For many years, our funders required us to have strategic plans; not so we could follow them not measure the effectiveness of what we did, but because we needed them!
Times have changed and the next time you hear a customer ask for your strategic plan before they decide to use your service, will be first time.
Strategy is about understanding the environment within which you operate and making choices about what you will do. Planning is about making choices about how to use the resources you have and the actions you will take to achieve the choices made in your strategy. It is simple different and often over-complicated but too often we spend time on the planning part, not the thinking part.
In these times of change, opportunities are ever-present. Having a plan is important but often closes your mind and eyes to other opportunities; things you haven’t considered before (often as you didn’t have the capacity, capability or resources). This is often the failing of many plans that they only focus on what you know and what you have. Opportunities by design stem from the things you don’t know and don’t have.
Board and CEO’s are often and correctly focused on measuring the success of their strategy and do so through KPIs, KRAs etc. These are both meaningful and relevant but they only tell you about how well you have implemented your plan. They don’t tell you if your strategy is correct. In these times, that is as, if not more critical.
We offer simple techniques, based on our years of experience in the social sector, to enable you to now only assess the usefulness of your strategy but also to determine its effectiveness. Don’t wait until it is too late and you find that your well-executed plan did not lead you to having the future you desired.
In the end printing off your strategic plan or posting it up on your website allows you to feel like you have completed yet another task. It is not enough. Let us work with you to build your strategic thinking and capability.