Thinking and Acting Strategically to Move Your Organization Forward

We have facilitated strategic plans for a lot of organizations over the years and have turned down others who wanted us to “write their plans.” While an important outcome of a good strategic planning process, a plan does no good if the process does not teach the organizational leaders how to think and act strategically. Imagine the organization who completed their strategic plan in early March 2020; the whole world changed that month as the pandemic took hold. Instead, organizations who knew how to think and act strategically survived and even thrived as they used their plans and the knowledge it provided to them to navigate the choppy waters of the pandemic and its aftermath.

What do I mean by thinking and acting strategically? Quite simply, it means that you take calculated steps toward a predefined goal. For an individual, it might mean that you want to move up in your organization or lose 25 pounds. For an organization, it might mean that you want to serve more people or expand geographically. The goal matters less than the fact that you have one on which all agree and work intentionally toward meeting it.

How can your organization and its leaders think and act more strategically?

You need two things: knowledge of who you are and consensus of your organization’s aspirational goals or where you want to be in 1, 5, 10, or 20 years.

Your mission provides the foundation knowledge of who you are. Quite simply, your mission should describe what do you do and why do you do it. It should draw clear boundaries of what falls under your organization’s purview and what does not. Without a solid understanding of your mission, the possibility of mission creep becomes tempting as you chase dollars to fill your coffers without regard for how new programs might stretch the organization too thin or move you in a direction that does not fit your strengths. However, a firm grounding in your mission serves as a launching point to do more of it or do it better.

Your vision or aspirational statement provides you with an end goal toward which to work. Too often I see vision statements that are not very visionary and describe what you do today which is why we talk about vision in terms of aspirations: where do you see your organization in 5, 10, or 20 years? This goal becomes the measure against which all decisions get made.

Your plan should ask what prevents you from achieving those aspirations and develop specific action steps to overcome those barriers, including reviewing current programs to see if they meet your current aspirations.

Thinking and acting strategically means taking into consideration both your mission and your aspirations when making any decision.

If an opportunity arises, you first ask yourself if it fits your mission. If not, then you can easily and quickly discard it. If it does, then you ask yourself if it moves you toward your aspiration or your ultimate goals. If not, then you can again discard it to focus more of your energy and resources on those things that do. If it does, then you can do your due diligence to see if it makes sense for your organization to pursue. It may still not, but at least you have the opportunity to look at it through your organizational lens rather than having ideas imposed upon you or chasing dollars that might pull you away from what you do well or what you want to do.

Strategic plans have their place to guide the organization, but I prefer to think of them as written in sand, not stone. Plans emanate from a snapshot in time and predict a world that may or may not materialize. However, the conversations around developing the plan about who you are as an organization and what you want to accomplish serves as the foundation for becoming a more strategic organization and leader. For those reasons, the process around creating the plan becomes more important than the plan itself because in those conversations, we learn more about our organization, its environment, and can develop the much-needed consensus around the organization’s mission, purpose, and aspirations.