NGO’s, Hockey Canada’s strategic planning is critical to the further development and continued success of the sport of ice hockey in Canada.
According to Allison & Kaye there are four key concepts regarding strategic planning. The first is that the process is strategic because it involves choosing how to best respond to the circumstances of a dynamic and sometimes hostile environment (2005). Hockey Canada’s circumstances as a cultural icon have led …show more content…

A SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats, is the best method of doing this (Shank 2009). Strengths and Weakness are controllable factors within the organization like for example in Hockey Canada a strength is that it has over 630,000 athletes registered. On the other hand Opportunities and Threats are external to Hockey Canada and may beyond the control of Hockey Canada. For example, as Canada becomes more and more diverse, with more then 50 percent of Torontonians are born outside of Canada, hockey is no longer ingrained in the newcomers …show more content…

Hockey Canada went 50 years without winning an Olympic Gold Medal, the pinnacle of the sport. Although this was in part because they could not send players from the NHL, they failed to gauge their competition, realizing that to win they needed to create a team that practice and played like professionals. When the NHL’ers were finally ready to compete in Nagano in 1998 Hockey Canada failed to gauge themselves against the competition in their decision to pick aging stars for the tournament that was played on the larger ice surface. This ultimately led to them not winning a medal in the tournament. The good thing is that Hockey Canada has learned, building teams to suit the competition and thus winning 3 of the last 4 Olympic tournaments, including in 2014 on international ice in Sochi.
Overall the literature states that Hockey Canada has put forward a good strategic plan to continue it’s dominance, but it needs to continue to progress and learn from previous failures to expand it’s role in the context of sport in

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