Leading by Design

I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY APPROACH TO CLIENTS who come to me for strategic planning services.  Instead of me assuming that the process of building a plan is the most important part of planning (and of utmost importance to the client), I'm going to start by questioning the organization's ability and commitment to executing the plan once it's finally adopted.  My experience has been -- and I know this goes for other planning consultants, too -- the wheels fall off the plan when the organization actually has to implement what it says it wants to do.  Even when we spend hours creating detailed work plans it never ceases to amaze me that they are poorly used or not used at all. It's often not for lack of desire that organizations fail to follow through on implementation.  How many of you have heard or said, "We think this is important, but...." followed by the list of what stands in the way of execution.  Top responses:  no time, no money, no interest; stuff c...

DESPITE TONS OF READILY AVAILABLE ADVICE ABOUT THE WHYS AND HOWS OF STRATEGIC PLANNING, many organizations still engage in planning because someone else told them to do it.  That someone could be a funder, a consultant, a staff leader, a program partner, a board member -- anyone, really, who has the audacity or ignorance to say "money/audience/visibility will come if you have a plan".    Fact is, many of these folks don't particularly care if the plan functions or not, just so long as there's a piece of paper or swell looking PowerPoint to show for it.  The bottom line is if planning doesn't well up from some deep, shared core organizational values, it will be a hollow effort that will ultimately be tossed aside for someone else's shiny, new imperative.  (Did you just hear the thud of the last plan hit the bottom of the trash can?  Or, as the illustration above suggests, it miraculously tumbles like a house of cards, never to be seen again.) The ...

WELL, I GUESS THE SHORT ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION IS 'YES'.  Plans are concocted everyday for all sorts of things from grocery lists to multi-year programmatic initiatives and I can see where many of them can be accomplished with little reflection and less excitement for the results.  There are proponents who assure us that even the most complex plans can be achieved with short, highly focused bursts of effort.  And, indeed, that's possible.  But it seems to me that any plan will lack dimension and luster if it's written as an internal 'beat the clock' exercise or a requirement to satisfy someone else's desire. The best planning is borne of possibility and one's own desire to marry the here-and-now with the what-if's and can-do's.  Its underlying thesis has everything to do with making aspirations reality, even if the aspiration is as universal or as necessary as getting out of debt or revisioning the work of a downsized staff.   When done right,...

DESPITE THE FACT THAT I DO A LOT OF ORGANIZATIONAL PLANNING in my consulting work, it's been far too long since I've sat myself down and drafted a personal plan for my career and life.  I think the last time I did any real serious work on a personal plan was more than ten years ago.  'Yikes!' was my reaction when fellow consultant Linda Norris asked if I had one.  Turns out neither did she.  Nor several other colleagues she asked.  Hmmm..... It wasn't long after that conversation when Linda called again with an invitation to attend a personal planning retreat at her house.  Starting tomorrow, five consultant colleagues are converging for 1.5 days of conversation, soul-searching, group problem-solving, and individual plan creation, and I, for one, am getting really excited about what I might contribute as well as bring home. I think I've done a fair amount of preparation -- we kick the party off with a discussion about our past and current work and whether ...

JUST GOT OFF THE PHONE WITH A BOARD PRESIDENT who was checking in with me about the planning process his organization was wrapping up with me.  I told him what I had told the planning committee a week earlier at the end of our last meeting together, "Now the hard work begins.  You've got to summon the discipline to stick to this plan you've created." My advice wasn't just for the planning committee, although they were the only ones in earshot of my parting words.  Planning committees may think all they have to do is create the written document, and while that is the immediate goal, I think they also have the added responsibility (along with staff leadership) to figure out how to institutionalize it at the board level.  This is especially critical if this is the first plan the organization has ever produced or if the organization has previously failed at following their plans.  So, part of the planning committee's follow-through responsibilities include teachin...

WHEN DO "AHA" MOMENTS COME FOR YOU?  If they rolled up on your doorstep with unfailing regularity, you'd take them for granted.  They wouldn't elicit an "aha!" at all.  But real "aha" moments, for me at any rate, come after stretches of concerted problem-solving and reflection.  They more often occur as a prolonged unfolding of understanding rather than in one flash of insight. So it was with a strategic planning committee I'd been working with for months.  Our regular meetings were moving well through the obstacle course of mission refinement, goal development and strategy creation.  But it wasn't until we were buried knee-deep in strategies and tasking that some very forthright conversations started to take place. As the morning fog lifts from the landscape, this team began to articulate  -- as a group -- that its resources for at least the short-term had to be spent on strengthening its organizational core.  Board and staff development, ...

