The Executive Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association is sending out a survey to the full complement of participants in the Association to assay the direction and priorities of the organization for the next five to ten years.
“Nobody's going to put their shoulder to the wheel to anything they haven't been asked about or involved with,” APsaA president Jon Meyer said. He also pointed out that there must be decisions as well about what not to do. “There is no strategic plan without some pain,” he said.
The actual construction of a strategic plan, a keystone of Meyer's presidency, will follow. The tentative timeline, agreed on at a joint meeting of the Executive Committee, Steering Committee, and Coordinating Committee in New York in October, anticipates that the survey results will be compiled and discussed in January. Planning sessions, including a second joint meeting of the steering and coordinating committees in April, will be held in time for plan distribution by summer. The membership will be involved in implementation both directly as individuals and through APsaA's existing structure of committees, societies, and institutes.
Gretchen Anderson, a management consultant with Katzenbach Partners who has strategic planning experience, is working with APsaA on the project. While consensus is the goal, Anderson said in an e-mail communication, “as with any organization of similar size and complexity,” it is an ideal. Different survey designs, including Liekert Scale questions, are being considered. There will, however, be room for written responses.
The strategic planning survey and initiative is a part of several recent efforts of the APsaA to assess its challenges, its mission, its structure, and its priorities. Beth Seelig, secretary of the Board on Professional Standards, said that there is real “time pressure” now and “an organizational mandate to go forward.”
The Task Force on Reorganization has a mandate to create a proposal for new governance. The immediate goal of the strategic planning process, however, is to gain a sense of the organization's priorities for future evolution. There are external challenges the organization must face as part of that agenda to help APsaA remain the preeminent professional association for psychoanalysts through the 21st century.