To:	Grinnell College Community


From:	Russell Osgood


Date:	September 6, 2002


Re:	Strategic Planning							


          During the last academic year, the full faculty and the Board approved a Grinnell 
College Mission Statement which concluded: Grinnell College "aims to graduate women 
and men who can think clearly, who can speak and write persuasively and even 
eloquently, who can evaluate critically both their own and others' ideas, who can acquire 
new knowledge, and who are prepared in life and work to use their knowledge and their 
abilities to serve the common good."  Developing and promulgating this statement 
required a lot of hard work and thought on the part of many individuals and was a 
significant accomplishment.  


          The Board of Trustees has asked us to engage in further planning to articulate 
strategies that will ensure a future of excellence.  This necessarily means charting a more 
definite path from our mission that assures continued success at attracting the best 
faculty, students, and staff who are committed to the values and importance of a Grinnell 
education.  


          Thus, it makes the most sense at this time to develop specific strategies that flow 
from our mission.  More specifically, this fall, we are going to engage in a planning 
process to undertake the following tasks:


               1.  Identify and develop key assumptions underlying our efforts at better 
                    achieving our mission (e.g., size of the student body) and
               2.  Articulate a few essential overarching strategic goals (such as Grinnell 
                   College will prize above anything else intense and individualized 
                  student-teacher learning relationships)


          We plan to use a process called the Dialogue Planning Process which is a process 
that first ensures an understanding of the institutional problem(s) that need to be solved 
(and goals to be reached), then helps create a set of alternatives to be evaluated for 
addressing those problems, and finally through creative dialogue arrives at the most 
desirable alternatives (often hybrids of earlier suggested alternatives) in light of their 
costs and benefits.  Ultimately, these alternatives are implemented through, for example, 
the annual budget process.


          There are three primary strengths to this process.  First, it ensures the broad 
participation that is necessary for any plan to succeed at Grinnell College.  Second (and 
related to the first strength), this process will operate analogously to our budget process. 
That is, it will function with a broadly-based committee that recommends a plan to the 
President who, in turn, recommends it to the Board of Trustees.  Third, this process 
encourages the development of innovative alternatives through dialogue. 


          I, after consultation with the Board of Trustees and the Executive Council, have 
constituted a planning steering committee to address these issues. This committee will 
include the following members:  Mark Montgomery (as chair), Sig Barber, Bob Barr, 
Nord Brue, David Clay, Tom Crady, Patricia Finkelman, Dan Kaiser, Bill Lazier, 
Caroline Little, John Mohan, Jack Mutti, Russell Osgood, Mark Schneider, Helen Scott, 
Anne Campbell Spence, Jim Swartz, Frank Thomas, David White, and a student to be 
selected in consultation with SGA.


          There will also be a "planning team" to support the steering committee by 
providing it the data or information that it needs.  The "planning team" will include Scott 
Baumler, Jonathan Brand, Clint Korver, Mark Miller, Marci Sortor, Carol Trosset, and 
Karen Voss.  


          The process, which is likely to take the full academic year, will probably involve 
four meetings of the Planning Steering Committee.  The first meeting is tentatively 
scheduled for October 5.