A MUSEUM STUDIES CLASS IS ABOUT TO LAUNCH A planning process with a local historical society as part of a semester-long project this fall.  As a preliminary activity, one of the students (who is responsible for the outreach portion of the project) and I chatted yesterday about my take on organizational planning.  We covered a lot of ground and a lot of the basic elements of a solid planning process:  vision, mission, where do goals come from?; how much outreach can you suggest an all-volunteer organization do?; as well as the more mundane how much can you devote to this class project when you're a busy student with tons of other claims on your time? That aside, I encourage my grad student friend to spend considerable time at the beginning getting the board to engage in the emotion-based discussions about why their organization is important, who it serves and what impact it can make on the lives of its audiences, its neighborhood, and its larger community.  These are ...

THIS WEEK, NONPROFIT CONSULTANT MARION CONWAY is running a series of articles on her blog about the importance of board retreats .  She's giving you all the best insight on why to do them and how to do them; she's even sharing sample agendas!  So you've got to check that out. I consider the board retreat oxygen for the organizational brain .  It provides space and time to breathe and think deeply about the organization's health and well-being.  As I've written elsewhere , the coming together of boards, staff and volunteers can be a bonding experience that can move an organization to new levels of achievement.  And taking time to breathe and think deeply can clear away the cobwebs and refocus everyone on the mission and the impact. Most regular board meetings just can't do that very well.  With their agendas and often rigorous timeframes, getting the chance to even take a breath, much less a deep one, is almost impossible.  You've got to create separa...

WE'RE ON THE CUSP OF THE NEW YEAR, A TIME WHEN I try to use the next few days to do some reflection and personal mission review and goal setting. Sounds very serious, but I assure you that it's not so much that as it is reinvigorating. Taking a bit of reflective time puts me back in touch with some basic ideas that are foundational to my work and to my outlook on life. I thought I'd begin the process this time around by sharing some quotes with you that have particular meaning for me: Eleanor Roosevelt: It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. When I first came across this quote, I wrote it right down. It clicked with me, because I've worked with so many organizations whose dreams seemed to far exceed their capacities to fulfill them. Or one person has big, vocal dreams, while everybody else is either not yet in dream mode or is completely clueless. No matter whose dream or how big, without an articulated plan to achieve it, it almost certainly wil...

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THE IDEAL PLANNING PROCESS includes many voices along its way from inside and outside the organization. Casting as wide a net as possible for stakeholder opinion and insight can help the plan’s developers frame questions they might never have thought of asking, which can lead to the creation of important criteria by which to filter possible future scenarios. It’s also a way to gain broad buy-in to a final plan, because many people will have had an opportunity to put a point-of-view, an idea, or a warning on the planning table. Sounds good, doesn’t it? In practice, few organizations are able to take on as much opinion gathering as they or their consultants would like. If truth be told, all that surveying, benchmarking and focus-grouping is time-consuming work requiring as much (or more) coordination as the actual writing of a plan. But it can be so richly rewarding! Organizations that short-circuit this “research” phase of the process, however, go into p...

THE VERY NOTION OF STRATEGIC PLANNING DEMANDS that one get out of one's skin to view an organization the way others do. There's valuable information out in the landscape about your organization and all you have to do is ask for it. But, frankly, that's enough to send chills through some of the most hardened organization leaders. Most organizations rely on the survey as a means to collect community input. But surveys are passive things -- they generally only tell you what's written on the page. No chance for follow-up questions. While they're great for reaching a large group, it's really hard to create a survey that gives you much new or really insightful information. Talking face-to-face in small groups also has its limitations, but hold tremendous opportunities for making deeper connections. And since few cultural organizations seize the opportunity to use focus groups in any regular way....or at all....the format is definitely worth exploring, particular...

I KNOW WHEN MY BRAIN IS ON OVERLOAD to the point that I can't focus on anything, that's the time I start list-making. I just dump the reeling brain onto a piece of paper and start to sort it out. In doing so, I start to focus -- first on making the list, but then on prioritizing and tasking. This exercise is often overwhelming, but it's also calming, because it brings me clarity and gives me a starting point I simply lacked when all of it was stuffed in my head, zooming around in there. It's the same with many organizations. They come to planning after months or years of unfocused activity, often so overwhelming that they are unable to see the future for the forest of the now. "Energy depleting", "chasing our tails", "in seeming crisis-mode all the time" -- these are some of the ways board and staff leaders have described the long-term effects of life without a plan. Other manifestations can include: difficulty in attracting solid board...

The military and the corporate world increasingly employ a tool to help gain the upper hand, be it in war or in snagging more market share. It’s a tool that is particularly well-suited for nonprofits, as well. The tool is called the “strategic narrative”. Military expert Michael Vlahos describes to journalist Kaihan Krippendorff that strategic narratives in the military context are considered to be " compelling storylines which can explain events convincingly and from which inferences can be drawn ." Or alternatively, “ an interlocking framework of ‘truths’ ” that explain how a conflict came to be, where it is going, and how it should be argued and described. Why are they so important and why should cultural nonprofits care about them? As Krippendorff explains, the answer is simple: everybody wants to win…and everybody loves a winner. A compelling strategic narrative, which is, in effect, storytelling, has the potential to draw audiences and keep them coming...