Recently I’ve been working with an Intentional Community on its strategic planning. It’s part-church, part-social work agency, part-homeless shelter provider with over 100 staff, so it’s an interesting challenge from an O.D. perspective.
At a planning session to deal with some critical short-term issues (facilitated by another consultant), we started talking about the organization’s Vision. I drew the group’s attention to the fact that we have to see beyond “The Vision” and the plans that cascade down from it. On reflection, I think there are a number of “Beyond the Vision” issues that have interesting implications for both the process and the outcome of strategic planning.
1. Identity. Whose Vision is it – the CEO’s? The leadership team’s? The Board’s? The staff’s? The larger church that sponsor’s it? Or is there supposed to be some kind of consensus among the various stake-holders? Obviously some form of involvement by each of these interest groups is advisable but where, when and how?
2. Landscape. The organization’s Vision is that part of the bigger picture of the future needs or opportunities that they’re claiming as their niche. However, there are government agencies and other charities as well as the community being served that have their own versions of that landscape and their parts in it. Without some kind of consensus among the major players, there’s likely to be ill-afforded duplication (in the charitable world of scarce resources), competition and gaps in needs being met.
3. Perspective. In my experience, too often leadership teams develop strategic plans based on their own wish lists. Just as a person with one eye has no depth perception and you can’t get stereo sound from a single (undifferentiated) speaker, strategies developed from a single perspective run the risk of being uni-dimensional and phantasies.
4. Utility. What’s the Vision going to be used for? It’s the “done thing” for organizations these days to have “Vision Statements”. (After all, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”.) But besides hanging them in the lobby and boardroom, how are such statements going to be used? To guide operational plans and procedures? To give employees direction in unclear situations? For performance appraisals? For selling the organization to customers and/or fund-raisers/investors? If form follows function, we should know the intended use of the results of strategic planning before we develop process and participation.
5. Evolution. Strategic plans are never static but in the process of constant change. It’s natural for leaders (especially of action-oriented enterprises), who have invested significant time and effort into developing the organization’s first strategic plan to want to “put it to bed” and forget about it for a while. But a process of changing the plan needs to be built into it or it will soon become irrelevant and obsolete.
6. Learning. One of my great mentors was Karl Weick, who may be famous for his question “How can I know what I mean until I see what I say?” Knowledge is not a substance stored in the attics of our minds: unless it is applied it’s not real knowledge. So Karl emphasized “sense-making”. The sense we make of an experience after the fact may be more important than the objectives and plans we had about it beforehand. We need to question what we’re learning as individuals and as organizations from our strategic planning or visioning by way of process or unanticipated side-effects, for example, for that’s where the pay-off is.
These are just some of the ways in which I feel people engaged in visioning processes need to look beyond the Vision.
I’d be interested in hearing from others with experience in strategic planning (either as clients who own the results or as consultants who facilitate the process) on other aspects of “Seeing beyond the Vision”.
Brian Tucker, Ph.D.,
Principal Consultant, briant@the3magi.com.
The 3 Magi (ODLAW Consultants). www.the3mgi.com
