Sexual Violence Prevention Plan Paper

The Sexual Violence Unit of Minnesota’s Health Department decided to undertake a 5 year strategic planning effort to address the primary prevention of sexual violence. There are 2 main reasons for the development of the plan. Firstly, the Centers for Disease Control identified sexual violence as a key health issue and it is providing grants to various states for the development of primary prevention plans. Secondly, Minnesota is a leader in sexual violence prevention work. There are also 2 main objectives of the project namely, to create a strategic plan for and to mobilize a broad range of individuals and organizations to take action in the primary prevention of sexual violence in the Minnesota state. To achieve these objectives the Unit hired an OD consulting firm to facilitate the strategic planning process. However, challenges were presented to the OD consultants from the onset as the Unit director resigned one day after the start of the project. Her departure
1) Organizations need to be sensitized to pressures for change. This can be achieved by encouraging organizations’ leaders to cultivate external networks that comprise people or organizations with different perspectives, by visiting other organizations to gain exposure to new ideas and methods or by using external standards of performance as opposed to the organization’s own past standards of performance. By securing this kind of knowledge first hand, organizations’ leaders will be more set on commitment to change. 2) Organizations need to reveal discrepancies between current and desired states. To this end information about the organization’s current functioning is gathered and compared with desired states of operations. Any discrepancies discovered can motivate organizations’ members to initiate corrective change