On Strategic Plans and What Happens After
Strategic planning has been on the minds of potential clients lately. It’s great that groups are wanting to plan. A plan can help us be more organized, involve stakeholders, and feel confident that we’ve taken a step forward. In this article, I’m going to discuss both strategic plans and the implementation that ideally follows, and how to move past the barriers to each of these pieces going well.
As noted above, a strategic plan is a great starting point, yet even within that process, there are pitfalls which can undermine the best execution of strategically-led organizational change. Three strategic plan pitfalls come to mind: 1) unstated assumptions, 2) vagueness, and 3) strategic plans as a substitute for implementation
Unstated assumptions can be nothing more than taking for granted what has been done the years prior as a given in terms of the strategic direction. Organizational options quickly narrow because resources must support legacy activities, perhaps without the hard look at how they block organizational possibilities. Related is where leadership makes an assumption about the kind, or character, of an organization. For example, a service organization says it does not advocate, when in fact, it might greatly benefit from educating community decisionmakers about the importance of its work in the context of communities. Such an organizational block means the leadership cannot conceive of how it might do amazing direct service and teach about their work.
The solution for these unstated assumptions is to get the right questions asked, whether an organization can do that through its internal processes or can be helped by a consultant. I remember over a decade ago at graduate school at Carolina law, I took classes in the Business School. In law, interrogating assumptions is a must do, and I saw how this was useful in the business school setting when evaluating business and operations scenarios. Indeed, it has been helpful in leadership roles, and I continue to believe that checking assumptions is useful in organizational management and strategic business planning.
The second pitfall is leaving the strategic plan open ended such that it could be characterized as vague. It is tempting path, because it seems to leave options open and stay in the aspirational. This might be OK if the strategic plan is designed to be combined with more detailed implementation plans. Unfortunately, too often the plans reiterate well-known generalities about organizational goals that probably aren’t even that useful boiler plate for a discerning funder. That the funder community is the intended audience for many strategic plans and the concurrent thriving of vague strategic plans as a species is a topic for a longer piece some other day.
The third pitfall is a strategic plan that represents a wish to “do something” as a substiture for more consequential action. I’ve seen this with many types of organizations and think this type of pattern may affect local governments even more. These governments understandably want to show they are responsive to local residents on an issue, and developing a strategic plan (or a committee, the close cousin) can fulfill that need showing something being done.
Related to the plan substituting for action, in certain cases a plan suggests few easy wins that seem to hold out promise. Any implementation steps are welcome, for example, a particular vacant piece of property the local government owns could be developed. But too often this easy win does not meet the scale of the economic development, housing, or other amenity issues in the community. And while early wins can be a jumpstart to further action and buy-in, often the implementation follow through is lacking, so they are just one-off small triumphs.
So we’ve discussed three common pitfalls lurking around strategic plans. You’ve probably understood at this point that I believe implementation and execution is essential follow up for the planning or committee process. Whatever the organization doing the strategic planning, part of the reason I founded Alex Dadok Consulting is that even well-crafted plans or committee reports sometimes sit on the shelf after their creation. When that happens, they don’t aid the organization no matter how much the organization repeats on the website and grant applications that it’s informed by its strategic plan.
Implementation is often a great challenge. Positive changes at scale can require leadership in the face of more controversy and perhaps even organizational change that invests in the right priorities and finds or puts together creative funding sources. Let’s say the organization has done a great job interrogating its assumptions and reimagining possibilities and has produced a first-rate strategic plan. Then it also produces a “business plan” or “implementation plan” flowing from their strategic plans that is clear, logical, and achievable for an organization of that size and scope.
However, though the leadership may see the possibility, have a vision, and be able to clearly communicate that vision though a more specific implementation plan, if the organization doesn’t have the capacity to implement, the result may be unsatisfactory. Put another way, a good strategic plan + implementation plan doesn’t cure the problem if there aren’t resources, leadership, and relationships for implementation.
The hard work to work past these barriers are iterative processes. An implementation plan that invests in future priorities and starts to make changes to duties can grow into new hires or transitions in roles. With these transitions, new activities can tell a story for funders that leads to new resources, and then more ability to tackle those tough organizational changes. In the public interest space, just as in the business world, there is no substitute for good execution.
When public interest organizations reach that higher level, they do honor to their missions, to those they seek to serve, and to our society. Those things are worth the challenges a leader must face in executing well on a strategic plan and what comes after.