Align your Strategic Plan to Your Purpose for Expanding Impacts
Recently, a rapidly expanding non-profit organization approached me to help align their leadership team on their 2024 strategy. They were experiencing a tremendously positive problem–outpacing their ability to manage growth due to new global expansion and increased demand for their services and program offerings.
This responsiveness to emerging needs, coupled with significant expansion, is the perfect catalyst for vision and mission drift. For example, this organization’s core work was originally focused on one country and its needs, and soon it became that country PLUS an additional one. This also created growing needs within the US for future, locally focused missions and fostered new aspirations for a US training and readiness center. Feeling overwhelmed, yet driven to move into the calling, the leadership recognized this as an important opportunity to realign their purpose with an achievable strategy to accurately reflect the organization’s evolving scope. We agreed to schedule multiple design thinking strategy brainstorming sessions with their leadership team.
Guiding Lights: Vision, Mission, Values
While vision, mission, and values provide crucial guideposts, they may not serve your future as carved into stone monoliths. As this non-profit is expanding, revisiting these foundational elements is vital. This team has a great guiding light for their vision, mission, and values, and through validation and a few small tweaks, we were able to update their original core tenants as living, breathing representations of their organization’s identity and aspirations.
An inclusive process for periodically re-evaluating and updating the vision, mission, and values does more than just keep them relevant. It creates robust dialogue, strengthening connection and buy-in at all levels of the organization. When refined through this iterative, collaborative approach, these core principles become universal threads woven through every team, every initiative, and every action. They are a continuous reminder of your nonprofit or company’s essence–its reason for being, its philosophies, its goals, and its plans for getting there. These guideposts empower your entire organization to move forward, in lockstep, toward greater impact. This also opens up the next step of getting things in motion, a strategy tied to the vision, mission, and values for building near and longer-term goals, initiatives, and plans.
Strategy: Putting the Mission to Work
In contrast to creating or recalibrating vision, mission, and values–strategy is focused on relatively short-term action, defining the specific goals and plans to accomplish your mission and move toward your vision over the next 1-5 years. The art and science of focus means that strategy is as much about what you won’t do as it is about what you will do. The strategy focus session with this organization concentrated on what they needed to accomplish in the next year.
After validating and making minor tweaks to the organization’s vision, mission, and values, I kicked off the strategy development process with comprehensive brainstorming sessions on programs, people, and partners. This involves mapping out all current programs, initiatives, personnel, and partner relationships across and external to the organization. Through an interactive exercise, I quickly gained a holistic view of existing operations and identified potential gaps, redundancies, and risks. This initial session helped me quickly understand the current state and resulted in a Program+People one-pager to visualize all programs and resourcing. Putting it all on one page (realistically, it is one big, virtual whiteboard) gives us a single view and shows us the gaps and areas of need. It also helps to provide the team with context for our next step, setting themes and goals for the year.
Planning Goals for Impact
With this foundational understanding, we moved into a goal-setting workshop specifically focused on outlining desired objectives for the upcoming year across all geographic regions. While we had our current People+Programs on our minds, I reminded everyone that objectives brainstorming shouldn’t be limited to what we already know or what we’ve already committed to. (While this can make some a bit nervous–”We already have so much to do!”–I assured them that we would align all that in our next step!) Leveraging ideation techniques and prioritization frameworks, the leadership team brainstormed a list of potential goals, comprehensive of current and new ideas. The lists were then filtered, consolidated, and ranked based on criteria such as impact, feasibility, and alignment with the vision and mission, as well as all the current commitments in flight. Realistically this goal finalization process needs to happen over a few sessions. Getting to a consolidated list can require multiple heated discussions and sometimes some sleep time in between to get to alignment!
In the next step, breaking down each goal was important to understand one and whether it could be accomplished. To get to a realistic needs and impact view, the resulting prioritized goals were plotted onto a strategic roadmap, accounting for interdependencies, sequencing, and resource constraints. This road-mapping process involves breaking down high-level goals into a timeline view with specific initiatives, deliverables, and actionable steps identified. Through this exercise, the team gains visibility into the cumulative commitments and quickly identifies areas where additional support might be needed. It also creates an opportunity to discuss whether initiatives require re-prioritization or rescheduling to subsequent quarters or next year.
Leadership Involvement
Also, it’s important to note that after the previous step of goal-setting, leadership didn’t simply walk away and hand goals to a portfolio or program management team to “just get them done.” This strategic roadmap step still requires leadership to be engaged. Sometimes what we find most interesting is that goals need further definition at this stage to ensure the right breakdown of high-level tasks is understood and aligns to a realistic objective. I like to think of this as the goal discussion-definiton-reality-alignment continuum.
Throughout the strategy development process, I use various facilitation techniques to foster creative thinking, open dialogue, and collaborative decision-making. By taking a structured yet inclusive approach, we empower the organization’s leadership to collectively define a comprehensive, actionable strategy that balances ambition with feasibility, aligns resources with priorities, and establishes clear accountability and timelines for execution.
The Value of Facilitation
My consulting approach is focused on the art of assessment and discovery, including small group interviews and facilitating meetings that produce results. Successful and passionate leaders can be challenging to manage (they are disruptive innovators!), so setting in motion the right goals, activities, and compassionate facilitation makes all the difference.
I’d be delighted to explore how I can help your non-profit or company’s leadership harness their collective wisdom to brainstorm any part of an inspiring vision, mission, values, or strategy to maximize your impact in the years ahead. Let’s make some motion.
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