by Babs Weber

During our most recent Network Weaver call, I asked the question: Is strategic planning as we know it dead?

This is something I’ve wondered for a little while ever since I came across the Stanford Social Innovation Review pieces on adaptive strategy. Organizations of all types need to have plans. They need to have an idea of what their goals are. Even before the pandemic there was a movement away from comprehensive and detailed plans covering targets decided 3-5 years in advance. In prepping for this blog, I came across a reference to Henry Mintzberg criticizing strategic planning in the popular business press back in the 90’s.

On the other hand - even though the traditional 3-5 year, unified planning document that links mission to metrics may not give the flexibility to deal with large scale change, an organization who uses that as an excuse to set no goals or examine pathways to achieve their mission probably isn’t going to do well either. Mission drift happens when small, unplanned or unchallenged changes (perhaps to take advantage of currently available grants or a perceived shift in community interests) add up, and can take an organization with a social purpose off-course. It’s a bit more rare in strictly for-profit entities, probably because profit is a lot easier to measure than people or planet - but even a for-profit business can muddy up their unique value proposition in times of change. And boy, are we in times of change. If you haven’t already had a look at what you’re doing and what direction you’re going in in the last 3-5 months, you might be surprised at the drift.

THREE TOOLS FOR PLANNING

So if mission drift and outdated, detailed, complicated plans are the two ends of the extreme, where can a responsible and forward-thinking changemaker get some tools today? Here are three pieces ABSI has come across recently which we like, and hope, can be helpful to you.

The North Star and the Creative Brief

*North Star by Mike Setchell on Unsplash*

The idea of a ‘north star’ - a broad, over-arching goal that we are aiming to achieve - captures the heart of your idea. It’s the big goal to aim for. Just like how the North Star always stays visible and stable relative to your location in the Northern Hemisphere, your North Star statement will always be the direction you want to orient your work. During a Peer Mentor session among ABSI’s Community Catalyst Project cohort, one of the teams used this creative brief tool to articulate their North Star and check up on the direction of the projects they’re going in.

*Creative Brief Jamboard on identifying your North Star Statement. Credit: Brandy Old*

Your North Star should connect to the emotion behind your work. It should be broad enough to stay relevant, no matter what changes. It should also be tuned in enough to your work to be a helpful, guiding goal.

McConnell Foundation’s Covid-19 decision making tool

McConnell Foundation and Recode recently released this Social Impact Decision Lens as a tool to help social purpose organizations think through their actions, decisions and spark new ideas. They suggest this tool and the questions in it can be used as a conversation starter, to gather impact measurements, and to make plans and predictions. We suggest cutting up pages one and two, and pairing them up besides the sections on page 3 & 4 you want to dive into. If you want to safely work with a colleague, use screenshots or the snip tool (here’s a mac alternative) and load them up on Jamboard, Microsoft Whiteboard, Miro or Mural. Use sticky notes to your heart’s content!

Scenario thinking and a decision making matrix

My favourite part about decision making matrixes are the creativity they unleash. You can make a decision making matrix by examining any two attributes/forces that exist on a sliding scale, and plotting your choices along the x and y axis. So long as you have two independent variables that relate to whatever you are analyzing, you can use them to get more information from your data.

*XKCD #388: F*** Grapefruit. If you visit the website, be sure to over over the image for the alt text. Credit: Randall Munroe.*

For example, if you are interested in selecting fruit and don’t mind an f-bomb or two, this is a relevant xkcd. It puts how delicious a fruit is vs. how easy it is to eat into a chart. Clearly you can see the chart’s author holds strong opinions about grapefruit.

Probably the most well known decision making matrix is the Eisenhower Box, where the two attributes are: how important a task is vs. how time sensitive the task is. If a task is time sensitive and important, do it now. If a task is important but doesn’t have a due date, find time to make it happen, or you’ll never get through that course on how to make pivot tables. Second most well known is probably a risk matrix plotting impact and likelihood.

One of our Network Weavers shared a great blog from the collective impact forum about scenario thinking. Instead of using two attributes to analyze our decisions, Paul Schmitz suggests we use two driving forces that can make change on the world to think about what future world could be on the horizon. Will your future plans work in any of those scenarios? When would you need to make adjustments to fit a new world? For a cleverly written white paper describing four different potential scenarios we could be headed for post-Covid, Paul suggests visiting the Zukunftsinstitut (here’s a link straight to the English pdf.)

Planning For Now

By using a matrix to analyze not just choices we can make, but the future we’re facing - we see a great deal of potential to build strategies that can be flexible as we try to make it to that ‘north star,’ or to identify one piece of the problem to dive into at a time. So to answer the question I asked our network weavers, ‘is strategic planning as we know it, dead?’ Probably. But strategies that allow us flexibility to plan for things we don’t know are coming is more valuable than ever.

ABSI hosts a monthly meeting of individuals, known as the Network Weaver Group, who want to build relationships and share skills across the social innovation ecosystem in the province. Let us know if you’d like to be part of the zoom call by emailing us at admin@absiconnect.ca.