With the end of the year approaching, I’ve been thinking about strategic planning themes — What are they? How could I identify them? How might they evolve year-to-year? Understanding themes and trends offers numerous benefits to you as a leader since they can help inform decisions and strategies.
Here’s what I discovered about strategic planning themes in reviewing plans from customers over the last 3 years.
If you’re like most nonprofit leaders, figuring out how to keep your organization financially stable is perhaps your biggest pain point.
Individual donors, foundations, and granting agencies will often donate to your organization because their heart connects to your mission—helping children, pursuing social justice, teaching the arts, etc. However, for funders to support you many times, you have to appeal to their logical senses.
One of my favorite articles that I’ve shared with our customers over the years is Dan and Chip Heath’s piece in Fast Company called “Analysis of Paralysis.”
The two basic points of their article are:
Too many choices can paralyze you, and
Simplicity helps you take action.
A few days ago I had a conversation with a customer who needed some help figuring out how to best lead her team through the pandemic. Like so many of those that I’ve been talking with, she has a team that is worried about several things: their funding, the needs of those that they serve, and if they’ll make it to the other side of the crisis.
I had the pleasure of seeing Mavis Staples, an American rhythm and blues singer, at the 15th Nelsonville Music Festival last weekend. Mavis, who will celebrate her 80th birthday next month, still performs over 200 shows a year. While watching her belting out vocal lines and performing for the crowd, I was reminded of a critical concept in strategic planning.
Uh, what? Now, try reading the title of this article backwards, starting from the far right and reading to the left. It likely took you a few seconds to do that, going letter-by-letter to make the title out: "Riding a Backwards Bicycle".
You know, you've spent your whole life paving pathways in your brain to read from left-to-right. It's a well-ingrained habit that is difficult to change.
What about another ingrained habit, like riding a bike. What if a bike was set up "backwards" in some way? Could you ride it?
Take a few minutes to watch this entertaining video to learn more. You'll find the time well-spent and may even want to share it with your friends.
So what does this all of this have to do with strategic planning, leadership, management, and running a nonprofit? A ton. Essentially, building your organization's capacity is often about overwriting old habits with new ones. Just like learning to ride a different type of bike.
What are some of those old habits that you might like to change? Try these:
Writing strategic plans but not implementing them.
Waiting to the last minute to complete grants.
Doing more work in the evenings and weekends than you'd like.
Viewing funders as people that support you (versus people that you support too).
Providing the executive director with sporadic performance reviews.
Doing everything yourself and not delegating very effectively.
You may not view these as habits, but they are. They're individual and organizational habits. And, like the guy in the video, with some insights and a committed practice, you can change them.
Which brings me to an excellent resource for you if you'd like to learn more about changing habits: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and In Business by Charles Duhigg. I read this book last year and have meaning to write about it ever since. It's fascinating. Duhigg provides a fantastic overview of how habits form and how you can change them. So, if you're serious about making changes in your life or organization, the concepts in this book are gold. The ideas will even help you ride a backwards bicycle if you'd like...
Charles Duhig - The Power of Habit
LG Cosmos flip phone
(Note: I wrote this back in early 2016 (despite the 2019 date above). Well, in 2017 I ended up migrating to an iPhone. It just became super obvious that the dumbphone was holding me back from providing my team and customers with the support they deserved. The shift was one of necessity to serve better.)
In the high-tech San Francisco area where I live, I'm a freak. You see, I'm one of the few that choose to use a dumbphone instead of a smartphone. A picture of my humble little LG Cosmos flip phone is above. It's decidedly not very cool. It just makes phone calls, texts, and takes horrible 1.3-megapixel photos. And I couldn't be happier.
I've made that choice not because I'm fearful of technology. I've designed and built electric cars. I've produced websites, built awesome spreadsheets, and co-founded a strategic planning company that has built a strategic planning software platform. I'm comfortable with technology.
And, I don’t have anything against smartphones. A while back I tried out both the iPhone and a Droid for a few weeks. They were incredible in the millions of things they could do. But that's just it. I don't need my phone to do a million things. I just need it to make phone calls and send texts. (I use my laptop to send emails and conduct all of my other internet-based business.) So after a few weeks, I returned the amazing smartphones and went back to my dumb phone. I realized that, when compared to the iPhone/Droid, my flip phone helped me to:
Disconnect and keep my life a little simpler.
Maintain better control of my time.
Focus on those around me rather than get distracted by the cool apps on the phone.
Basically, the smartphones weren't the best fit for me. It turns out that I'm not alone in my perspective. Check out these articles that convey similar sentiments:
So, that's my phone story. I share it with you with the intention to help you think a little bit about your phone choices. Whatever type of phone you use, I hope it is meeting your needs. If you're like me, sometimes I get sucked into the cool gadgets before I realize what's going on. Perhaps this article will help you pause for a moment and consider your options. You know, I'll probably have to get a smartphone at some point. Or at least a smarter phone than the one I have now. But in the meantime, I'm happy being a freak.
Several years ago I had a part-time job as the executive director of a small nonprofit. It was a great job in many ways. I loved our mission, the people we served, and the challenges we faced. Plus, at the time the job was a perfect complement to my other consulting work.
However, I had one main problem with the job: the board chair (also the founder) and I had dramatically different visions for the organization. He wanted us to be a somewhat regional program that used our nonprofit status primarily to qualify for funds. I, however, wanted us to become a strong nonprofit organization with a larger and larger national reach.
A few years ago I read a book by Stephen M.R. Covey called The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything. Covey's insights gave me some practical ideas to better discuss the concept of organizational trust with my clients. One of my takeaways was simply a way to describe how you created trust. He said that you built trust by demonstrating your competence (delivering on-time results, utilizing simple processes, etc.) and character (living your values, treating others with respect, etc.) Viewed differently, if trust were a tree, character would be the roots that kept you grounded and competence would be the trunk and branches evident to all.
Conversely, of course, you destroy trust when displaying poor character or incompetence. Perhaps most helpful was a simple and powerful formula he shared to describe the impact of trust. He said that when trust is high, speed increases, and costs decrease. The inverse is also true: when trust is low, speed decreases, and costs increase. Stating this as an equation: A good application of this formula is what happened to our experience in airports after 9/11. As a result of decreased trust, it took longer to get through the terminal and cost more due to the increased security. Can you think of ways that you can apply this formula to your personal and professional relationships?
