Is Your Strategy Good and is it Effective?

Once we have ensured that your plan is in fact a strategic plan, as we wrote about here, the next steps are to ensure it is a good strategy and one that will be effective.

To ensure we develop a good strategy, we challenge ourselves and our clients to ask:

• Does it assess the landscape identifying critical opportunities and obstacles to achieving your mission?

• Does it define a central guiding principle for addressing the opportunities and obstacles?

• Does it make clear choices and trade-offs clarifying what you will and will not do?

• Do the strategic priorities and other elements of your plan comprehensively work together as a set of coordinated actions to seize the opportunities and address obstacles?

The strategic plan is grounded in insights about your core capabilities and environmental context. In addition, we revisit this throughout the process. After we confirm that we have a strategy and that it is a good strategy, we want to ensure it is set up to be effective. To have the best chance of success, we check your strategy for:

• Environmental fit: Does your strategy fit with the current environmental context?

• Unique value and leverage: Does it leverage your unique strengths and position your organization to create unique and sustainable value?

• Theory of change: Is the strategy based on a clear and compelling theory of change about how the organization will create its intended impact?

• Direction setting: Does your strategy translate into specific actionable steps that can be executed throughout the organization?

• Capacity: Does the organization have the capacity or have the potential to implement the strategy?

If you find yourself answering no to many of these questions, then you can use the questions as a guide to identify what needs improvement.

By following these guiding questions, we work with you to develop a compelling strategic plan and enhance your organization’s chances of achieving its vision and goals.

Please contact us if you would like to discuss your organization’s strategy or strategic plan. So we can best accommodate your process and timing, we encourage you to reach out as much in advance as possible of when you’d like to start your planning process.