Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is a preferred approach to guiding an organization’s future, rather than making decisions issue by issue. The Village of Lindenhurst (“the Village”) engaged the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) at Northern Illinois University (NIU) to facilitate a strategic planning workshop with Board and senior staff members in January of 2020. Prior to the workshop, several focus groups were held with community stakeholders to gather input on their vision regarding the Village’s future. With the focus groups as a starting point for discussions, the strategic planning workshop provided a positive atmosphere for the Board and senior staff members to work together and collaboratively review and develop the Village’s visions of the future, and strategic goals to determine where it is the Village wants to go as an organization and as a community.  As was discussed and reviewed during the workshop, executive-level workshops and strategic planning sessions are a staple of good governance and leadership for progressive organizations.

Prior to the strategic planning process, staff reviewed and updated the Village’s vision and mission statements, as well as the Village's core principles. While these were not reviewed during the strategic planning workshop retreat, they continue to serve as a guide for driving the Village towards the future direction they wish to go.

Keeping the tenets of the Strategic Plan in the forefront of our collective efforts and decision-making is one of the most important aspects of a successful strategy and probably one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish. One way that staff is actively working towards accomplishing the tasks and advancing the themes of the strategic plan is to assign accountability to our short and long-term action items and discuss our efforts at regular intervals.

But we want to do more than simply discuss our accomplishments and progress on a staff level. We wish to make our efforts known on a larger, more public level. To create greater awareness of the strategic plan goals and how we are measuring our impact toward them, we have created a new Strategic Planning Dashboard which assigns metrics to compare and analyze our work.

Strategic Planning Dashboard

To navigate through the Village Performance Dashboard below, use the arrows located on the bottom of the report; some elements are easier to see in full screen mode. The dashboard provides data for specific service areas identified in the Lindenhurst Community Survey and annual budgets.

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