Strategic planning is an art — one that requires vision, teamwork, communication, and frank assessment to determine and implement your organization’s primary goals for the next year or several years. As we’ve discussed in prior posts, your strategic plan needs to be both aspirational (looking ahead to what and where the organization needs to be) and actionable (providing a road map for the route to the organization’s next destinations). And while there is a formula for strategic planning success, some of the elements of that formula might seem surprising. Here are four unexpected details to build into your next strategic plan.

Unexpected Element #1: Your Values

For some organizations, particularly nonprofits, this is a no-brainer – leading with your values is hardly unexpected. But what if you don’t think of yours as a values-driven organization? Well, guess what: every organization is influenced by the values of its founders and leaders. What are yours?

As part of the initial baseline assessment in your planning process, think about what drives you, and by extension, your organization. Is it excellent customer service? Phenomenal product? Sensitive response to client need? Your enterprise’s purpose (for example, to provide transportation services to a municipality) is informed by the values you bring to it (e.g., compassion, clarity, commitment to performance). By clearly defining the organization’s purpose, a business can more easily set goals and objectives to fulfill them. Assessing the values that inform that purpose can help you make those goals and objectives more meaningful and ultimately attainable.

That’s because your values help guide you in creating the vision or mission statement — simple declarations of the overarching goal and underlying values — that underpins every good strategic plan. Having a vision statement to refer to throughout the planning process helps keep the team on a straight road to a successful plan whenever questions or challenges arise.

Unexpected Element #2: Your Style

As we’ve alluded, strategic planning begins with gathering the right group of stakeholders and then analyzing the state of the business. It’s critical to build a team with the necessary scope of interest and expertise to understand your organization’s current needs, challenges, and opportunities to lay out a broad vision for its future. This is where your style comes in. It’s also critical that you understand how the team members work together and how they will continue to work together and communicate during this new shared venture. What’s your organizational culture like? Will you work better with in-person meetings, workshops, share sessions, or online visioning boards and chat rooms? Possibly a combination of all of these? Who needs to have buy-in to make the plan move forward, and what kinds of communication and management approaches do you need to secure that buy-in?

If you’re working with a third-party consultant on the strategic plan, make sure the consultant is sensitive to your distinct style. If a consultant appears to be imposing a formulaic plan on you that doesn’t reflect your values or style, seek out experts who can help you work with your own specific set of needs to craft a coherent, consensus-based, and well-communicated plan.

Unexpected Element #3: Your Humility

The evaluation and assessment stages of the strategic planning process can and should be a time of real institutional soul-searching. You’re taking a deep dive into what works and what doesn’t for your organization and identifying necessary changes to ensure future success. Often, this evaluation involves multiple components, such as:

• A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
• A gap analysis (current state of affairs vs. desired future state)
• A root cause analysis (evaluating why a problem exists)
• A risk analysis (if you don’t manage the problem, what might happen?)

This is where the element of humility comes in. Doing such candid analysis requires leaders to remove their egos from the equation. Approach evaluations with an open mind and a willingness to sublimate your own pet ideas and projects for the good of the whole enterprise. If something you initiated isn’t working, it might need to be eliminated. If a program you want to institute doesn’t fit with the enterprise’s overall mission, goals, or vision, it might need to be shelved, at least for now. Being clear-eyed about what is most beneficial to your institution is a fundamental goal of strategic planning, even if it means reshuffling your own professional priorities.

Unexpected Element #4: Your Ambition

That said, strategic planning is a visioning process, and looking ahead to your organization’s future requires a healthy dose of ambition. What do you ultimately want your enterprise to look like, feel like, and do in the coming years?

In the final goal-setting part of the strategic planning process, the vision for the business is clarified, and solutions are recommended. A quantifiable and realistic plan is set up using the information gathered from the assessment and planning sessions. The plan should define a strategy or direction for the organization and ensure every business unit contributes to that strategy. The plan needs to align with your values and collective work style. Still, it also often needs to break through the institutional status quo, and in doing so, allow your organization to meet its most ambitious and wide-ranging goals. So, throw your best ideas for process improvement and other institutional refinements into the planning process. A well-designed planning process builds in space to air your greatest ambitions and hopes for the enterprise, then employs a set of checks and balances to make sure those ambitions are appropriate, actionable, and achievable. If they are, you will see them in your final strategic plan.

If you need assistance drafting a strategic plan that echoes your values and style while reflecting your ambitions for your enterprise, drop us a line. We’re ready to help you cultivate a visionary strategic plan to help guide your enterprise to process improvement, growth, and transformation.