The first component of sustainability , organizational stability, has a number of requirements. Managers must develop the ability to think strategically, and the organization must articulate a clear mission and develop an organizational strategy based on the organization's strengths and the needs identified in the environment analysis. Furthermore, an organization must have strong leaders, who can communicate their vision of the future and their commitment to the goals of the organization, and who have the willingness and ability to find new ways to solve old problems.

For and organization to become stable, it must have leadership that is strong, committed, innovative, and has the vision to imagine and to anticipate what may be possible. Imagining what the future could hold - new services, new markets, new sources of revenue, new ways of cutting costs - can make an organization more able to plan for future constraints and opportunities and to adjust to changing circumstances in order to ensure its survival.

Stable organizations recruit the best staff and reward them for excellent performance. An organization will make great strides toward organizational stability if it develops an incentive system that motivates staff members to work toward achieving the organization's mission and objectives and that simultaneously builds team spirit and cooperation.

A strong system of management is another essential element of organizational stability. Many of the management tools and techniques covered in this handbook are critical for achieving organizational stability. These include:

• Planning: Developing policies at all levels that reflect the organization's mission and objectives and developing reasonable targets and work plans for achieving them.
• Coordination: Developing collaboration among different sectors to reduce the competition among providers for the same clients and the unnecessary duplication of services.
• Staffing: Implementing policies that reward good performance to help programs retain experienced and committed staff.
• Supervision: Providing supportive and timely supervision of service delivery staff to ensure quality services.
• Management Information Systems: Generating timely and useful information about clients, services, costs, and revenues.
• Commodities: Maintaining an adequate supply of appropriate contraceptives at all contraceptive distribution points.
• Finance: Developing financial mechanisms that make it possible to identify the cost of services, generate new sources of revenue, decrease donor dependence, and serve the hardest-to-reach, poorest, and high-risk groups.

Among all of the management activities described above, strategic planning is perhaps the most important, because it is through this process that an organization clarifies its mission, defines potential markets, and identifies strategies to create demand for services and products.

Finally, stable organizations must have the flexibility, resilience, and willingness to respond to changing environments and to new opportunities to expand their services.

Strategic planning is a powerful tool to identify changes in the environment which will affect a family planning program. Managers can test new approaches based on anticipated changes in the environment through well-designed and carefully-selected operations research. Operations research is a method for identifying service problems and developing effective solutions for them. Operations research provides managers with a practical and systematic way to improve family planning service delivery, develop program policies, and improve client satisfaction. As a tool for identifying and solving management problems and for testing innovative approaches to enable the program to respond to changes in the environment, operations research is particularly useful to managers because it focuses on factors under their control. Using operations research, managers can test new ways to deliver services and can assess the results of adding family planning services to existing health programs. In addition, they can use operations research to evaluate the overall effect of improvements made to individual program components.

Example from Ecuador - Developing and Implementing a Strategic Vision