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The way to achieve this objective is to adopt a strategy - a yardstick against which ongoing activity can be assessed, as well as a marker that provides a way to decide whether each "new thing" is to be grasped or ignored. Hence the updated strategic plan which was sent to all members recently.

This new plan, developed as a result of a year of discussion and debate by the Board and the Council of CIBSE, identifies a number of issues which will be crucial to the future health of the Institution.

The phrase used often to describe CIBSE's work: "Promoting competence in building services through education, training and registration of engineers", crystallised as the first strategic objective - "Develop a growth strategy for Membership by broadening and deepening our membership across the building services economy". This objective embraces work fundamental to CIBSE and is carried out by a good part of the CIBSE staff who deal with membership applications, processing of registrations as professional engineers, dealing with amendments to members' details and the all-important task of ensuring that the subscriptions, which make up over three quarters of our income, continue to flow in.

But that strategic objective also includes one of the most significant developments for CIBSE in the past few years, namely the awarding of a major contract by the Engineering and Technology Board to develop registration of members.

Similarly, the strategic objective "Pursue CIBSE's core purpose of promoting competence and knowledge, through engagement in current issues including sustainability, climate change and globalisation of the engineering industry" embraces much on-going activity but also includes our current contract with the Carbon Trust to promote energy efficiency beyond the levels set by regulations. One aspect of this, the "100 days of carbon clean-up" campaign, is detailed overleaf.

Although professional institutions emerged over a century ago, the dominant attributes of sharing knowledge and maintaining standards of competence remain at their heart. The Institution spreads knowledge through its guides and other publications. The strategic plan acknowledges the need to continue to generate the research and engineering knowledge that underpins our leading publications.

It could be said that CIBSE has sometimes failed to capitalise fully on opportunities in the past because we have not had a strategic plan to guide our decision making, and so have not always recognised those opportunities until it was too late. The current plan will ensure that in the future we are able to grasp opportunities with both hands where they fit our objectives - and equally, we can ignore those things which could so easily divert CIBSE from its core purpose.

So a strategic plan is not a straitjacket; nor is everything CIBSE does strategic, but it is all essential to the development of the Institution as the centre of expertise on matters concerning the built environment.