It’s strategic planning season, and I’ve been helping with more planning processes 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 your plan is adopted. 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, what problem would still be there, and what would be lost?
Start here, because everything else ought to flow from it. This is your challenge statement: the need in your community and what happens if your work stops. 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?
Your unique value is what lets you make a difference others 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. If other groups do similar work, cross off anything they could also claim, and put whatever’s left at the top of your unique value statement. If no one else does this work, ask why. The answer usually shows what makes you hard to replace.
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 that happens 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. “Education” and “outreach,” for example, are usually “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 everyone who carries the work, usually board and staff, to weigh in. Your strategic priorities can come out of this process, with your decision-makers choosing which ones to take on (and which ones not to).
Try this: Have your board and leadership team each select the items from the SWOT they believe are most critical for the organization to act on. Where the votes cluster, you’ve likely found your strategic priorities. Where they diverge, you’ve found topics for your next planning committee meeting or retreat.
5. strategic plan or work plan?
A strategic plan sets direction, usually for three to five years, though an organization in transition might plan for less. It names who you serve and where you’ll focus, and it helps you decide which good ideas don’t fit. It doesn’t need to hold everything. The tricky 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 that 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, but adding a development director to reduce your reliance on one major funder is a strategic bet.
Try this: Early in the process, agree as a group 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 was about sorting ideas, and this one is about sorting roles. In most organizations with paid staff, 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. On a working board, members may handle some of the how themselves, so it helps to be clear about which hat they’re wearing.
Try this: Add one line to your working agreements and agree on it as a team. For many organizations it’s “The board decides what and why. Staff own how, who, and when.” Then if someone starts assigning homework mid-retreat, anyone can ask, “Whose lane is this?”
7. what has to be settled before your plan is adopted, and what can wait?
Every strategic planning process raises more questions than a board and staff can answer. Keep the before-adoption list short. Settle who you serve, run financial scenarios that show the plan holds up if revenue comes in low, and do a pre-mortem, where the group imagines the plan has failed by the end of its term and works out why.
Try this: Welcome the board’s questions, since asking hard questions is part of their job. When one comes up, ask the group: “Do we need to answer this before the plan is adopted, 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.
