It’s strategic planning season for a lot of my clients, and I’ve been reading draft plans and facilitating more retreats than usual.
Once your board approves a plan, it sets the direction for your organization and decides where your money and staff time go. It’s worth slowing down before the vote. Below are seven questions that keep coming up with my clients, each with something you can try. Pick the one your board would struggle with most and put it on your next agenda. I’d love to hear how it goes.
1. if you closed tomorrow, what problem would still be there?
Start here, because everything else ought to flow from it. This is your challenge statement: the need in your community, what’s causing it, and what happens if nobody steps in. When a plan skips this step, the organization can easily drift away from what the community needs.
Try this: Write down the obvious answer, then ask “Why does that matter?” Keep asking until you start repeating yourself. The last new answer is usually the one worth keeping.
2. why you?
Other groups are working on the same problem. Your unique value is what lets you make a difference they can’t. That might be decades in one community, a specific piece of land, relationships people trust, or a way of working nobody else has figured out.
Try this: List everything that makes your organization awesome. Then cross off anything a peer organization could also claim. Whatever’s left goes at the top of your unique value statement.
3. does your mission statement do its whole job?
A good mission says what you do, for whom, where, and how. The “what” is the change people experience because you exist. The “how” is what the work looks like on a Tuesday.
Try this: Interrogate your mission: does it answer what you do, for whom, where, and how? The “what” and the “how” often get mixed up. “Advocacy” and “education,” for example, are “hows.” If your mission is all “how” and no “what,” you’ve described your activities and left out why anyone should care.
4. do your strategic priorities flow from your SWOT?
A SWOT is a catch-all and ought to name every strength, weakness, opportunity and threat. I encourage every client to ask their full board and staff to weigh in on the organization’s SWOT. Your strategic priorities can flow from this process, where your board and leadership team identify which ones to take on (and which ones not to).
Try this: Have your board and leadership team each select the weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that they believe are most critical for the organization to take on. Where the votes cluster, you’ve likely found your strategic priorities. Where they diverge, you’ve found potential topics for your next strategic planning committee meeting or board retreat.
5. strategic plan or work plan?
A strategic plan sets direction for three to five years. It names who you serve and where you’ll focus, and it gives you a filter for saying no to good ideas that don’t fit. It doesn’t need to hold everything, and the hard part is that the line between strategic and operational moves depending on the organization. For most groups, a new database is a staff project. For an organization whose biggest weakness is that it can’t show funders its impact, the database might be the most strategic decision in the plan. Hiring works the same way. Filling an open role is operational. Adding a development director to reduce your reliance on one major funder is a strategic bet.
Try this: Early in the process, spend 15 minutes with the group agreeing on what counts as strategic for your organization, using a few real examples from your own list. Then when someone argues that something belongs in the plan (or doesn’t), you have a shared definition to go back to.
6. whose job is this?
Question 5 sorts the ideas. This one sorts the people. The board owns the what and the why, like whether to build an endowment or expand into a new region. Staff own the how, who and when, like which programs to run and which candidate to hire. Board members will still have good ideas about operations. You can invite them, but say up front that staff decide which ones to pursue.
Try this: Add one line to your working agreements and agree on this as a team: “The board decides what and why. Staff own how, who, and when.” Now when a board member starts assigning homework to staff mid-retreat and asks for a report back, anyone can ask, “Is this the board’s lane?”
7. what has to be settled before the vote, and what can wait?
Every strategic planning process raises more questions than a board and staff can answer. Keep the before-the-vote list short: who you serve, financial scenarios that show the plan holds up if revenue comes in low, and a pre-mortem, where the board imagines the plan has failed five years from now and works out why.
Try this: Welcome the board’s questions. Asking hard questions is part of their job. When one comes up, ask the group: “Do we need to answer this before we vote, or can it wait a few months or longer?” Keep a running list of everything that can wait, and put it on a future agenda so those questions don’t get lost.
