Essential 1: Operating Strategic Plan - Why do it and an Overview of Popular Approaches

This post is about building and managing your organization to a strategy. This is very different from the exercise of building and using a four or five year strategic plan, often and most usually, as something to fundraise against. That is good and useful as a fundraising tool to lock in your future state at one moment in time, and provide clarity for funders on what “plan” they’re financing. But it’s less useful to actually manage your organization day to day; see SSIR article ​​“The Strategic Plan Is Dead. Long Live Strategy.”

This is different. This is about how you lead your team against strategy on an ongoing basis, to ensure alignment, clarity, and that we have the very best chance to collaborate effectively. It’s your map to ensure everyone gets to the same end destination and takes the same path to get there. Without this, it’s nearly impossible to have a variety of teams, job scopes, and individuals to operate well together.

If you read enough management books and look at enough strategy frameworks, you’ll see that there really is one suggested tool to do this: a short 2-3 page document that you update regularly. Keeping a document like this to 2-3 pages is hard. As an organization, sometimes we struggle to keep it within this structure, but we continue to strive for this ideal, as the output creates a degree of focus and clarity necessary to get big things done. An anchor document like this, that serves a compass of truth makes sure that no one on your team gets lost along the way.  

This way, your latest view of what your “path forward” looks like is up to date and you can share it with everyone on your team, so no one gets lost. The impact of having team members get lost is not just a bad experience for them, but a missed opportunity for impact as a collective. 

The beautiful thing about this approach is that the framework is easily accessible to all of us. We don’t need to recreate the wheel.

Here are three of the top frameworks for this:

1. The Advantage. This is the most mainstream one and the one we use at Educate!. You can read the book, which I’d recommend, but the overall approach is summarized here, and the template for your short strategy document is here.
   
   In this framework, you answer six questions:

1. Why do we exist - our purpose/mission (see more on mission statements)

2. How do we behave - what’s our culture? This is really critical. I think the Advantage also has the best, clearest framework I’ve come across for how to define your culture and what is a real cultural tenet for your organization. 

3. What do we do 

4. How will we succeed - these are the 3-5 core strategic anchors to decision making. The book also has a good framework for how to define these. At Educate!, we have 5: Impact, Scale, Learning, Sustainable Payer and Systems Change. 

5. What is Most Important, Right Now - these are your top priorities. We don’t use the framework as intended but instead place our org wide annual goals here.

6. Who Must do What - this would be the key to your org design and org chart.
   

2. Traction. This is a book that was suggested to me early on in my Educate! days. I highly recommend it. It provides a top to bottom framework for how to manage an organization, from making your strategy down to day-to-day execution. We don’t use all of it anymore, but we did at one point, and it literally tells you what to do to manage an organization from the highest level to the day to day meeting management. I’ve never come across a book or resource this all encompassing. 
   
   You can see the full Traction approach here. Under vision, you’ll see the questions they think are most important. They also provide various other resources.
   
   At Educate, we use a combo of The Advantage questions, along with some Traction ones in our strategy document. 
   
   

3. Jeff Weiner, the CEO who scaled LinkedIn, also has written and spoke a lot about his approach to this question. He has a couple video learning series about it, here and here. 

The frameworks above vary slightly; and truthfully, the specifics of the framework matter the least.  What matters the most  is that you first sit down with your core leaders and answer the questions that are most relevant for you in real, honest ways. This is foundational for team cohesion and alignment. 

Once you’ve done that, you can share it with your entire organization and make it the anchor of all decisions and strategy. The beauty of this type of document is that it also serves as a way for individual team members to make decisions about how to prioritize their time and their work; it provides a tool that creates agency for your team. When capable team members feel a sense of agency, that also creates increased engagement in the work. It benefits the organization and our people on many levels. 

After you share this document across the organization, contextualize how to use it and why it’s important, then you shift into maintenance mode - you check-in with this document regularly and update it as needed. This ensures that it always holds its value as a place of current truth. Team members know they can rely on it for answers. For us, we always want it to be up to date for the next 3 years, from any moment in time. Every year, we shift the plan out another year. 

In the early days, we would check into this every 3 months, updating small details as necessary. Today we check into it every 6 months and do a bigger update annually. You’d be surprised how the document and what’s central to your strategy continues to evolve, and how the document itself becomes a place of clarity and alignment.

If you’re able to do this AND use it regularly with your entire organization, you’ll ensure you always have a clear “map” for where you’re going. That’s the trick to moving a group of people in the same direction. It won’t be perfect - it won’t always be used, you’ll forget, etc… - but trying to anchor in this core 1-3 page strategy document will go a long way. 

Want to build one? Go to: Essential: Operating Strategic Plan - Step by Step Playbook and Video Overview. Or go directly to the step by step playbook here.