Know Yourself and Choose the Narrow Door: Strategic Planning

Current political and economic conditions are primed to create confusion and discord, dissipate our impact, and burn our movements out. We can’t slow time or stop the flood of shifting conditions confronting us—but we can pause and seed conditions that create clarity, minimize stress on our teams and relationships, and prioritize our overall energy and focus.

Though you can’t predict the conditions coming at you, you can elevate your understanding and insight to make the wisest choices available to you. Whether you have just a few hours or have more leeway to coordinate with others and explore a more intensive strategic planning process, give yourself the gift of reflection so you can assess yourself and position in order to make the wisest choice you can.

If you have limited time, even just 1-2 hours, you can still glean so much insight that can inform your choices. Here are some activities that can take you less than 2 hours.

• Engage in a SWOT analysis to explore your organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses, then consider external opportunities and threats. 
• Deepen your understanding of your position by completing a Community Relationships Power Map to see who you have access to and where you may wield or seek to grow your influence.
• If you’re looking to defensively down size some of your programs, conduct an Organizational Landscape Analysis to get a sense of who else is working in your field and holds similar or adjacent work.
• If you’re in a crisis and seem to have just a few unsavory pathways available to you, try taking the time to complete a Pre Mortem analysis, in which you forecast the absolute worst case outcomes to see what you can learn from exploring those results. 

Having a solid understanding of your organization’s position poises you to make powerful choices, especially if you need to take dramatic actions. Crisis and resource challenges require an especially thoughtful approach so that you can martial your energy towards necessary innovations or pivots. Lean into the discipline of focus and resist the desire to broaden your scope of activities unless it clearly advances your position or goals. You’ll have many opportunities to overtax yourself—planning can help you position yourself to choose when you do so.

• Expertise: insight and understanding of complex issues, policies, or processes 
• Amplification: communication to a broad and receptive audience 
• Watchdogging: keeping a close or insider view on key issues and processes that could get overlooked 
• Mobilizing: activating supporters and partners to create outcry and pressure  
• Relationships: quality access to relevant groups and leaders 
• Data: accessing or creating reputable information that wouldn’t otherwise exist

Most importantly, knowing yourself means being pragmatic and clear about your limitations. Some of those are harder to see, especially when they are based in the cultural aspects of your organization, such as:

• Coordination: how nimbly can your team communicate with each other and plot out new projects?  
• Decisiveness: is decision making clear and supported in this instance, or will there be push back and confusion?  
• Initiative: is there a strong sense that this is necessary and advances your mission and work? Is your organization’s leadership vital for this matter? Can staff work relatively autonomously or do they require extensive management?

Truly knowing yourself means engaging disappointment. As much as you may want to take something on or make a hard pivot, you frankly may not be the group in this moment to be able to do so.

Choose the Narrow Door

I’ve noticed a trend where strategic plans tend to result in additions to programs and increased complexity of the organization’s work. More isn’t the same as better. In fact, in perilous conditions it is especially important to focus your efforts to keep your team’s capacity laser focused where you can have impact.

Your team’s capacity is your core resource, so guard it by choosing a narrow door. 

Changemakers are often guilty of letting their passions rather than a strong strategy drive their plans. However, passion and commitment won’t magically generate more hours or mental focus for your team. When you’re in a defensive position, you need to protect your team’s time and morale. Every hour spent overworking is an hour taken away from families, personal lives, rest, and overall well-being, so only demand that effort when absolutely necessary.

We also often confuse our passion and commitment for our strengths. Passion and commitment are vital assets, but they can’t stand in for skill, insight, expertise, relationships, nimble coordination, or strong systems. Any pivots or additions that lead you into arenas where you aren’t engaging your strengths will cost you at least twice as much in terms of time and energy. Also, remember that your strengths are not just yours, but assets for the broader movement. Shifting focus from what you do well can create additional stress in the field where other players were counting on you.

As global geo-political conditions evolve and new surprises appear on the horizon, you’ll be frequently called on to develop responsive, opportunistic, visionary strategies to advance your work. Being rooted in a clear self understanding and having been protective of your capacity will poise you to make powerful choices to advance your work.

In solidarity,

– Juliette Lee

Strategic Planning Collection

Developing your organization’s strategic plan can be the most valuable investment of time and energy your group ever makes. This collection guides you through the planning, design, and implementation process for your personalized strategic plan.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis–reviewing your organization’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats–is a strategic planning tool that can be a quick and simple activity with your staff or leadership team. By periodically assessing where you can leverage strengths and opportunities, or where you may need to address weaknesses and threats that could be harming your goals, your organization can focus on the strategies you will need most to achieve your mission.

Right now I’m doing a deep dive on Kobo Abe’s work. I also love hiking and squeezing my pet cats.

A place that brings me joy or meaning is The Potomac River and the northern Oregon coast.

Juliette’s recommended resources: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and Do Less Podcast.