Time to Refresh Your Strategic Plan
A successful strategic plan provides a roadmap for how the mission and vision will come to life and can be utilized throughout the year. At the heart of a more holistic strategic plan, in addition to meeting the needs of leadership and the company, the plan should center on human/employee wellbeing and include ways to produce that over the tenure of the strategic plan.
A Strategic Plan refresh is important for a few reasons; first and foremost, to bring our goals back to the front of our minds. Especially in turbulent and challenging times, it can feel like we are putting out fires and reacting to what’s happening to us and around us. A strong and refreshed strategic plan can help a group feel held and supported, knowing the work we are doing is aligned, we’re responding from a place of integrity and aligned with our values while working towards the goals we’ve created.
There are also different types of strategic plan refreshes:
Minor adjustments
Mid-cycle reviews
Major revisions
Scenario planning (for when we know a few ways it could go)
Agile strategic planning (for rapid adaptation)
What I’m offering in this blog post is a ground-up approach you can use no matter what type of refresh you’re doing. These are some of promising practices for building inclusion into that process.
Here are a few starting questions to help you figure out the refresh your plan might need.
Current state:
Assess where you’re at now (compared to when this plan was written). Include the mission and vision of the organization, any minor or major changes that have happened within the organization and ways the plan may be updated due to those changes.
What type of employee feedback was used to create the plan and how many new staff members have been added since the strategic plan was created? How were new staff taught about the strategic plan? Have any of their ideas or feedback been integrated into the plan?
What’s going on in your field/market? Identify a few organizations or companies that are doing really well and set up a time to build relationships to get to know folks who are doing this work in aligned ways and learn ways your organization can set its sights on improving.
Goals:
Which goals in the strategic plan are achievable given current resources and within the timeframe outlined?
Which goals are ambitious but worth your team working towards them while knowing those goals may be out of reach?
What stakeholders were present to create these goals? If a small, elite group defined these goals, consider thinking more broadly and centering the voices of those within your organization that go beyond the most powerful.
Strategize
What are your groups/teams/divisions/organizations strategic objectives aka identifyign the key areas that will be the focus of supporting your orgnaization in meeting its mission and vision?
How do all the departments or teams play into these objectives?
Create a clear priorities map. There are lots of ways to do this! I like these two examples from Todoist, which is an iteration of the Eisenhower Matrix, and the ABCDE method Active Collab writes about). My personal favorite is making sure that all the priorities are SMART–specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
What adjustments do you need to make to align resources and investments to reflect the strategic priorities?
Check-in, Measure, Adapt
How will you know if these objectives are successful?
What areas can be measured through metrics?
What areas can be measured through feedback?
What built-in check-ins are on the calendar to touch base about how the plan is going?
How will successes be celebrated?
How will setbacks be addressed and cared for?
Looking for additional inclusive practices as you develop your strategic plan? Here are a few ideas:
Work with departments and teams to ensure they are on board with what defining and tracking success looks like
Ensure that success includes acknowledging that there are many steps towards larger goals, how will these be celebrated?
Brainstorm ways to measure success beyond surveys
Include a strengths-based approach, which likely means providing professional development so that the staff share the language and knowledge of what this looks like for each team and throughout the organization
Include professional development for any new systems or ways of working that are going to be implemented
Include what the people working within the group/organization will need to sustain themselves/Include how human well-being is centered in the work of the strategic plan
The key to success in a more inclusive strategic plan is to ensure more voices are included in the process, especially voices that have been underrepresented in the past. Consider what skills and knowledge staff need to implement the changes and what professional development will be needed to help people move forward with the outlined goals.
