What We Do: Strategic Planning | BE4SI
Part of our series on the services BE4SI provides to nonprofits and social enterprises in Europe, the United States, and beyond.
Strategic planning gets a bad name, and honestly, some of that reputation is deserved. There is an entire consulting industry built around taking a fairly straightforward organizational conversation, covering it in corporate language, stretching it across several months, and eventually producing a beautiful document that nobody uses. The problem is not strategic planning itself. The problem is confusing the document with the work.
At its most useful, strategic planning is a structured process for making decisions about where an organization is going, what it needs to prioritize, what it should stop doing, and how its resources need to follow those choices. That usually means looking honestly at where the organization is now, understanding what has changed around it, identifying the opportunities and constraints ahead, and deciding what matters most over the next several years. A good plan should make the organization’s choices clearer, not make them sound more sophisticated.
There is some disagreement in the field about how much “planning” belongs in strategic planning at all. Some practitioners still favor a conventional three- to five-year plan. Others argue that organizations operating in rapidly changing environments should spend less time producing a fixed plan and more time developing a strategy that can be revisited continuously. The National Council of Nonprofits reflects both positions: it describes strategic planning as a process for identifying strategies and priorities, while also emphasizing that strategy should be revisited and adapted as circumstances change. It even points readers toward the argument that “the strategic plan is dead” in favor of more real-time approaches.
I am not particularly interested in winning that argument. An organization does not need a five-year document simply because somebody has decided that five years sounds strategic. It needs enough clarity to make consequential choices. Sometimes that will result in a formal strategic plan. Sometimes a shorter strategy document or implementation framework will make more sense. The important thing is that the process produces decisions that people can actually use.
That is also why I would not automatically recommend an outside consultant. If your leadership and board already agree about where you are going, can have difficult conversations internally, have the time and capacity to run a rigorous process, and are willing to challenge their own assumptions, you may not need me. Paying an outsider to facilitate conversations you could have yourselves is not inherently a good use of money.
There are situations, however, where an outside perspective changes the quality of the conversation. An established organization can have plenty of knowledge and still find it difficult to use that knowledge collectively. Board members may have different ideas about the future. Staff may be carrying information that never reaches the board. Long-standing programs may continue because nobody wants to be the person who suggests stopping them. Leadership may know that something has to change without having enough distance from the organization to see what that change should be.
That is where I can be useful. I can provide an independent process, ask uncomfortable questions without having an internal stake in the answer, bring different parts of the organization into the same conversation, and help turn a collection of competing priorities into a smaller number of meaningful choices. My role is not to arrive with a strategy that I think your organization should adopt. It is to help you develop one that is grounded in your mission, your circumstances, your resources, and the reality of what you can actually do.
This work generally makes the most sense when an organization is at a crossroads, facing significant change, considering growth, dealing with competing priorities, or realizing that the way it has operated no longer matches the environment around it. It is less useful when the organization is looking for a consultant to make decisions that its own leadership is unwilling to make.
It also requires enough time and organizational readiness to do the work properly. Strategic planning is not something I would recommend trying to squeeze into a couple of meetings because a funder wants a document by Friday. Nor is it a good investment for an organization that has no realistic ability or willingness to act on the decisions it makes.
If you need a highly specialized strategy process, such as a complex financial restructuring, a technical market analysis, or a major organizational transaction, I may not be the right person either. I would rather say that directly and help you identify the kind of expertise you actually need than sell you a version of my own service that does not solve your problem.
For me, the point of strategic planning is fairly simple. You should come out knowing what you are trying to accomplish, what matters most, what you are prepared to say no to, and what needs to happen next. If the finished plan cannot help people make better decisions after I leave, then we have spent too much time talking about planning and not enough time actually doing it.
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