Creating an EXECUTABLE Strategic Plan
Imagine you just spent 5 months on a strategic plan that involved an organizational assessment, surveying stakeholders, a hard won day-long retreat with board and staff, and many hours spent in creating an action plan. You breathe a sigh of relief that you can get back to dealing with the day-to-day firefight. What you, or perhaps it’s your board, may not realize is that you just finished the easy part!
Now you actually need to execute the plan you created. Strategic Planning has become more of a science over the years with a consistent process for creating the plans that both nonprofits and for profits can follow. But the execution of these plans is where the art, and hard work, comes into play.
1. Take a Stakeholder Centered Approach. To ensure buy-in, and increase the chance of successfully executing, you must involve stakeholders in the creation of the plan. A stakeholder-centered approach means you ask for advice, listen carefully, thank the stakeholders who participate, and incorporate as much of the advice as you can into your plans. Then, when the plan is completed, make sure that every stakeholder – and beyond, has access to an easy to read, prominently displayed, high quality visual map of the plan.
One of my favorite resources for executing your plan is Covey’s The 4 Disciplines of Execution. In this book, Covey makes the point that in order for plan to be executable it should take into account the 4 things outlined below. I’ve customized this a bit to reflect my experiences with nonprofit organizations.
2. Limit Goals to no more than 3. Your Plan should focus on the top 1-3 Wildly Important Goals (WIG). A WIG is a Goal that if you fail to achieve, nothing else will matter. In my experience, limiting it to only 3 wildly important goals is particularly difficult for nonprofits. Perhaps this is because the idea of only a few goal feels like slacking to the boards, and leaders, who create the plan. Against my advice, many of the plans that I am asked to work on, end up with 5-8 broad goal areas each with 4-8 sub-goals. Covey’s book outlines these WIG Rules:
a. No more than 1-3 WIGs per person/team/organization at a time
b. Sub WIGs must ensure the success of the Parent-WIGs
c. A clear Finish Line - A WIG must have a measurable gap (From X to Y by When)
3. Understand and Act on your Key Measures. It is important to distinguish between lag measures (the target result) and lead measures (things that affect your ability to hit the target – sometimes called drivers). For example, if I am trying to lose weight, the key target might be to lose 10 pounds. This is a lag measure – it doesn’t tell me what to do – it just tells me how well I did. The lead measure, the real drivers of weight loss, might be how many hours of exercise I got this week, or how many calories I ate today. Another example: a nonprofit has a strategic planning goal of having 6 months of financial reserves. The amount of the reserve is the lag measure. In this example, the leading measures that drive the reserves might be the number of new members, or the hits on a social media page. I suggest that in this instance, the important discussions during planning are “Is 6 months of reserves a realistic target?” and, “What strategies will be used to increase the reserve – or what drives our ability to raise/put money in the reserve account?”
The idea here is that Lagging Indicators, without Leading Indicators, tell you nothing about how the outcomes will be achieved, nor can you have any early warnings about being on/off track to achieve your strategic goals. Leading Indicators should enable you to take pre-emptive actions to improve your chances of achieving strategic goals. Similarly, Leading Indicators, without Lagging Indicators, may enable you to focus on short-term performance, but you will not be able to confirm that broader organizational outcomes are being achieved.
4. Create and frequently use a Compelling Score Board. Covey says that once you have your important goals and key measures you need to create a scorecard or dashboard that is:
a. Simple
b. Is highly visible to the Players (Board, Staff and other Stakeholders)
c. Has the right Lead and Lag measures
d. Tells you immediately if you are winning or losing
A highly visible one page graphic of your strategic plan should include a clear and compelling dashboard of measures.
5. Create A Cadence Of Accountability. Covey says that regular meetings must be held to review the scoreboard and reinforce the WIGs. For nonprofits, my advice is that the WIGs and accompanying scoreboard should become the agenda for every Board Meeting and most Staff meetings.
