Is Your Plan Actually a Strategic Plan?

As we’ve written about before here and here, even in times of uncertainty and fear, strategic planning remains one of the most impactful things nonprofit leaders can do to chart a focused direction for making the change we want to see in the world.

As strategic planning specialists, we are focused on ensuring that our strategic planning projects provide our clients with a clear and effective strategy. Some strategic plans we’ve seen focus on operational goals rather than a transformative or guiding strategy, missing opportunities to create meaningful organizational change and lasting impact. Although there is no way to guarantee that your strategic plan will be successful, you can significantly improve your chances by ensuring first that your plan is actually a strategic plan.

What makes a plan strategic is that it sets a clear and distinct direction.

We define strategy as a coordinated set of actions designed to achieve your organization’s mission while overcoming significant challenges. It involves the choice to do some things and not others. To be a strategic plan, a plan must identify critical opportunities and obstacles to achieving an organization’s mission and develop a comprehensive set of coordinated actions that work together to seize these opportunities, overcome the obstacles, and advance your mission.

To assess whether your strategic plan is actually strategic, ask the following to identify some immediate disqualifiers:

• Is it a list of things to do? An operational plan, action plan, or “to do” list or calendar is not a strategic plan.

• Is it centrally about improving operational excellence? Improving operational efficiency, articulating hard work toward a goal, or building organizational excellence are essential to a successful nonprofit organization, but they are not strategy. Effectively and efficiently getting to where you are going is not of value if you are going in the wrong direction, circles, or zig zags.

• Is the opposite of the strategy absurd? If the opposite is absurd then it is inherently desirable and not a strategy. For example, a strategic priority to have operational excellence or to raise more funds are ambitions we frequently see in strategic plans but for which doing the opposite would be absurd. No organization would choose to be underfunded or not excellent. A strategy involves taking a stand, choosing a particular direction, and making tradeoffs.

We use the questions above with our clients during the planning process to prevent or help overcome a non-strategic plan. Once we have ensured that your strategic plan is strategic, then we must next determine if we have a good and effective strategy. Read more about this below.