I’m guessing that many of you feel like your pants are on fire. The path ahead is uncertain, and for some organizations, the future is quite scary.
Maybe you are heavily reliant on government funding. Maybe the population you serve is—and has every right to be—terrified. Oh, and the board is on this scary roller coaster and is turning to you for the answers (and you’re not even 100% sure what the questions are).
Last night, I drove home from NYC to my home in NJ, and it was snowing—nearly whiteout conditions. I tried to do two things at the same time: being present in the moment and envisioning the very near future.
Although I was scared, I paid a lot of attention to what was happening at the moment, how slowly I was driving, and how fast others were driving.
At the same time, I focused on what home would feel like, snuggling up with our four pets, having a nice cup of tea, and planning the dinner we were hosting the next evening. I had just two chapters left in a book I was reading and could not wait to finish it.
Focusing on being at home kept me grounded and calm. It gave me something to look forward to.
Those two concurrent activities made me an excellent driver.
Two Points Of View
In these stormy times, you need to focus on where you are headed. And you need clarity and genuine excitement about it.
I encourage you to think about the road ahead—the destination. I urge you to think about the origin story of your organization and to push your board to think about what is possible for your organization down the road.
Set the constraints aside. (I know that’s hard to do.) But I promise you, if you spend time as an organization establishing a future vision, you will be a much more adaptive, confident, and capable leader.
Because I feel so strongly that you need to focus on your future vision, our Nonprofit Leadership Lab is offering a very timely workshop
Notice I have used the “vision”. But not the word planning. There is a difference.
When nonprofits fail at strategic planning, it’s because they focus on the planning part and not the “strategy” part. Strategy is not the same thing as goals. The result is that a nonprofit can end up with a 3-year-strategic plan that isn’t strategic—it’s a list of goals and a work plan.
Are you saying that there is something wrong with that, Joan?
Of course not. Nonprofit organizations need goals and work plans (and not enough of them have them).
What I am saying is that if an organization isn’t clear about the difference and strategizes accordingly, then they might think they have done strategic planning and they haven’t.
Today, I ask you to use different language when it is time to engage in strategy work. And that if you do, instead of the process sucking the life out of you all, it will energize and inspire your staff, your board, and your funders.
A Key Element of Strategy Work
The word is VISION.
How about some examples:
Organization X is Chicago-based and has developed a model for providing shelter for LGBTQ teens that is three-dimensional: offering housing, social services, medical services, and job placement. It is a model that is working based on the percentage of teens leaving the shelter, job placement stats, etc. And its vision? To open five more centers around the country within the next 5 years with this model.
A hospital creates a vision to put pediatricians in 80% of public schools in low-income neighborhoods throughout Detroit. The pediatricians will see kids in their office at the school and focus on annual checkups and vaccinations.
The above are visions. They are bold, ambitious, and aspirational. These visions come from a place of abundance and not scarcity. And with some smart strategies, annual goals, and some key success metrics, they are wildly marketable.
Wouldn’t it be fun to be involved in a process that landed on visions like that? Would you be excited to talk about that to people in your network? Would the thought of these visions fuel you and ignite you to get more folks involved?
It would be for me.
A board-staff process in which you set aside the constraints you live with every day and imagine what is possible. In the world of board governance, they call that generative thinking. This is the kind of thinking board members don’t often get to do and is a main cause of lack of board engagement.
Strategic visioning is essential to organizational sustainability, continued stakeholder involvement, and board engagement.
That said, I want you to reframe one more thing about strategy work…
You will get the best answers only by asking the best questions. Often, those questions are the toughest—the “elephant in the middle of the room” kind of questions.
5 Core Questions For Strategic Visioning
Percolate on what we have found to be the five core questions to strategic visioning:
- What does your organization do better than any other?
- If your organization disappeared tomorrow, what gap would there be, and how would it be filled? Or would it be filled?
- What has been a magical moment in the work you do? What made it so?
- What is the headline you would most like to read about your organization three years from now?
- What would you do with a $10 million unrestricted donation?
Exciting to think about these, right? Take your nose out of what might be a worrisome cash flow statement for just a bit and—yes, you can—craft a vision that fuels the work for the long haul.
Those questions are the tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to go a whole lot deeper on how to lead an outstandingly effective strategic visioning process—and how to get the board to commit to one—the Nonprofit Leadership Lab is offering a one-week workshop (1 hour a day, 5 hours in total) that will provide you with the tools that you need to get started on creating a bold vision that attracts funders and rallies your board and staff. It will be led by the brilliant Lindsay Hoffman who has done this for countless organizations and I cannot recommend her highly enough.
