Question Details

Strategic plans are focused on current and future company goals, therefore changes in the environment must be detected and monitored. Changes in the environment that impinge on the company’s strategic plan are known as external triggers and triggers are paired with plans to successfully deal with them. These paired actions are known as contingency plans. What qualities make a future issue a “trigger”?

As an example, consider you are on the strategic planning team for a soft drink company. A merger of two major competitors next year would constitute a future trigger. For this discussion, consider the Environmental Scan and SWOT analysis you conducted in Week 2. Formulate a trigger/contingency pair in the form of a three-part sentence similar to the example in the textbook. Examine it in terms of the three guidelines that good contingency plans should follow.

Post a summary of your selected company and risks that you perceive based on your prior Environmental Scan and SWOT analysis. State the three-sentence trigger/contingency pair and justify your choice of contingency plan using information from the week’s readings and/or other scholarly or credible resources, using the Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.) table for guidance.