Regular Meeting Rules:
a. Report on the commitments/actions we agreed to take last week (for Boards this might
be month or quarter)
b. Review and Update the Scoreboard. Did we make progress? What trends are we seeing?
c. Make commitments for next week. Answer the question: “What are the 2-3 most important things
I/we can do this week/month/quarter to impact the scoreboard?”
Now you actually need to execute the plan you created. Strategic Planning has become more of a science over the years with a consistent process for creating the plans that both nonprofits and for profits can follow. But the execution of these plans is where the art, and hard work, comes into play.
1. Take a Stakeholder Centered Approach. To ensure buy-in, and increase the chance of successfully executing, you must involve stakeholders in the creation of the plan. A stakeholder-centered approach means you ask for advice, listen carefully, thank the stakeholders who participate, and incorporate as much of the advice as you can into your plans. Then, when the plan is completed, make sure that every stakeholder – and beyond, has access to an easy to read, prominently displayed, high quality visual map of the plan.
One of my favorite resources for executing your plan is Covey’s The 4 Disciplines of Execution. In this book, Covey makes the point that in order for plan to be executable it should take into account the 4 things outlined below. I’ve customized this a bit to reflect my experiences with nonprofit organizations.
2. Limit Goals to no more than 3. Your Plan should focus on the top 1-3 Wildly Important Goals (WIG). A WIG is a Goal that if you fail to achieve, nothing else will matter. In my experience, limiting it to only 3 wildly important goals is particularly difficult for nonprofits. Perhaps this is because the idea of only a few goal feels like slacking to the boards, and leaders, who create the plan. Against my advice, many of the plans that I am asked to work on, end up with 5-8 broad goal areas each with 4-8 sub-goals. Covey’s book outlines these WIG Rules:
a. No more than 1-3 WIGs per person/team/organization at a time
b. Sub WIGs must ensure the success of the Parent-WIGs
c. A clear Finish Line - A WIG must have a measurable gap (From X to Y by When)
3. Understand and Act on your Key Measures. It is important to distinguish between lag measures (the target result) and lead measures (things that affect your ability to hit the target – sometimes called drivers). For example, if I am trying to lose weight, the key target might be to lose 10 pounds. This is a lag measure – it doesn’t tell me what to do – it just tells me how well I did. The lead measure, the real drivers of weight loss, might be how many hours of exercise I got this week, or how many calories I ate today. Another example: a nonprofit has a strategic planning goal of having 6 months of financial reserves. The amount of the reserve is the lag measure. In this example, the leading measures that drive the reserves might be the number of new members, or the hits on a social media page. I suggest that in this instance, the important discussions during planning are “Is 6 months of reserves a realistic target?” and, “What strategies will be used to increase the reserve – or what drives our ability to raise/put money in the reserve account?”
The idea here is that Lagging Indicators, without Leading Indicators, tell you nothing about how the outcomes will be achieved, nor can you have any early warnings about being on/off track to achieve your strategic goals. Leading Indicators should enable you to take pre-emptive actions to improve your chances of achieving strategic goals. Similarly, Leading Indicators, without Lagging Indicators, may enable you to focus on short-term performance, but you will not be able to confirm that broader organizational outcomes are being achieved.
4. Create and frequently use a Compelling Score Board. Covey says that once you have your important goals and key measures you need to create a scorecard or dashboard that is:
a. Simple
b. Is highly visible to the Players (Board, Staff and other Stakeholders)
c. Has the right Lead and Lag measures
d. Tells you immediately if you are winning or losing
A highly visible one page graphic of your strategic plan should include a clear and compelling dashboard of measures.
5. Create A Cadence Of Accountability. Covey says that regular meetings must be held to review the scoreboard and reinforce the WIGs. For nonprofits, my advice is that the WIGs and accompanying scoreboard should become the agenda for every Board Meeting and most Staff meetings.
Regular Meeting Rules:
a. Report on the commitments/actions we agreed to take last week (for Boards this might
be month or quarter)
b. Review and Update the Scoreboard. Did we make progress? What trends are we seeing?
c. Make commitments for next week. Answer the question: “What are the 2-3 most important things
I/we can do this week/month/quarter to impact the scoreboard?”