5-Year Strategic Plan
On the precipice of a pivotal presidential election, a narrative change and advocacy nonprofit (which I’ll refer to as “my client”) hired me to help them develop the organization’s first multi-year strategic plan. This case study illustrates how I design and facilitate highly customized strategy and planning experiences to achieve your goals. My rigorous focus on outcomes and my commitment to developing deep knowledge about your team lead to higher-quality experiences for all participants—yielding a significant return on your investment of staff time.
Phase 1: Discovery
I become deeply familiar with my client as individual partners and as an organization with history, tradition, and a specific operating context. This enables me to develop custom solutions that meet my client’s needs and exceed their expectations. This phase is also when clients and I each gather information to feed into the strategic decision-making process; this could include stakeholder conversations, landscape analysis, scenario planning, and look-backs.
I began work with my client’s leadership team by aligning on norms, clarifying expectations, and surfacing hopes and dreams for this project. I conducted staff stakeholder interviews in order to build a foundation of trust for the ongoing work and provide the team with data about staff’s assumptions, desires, and readiness. These interviews helped me design a participatory strategic planning process that was responsive to the team culture, leadership’s goals, and targeted outcomes.
Phase 2: Design
No matter how many hours we designate to dedicated group work, it never feels like enough. The 60-30-10 rule of team effectiveness says we should put the bulk (60%) of our energy where it will have the most impact—in intentional pre-work. Smart preparation makes collaboration more productive and yields better results.
I guided my client’s leadership team to determine the plan’s components and use cases. In the months before the retreat, we used team meetings for strategic planning preparation, including a five-year look-back, election analysis, and more. I led a team strengths workshop that deepened self-awareness, built intra-team collaboration capacities, and empowered staff to use their strengths in the retreat. From there, we co-created a two-day strategic planning retreat agenda aligned with my client’s organizational values and equitable operating principles.
Phase 3: Decision
This phase involves the hard work of envisioning bold and creative options and then zeroing in on the mission-critical goals and priorities that will end up in the plan. This is the work that’s often the best use of precious in-person time as team members build on each other’s brainstorms and have necessary conversations that enable long-term strategic plan success.
At our strategic planning retreat, my client engaged in a lively mix of full-group, small-group, and solo activities. From a SWOT analysis to examining “the problem,” from paired visioning to collective mind-mapping, day one used big-picture thinking to generate new possibilities for the years ahead. On day two, we developed the 2030 Objective and set of Strategic Priorities to guide the next five years. We reconvened for a virtual workshop to set Year 1 milestones and progress indicators.
Phase 4: Documentation
The primary outcome of strategic planning is, of course, a plan. Ideally the plan is a record of the creative visioning, smart decision making, and authentic alignment your team accomplishes in the process.
Having deeply listened to my client throughout our engagement, I drafted their first strategic plan using their ideas and words. Working with a trusted design partner, we transformed the material into a compelling visual asset suitable for engaging funders, partners, and other constituents—a product that made the team proud.
Phase 5: Doing
Too often, expensive and labor-intensive strategic plans end up collecting dust in a forgotten digital file. Strategic implementation is an iterative process of execution, evaluation, and adaptation. The most successful strategic plans are collectively owned and regularly reviewed for relevance, feasibility, and impact.
To set my client up for long-term success, I offered strategic plan implementation recommendations, which included establishing a predictable strategic plan “performance review” cycle that replicates the Year 1 milestones and progress indicators process. Regular strategic plan review and evaluation will ensure that the plan adapts as needed to the current context and benefits from new information and learnings generated in the prior implementation year.
If my highly-customized approach sounds like a good fit for your needs, let’s co-create a journey that will suit your goals, people, culture, and operating environment.