In 2020, Division 40: Society for Clinical Neuropsychology (SCN) formed an ad-hoc strategic planning committee to develop a new strategic plan, based on perceived need to re-align SCN in ways consistent with the needs of its membership, the professional neuropsychology community more broadly, and society at large.
An initial critical step was to gather data about the organization, both historical and contemporary, from multiple perspectives. As such, in addition to reviewing historical documents from division archives, the strategic planning committee reviewed the strategic plans of American Psychological Association (APA) and other APA divisions. SCN also hired expert consultants to lead focus groups consisting of SCN leaders and members as well as representatives and leaders from other neuropsychology organizations. Data from focus groups informed the development of a larger survey, which was broadly distributed to SCN members and the larger neuropsychology community.
These data were carefully reviewed and discussed, leading to development of a strategic plan, approved by SCN in 2023. A second strategic planning committee worked to align the organizational structure and bylaws with the strategic plan. SCN is grateful to the hardworking members of these two committees and to everyone who provided SCN with feedback through focus groups and survey responses.
SCN’s new guiding principles, as outlined in the strategic plan, are:
- placing priority on justice, equity, and inclusion;
- acting with integrity and courage;
- advocacy for the field of neuropsychology, neuropsychology professionals, and the people served by neuropsychologists;
- focusing on innovation and relevance;
- emphasizing community and collaboration; and 6) increasing SCN’s value to SCN members.
Our strategic priorities are to:
- increase the societal value of neuropsychology;
- collaborate with APA in advocacy efforts;
- improve and support equity, diversity, and inclusion within our division,
- support education and training opportunities across the full training and career span of neuropsychologists; and
- increase transparency and communication.
The new bylaws, informed by the strategic plan, were passed in spring of 2025.
Since that time, SCN has been working to implement the new bylaws, guided by our strategic plan. Given well-known barriers to implementation of new strategic plans in organizations, we have focused on:
- constantly communicating our strategic plan and new bylaws to SCN membership and leadership;
- structurally reorganizing existing SCN subcommittees and adding new committees to align with the bylaws/strategic plan;
- updating our Policies and Procedures manual to operationalize the Bylaws/Strategic Plan; and
- deliberately keeping focus on our long term strategic priorities even while needing to address SCN’s day to day tasks and deadlines.
We also appointed our first-ever executive director, whose main mission is to work with SCN leadership to align SCN efforts with our strategic plan, assist in implementing SCN initiatives, and provide institutional consistency that works in parallel with our term-limited elected leadership.
SCN has learned much, and continues to learn, from this ongoing process. For divisions planning to undergo similar restructuring, we recommend a series of recent papers (Sperling et al., 2025 a, b, and c), which details the processes undertaken by SCN, as a resource.