Planning in spite of it all

Strategy for Our Times Part 1

Image description: four hikers gazing out at hilly terrain. Photo by Matt Heaton on Unsplash

As I am returning to facilitating planning for nonprofit clients and have wrapped up teaching strategic planning to graduate students at Seattle University, I have been reflecting a lot about how to approach strategic planning in the current moment. To state the obvious, strategic planning has become more challenging in recent years.

Several factors are contributing:

· Increased pace of change: Rapid societal change has been an escalating issue for years. The result is strategic plans with shorter time horizons and encouragement to adopt “strategic thinking”—strategy adjustment through more rapid planning cycles. The difficulty of setting durable strategy increases as the pace of change accelerates.

· Information overload: The volume of information coming at us all in all spheres of our lives is overwhelming. This includes news media, entertainment, research and news related to our field of work, and much more. This inundation and the way it occupies and at times hijacks our attention can compromise leaders’ ability to think clearly and creatively.

· Massive uncertainty: While we have never been able to predict the future, in the past it has felt possible to set up ambitious goals that would take many years to realize. Nonprofit organizations felt more stable and faced fewer existential threats. The uncertain climate makes it difficult to have confidence in a chosen strategic direction.

· Political changes: The Trump administration has taken numerous actions that undermine or outright attack nonprofits. These include massive and abrupt funding cuts in many fields of service, ending Americorps, working to curtail the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and threatening to revoke the nonprofit status of some universities and hospitals. In addition, cuts to public services will increase demand for many types of assistance provided by health and human service nonprofits.

Naming and acknowledging these forces affecting our organizations is helpful. Recognizing that they impact every individual in your organization is crucial as well. Here’s now Edwin Friedman describes the impact of accelerating change on human beings (back in the 1990s!):

“It has been said that the only permanent thing in the world is change. This is only partially so. Change also changes—for the faster. Not only are we entering a millenium of perpetual novelty, but also the future promises a continuous escalation in the rate of change. This change will have a significant effect on the emotional processes of all families and other institutions. It will help to perpetuate a chronically anxious state for those members of our society who are least capable of taking responsibility for their own emotional being and destiny.”

My follow-up posts will discuss how to navigate these and other current challenges and develop appropriate strategy. Because strategic planning is done by humans collectively, I am realizing that much of what I have to say has to do with fostering a culture of care and trust that enables the planning to proceed successfully and include multiple perspectives. In addition, I’ll share some tools for helping people think together and a menu of methods and approaches so you can build an approach that suits your organization’s current situation.

Next time: What mindsets help us navigate these challenges?