Here’s a situation you may be in right now: You, your colleagues, and stakeholders spent a lot of time and energy developing a thoughtful, forward-thinking strategic plan to guide your organization as it grows and evolves in the future.
However, it may be unlikely that your strategic plan accounted for the significant changes proposed or happening with the Trump administration. We know that the administration’s actions and executive orders are impacting nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies differently, many of which are setting aside their original plans for the year as they work with and listen to communities. So, what does that mean for strategic planning?
First of all, know that your effort in creating a strategic plan is valuable. Your engagement with affected parties to inform your strategic plan has value beyond the plan itself—the process of engaging with community members, potential beneficiaries, and allies has deepened relationships that are serving you now and will into the future. Your mission, vision, and values are likely still relevant today and can guide your response to current political challenges and help define the role your organization plays in supporting equity and justice for communities.
Implementing a current strategic plan: How do you know what to keep and where to adapt or let go?
If you have a new strategic plan or a couple years left in your current one, you could cross-walk it with your current situation and what you perceive as important, lower priority, and unknown given the challenges your organization and community are facing. Here’s a helpful “Annotated Strategy Triage Tool” from the Center for Community Investment to help you prioritize.
In uncertain moments, returning to your organization’s vision, mission, and values can provide stability. One option is to keep your vision, mission, and values from your existing strategic plan, but revisit and adjust your action plan and implementation plan with the current challenges in mind. Adapting implementation plans while staying the course on your broad strategic directions can allow your organization to pivot in its activities while still being guided by your existing strategic plan.
We recently worked with RS EDEN, a nonprofit that provides a variety of programs around supportive housing, substance use recovery, and preventing recidivism, to develop a new strategic plan that responded to the current uncertainty and challenges. As they wrote in an article titled Why We’re Launching a Strategic Plan—Even Now, “even when the future feels unpredictable, our three pillars still hold. They will make sense one year from now, two years from now, three years from now.”
During uncertain times, it’s valuable to have very clear priorities and focus on only a few key actions: this increases momentum towards change quickly, and inspires hope because you can see the work getting done. If everything is a priority, it can feel like nothing is, and choosing a few key actions will support your staff to avoid burnout and change fatigue.
What can planning look like in these times? Where do you turn next for guidance on decision-making?
Depending on the level of change facing your organization and its work, a new three- to five-year strategic plan may be the right next step. We would recommend, however, only planning activities for the first year. Your overarching goals in the next year may hold for another three to five years—but how you get there may only be clear for the next year. If your organization needs something shorter-term, these tools could serve as consensus-building activities and provide the guidance you need:
- A 1-year strategic plan that focuses on implementation planning could provide high-level guidance without requiring you to plan further into the future than feels comfortable. By coming together during uncertain times, prioritizing key actions, and identifying new implementation plans for the next year and no further out, you can change the scope of your strategic plan to support action now, but still acknowledge that there may be a need to pivot again in the future.
- A strategy screen or decision tree can serve as criteria to help in decision-making for the many choices you may be facing. A funder, for example, could use a strategy screen to apply consistent, values-driven criteria to potential funding opportunities.
- Scenario planning involves considering possible situations and what your organization’s response would be, essentially determining an “if this, then that” plan before the scenario occurs.
- Reprioritization of actions and implementation plans can leverage your existing strategic plan with a higher impact. You can determine what actions should be happening in response to uncertainty in the current moment, using tools like an Impact/Effort Matrix. Reprioritizing means that your overarching goals haven’t changed, but how you get to the goals changes. This can include adjusting the how, when, and success measures for each implementation activity.
In addition to supporting clients with the strategies detailed above, we have worked with organizations in other ways to stay grounded during uncertain times. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we supported a client with monitoring for a rapid response initiative so that they could be both responsive to their community while still learning from the work and acting responsibly. We’ve also worked with organizations to collectively clarify how to articulate and stay true to their values in a rapidly evolving environment.
There are many more resources out there for rapid response and adapting work to have a justice-oriented lens. We are continually learning as our environment evolves, too. We also know each organization’s situation is unique—that’s why in all our projects, we take time in an Inception Phase to consider the above factors and help you determine the best approach forward.
We are open for work to support you and your organization. Are you looking to update and refocus your strategic plan for the current moment? Are you grappling with other ideas as you respond to a rapidly changing environment? We’d love to be your thought partner! Reach out to Dan Goldstein on our business development team at dang@theimprovegroup.com and we can find a time to discuss your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you!