Cleaning out my files the other day, I stumbled on those tips and realized just how influential they have been to my work in  strategic planning.

Here’s what Mason shared in the article:

1. Know exactly what you want to solve
2. Research deeply
3. Call in help
4. Practice problem-solving
5. Sketch it out
6. Churn
7. Go see a movie
8. Keep your space clear
9. Know when to walk away

In an interview for the book Diamond Power: Gems of Wisdom from America’s Greatest Marketers, Mason says

“It’s really not that complicated.  The creative process is trying really hard to solve a problem.”

Isn’t that the essence of strategic planning?

While our missions aren’t necessarily problems, the goal of getting from where we are today to realizing our mission can be seen as a big puzzle that we are trying to solve. (Puzzle = problem).  Whether we’re ending homelessness, or ensuring our kids graduate from school ready for success in life, or challenging and inspiring others through art – we are all seeking the best path to achieve our mission.

Finding the best path is what strategic planning is all about.

Start strategic planning by getting all of those big questions out in the open. What’s holding you back from reaching your vision?

Research is essential in any strategic planning process, and one that I find is too often neglected. How can you really understand the community need and your role in it without data? How do you know what might work if you don’t know what’s been tried before?

But don’t stop with “book learning” (or Google). Go ask others for their advice. Think of 25 people to talk to who know or should know something relevant to your mission. Go talk with them. You’ll learn a lot by listening (and they’ll learn something about you as well.)

Write down everything you are learning as you go. What might start as disconnected conversations begins to make sense when you articulate your theory of change and your logic model;  that is, the why and how of the path from the problem to the vision. (Mason says: “Invention is logic.”)

Make sure you brainstorm.  Keep thinking about what will actually create the breakthrough you are looking for –even if it seems like the most impossible idea. Then imagine how to get there.

I advise never trying to craft an entire strategic plan in a one day retreat. Like Mason, I’m convinced there has to be time for ideas to gel and reflection between planning sessions. And opening the door to inspiration from unexpected places.

As Mason suggests in Tip 9, sometimes there are too many other issues that need to be addressed first before you jump into strategic planning (like lack of commitment to really being strategic among staff or board leadership). So know when the time is right.

P.S. Apparently Stan Mason was locked in the principal’s office because he colored outside the lines in third grade. I remember practically falling off my chair when one of my son’s elementary school teachers told me that “following directions was the most important lesson for job success” after he used colored markers rather than crayons in a school assignment.  “What lost world are you preparing him for” I remember thinking at the time?

So that’s my approach to strategic planning.  What’s yours?

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Related readings:

Discovering great ideas in new places

Questions to jump start your SWOT

Increase innovation: mandate three day workweeks

These are the five elements that make up strategic thinking as described by Dr. Jeanne M. Liedtka, a faculty member at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business and former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation.

I’ve never met Dr. Liedtka, but I’m madly in love with her elements of strategic thinking.

One of the frustrations I’ve had with most of the definitions of strategic planning is that rarely is the concept “strategic” or “strategic thinking” well-defined. (I feel the same way about the use of the term “policies” which is why I’m drawn to the framework for policy creation as espoused by policygovernance guru John Carver)

In many definitions, strategic planning is defined as a process that employs “strategic thinking” or “strategies.” I guess the definers believe everyone inherently knows strategy when they see it. If only that were so.

I learned a great word in school many years ago: “tautology.” No it’s not a fish (that’s tautog).

A tautology is an explanation that uses the same or similar terms to explain what it means, like calling strategic planning a planning process that creates strategies.

Apparently Dr. Liedtka was also frustrated by these definitions, so she wrote an article* to explain what it meant to think strategically.

So what are these five essential elements of strategic thinking that she identified?

1. Intent focused

Dr. Liedtka says: “Strategic intent provides the focus that allows individuals within an organization to marshal and leverage their energy, to focus attention, to resist distraction, and to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal.”

This concept implies both having an overarching goal or direction (you might call that your vision) and making that goal a conscious focus or, in this wonderful definition for intent I found online “the act of turning your mind toward” an outcome or object.

In my approach to our sector, this intent is the change that we want to see in the world. A change that we are completely passionate about, that channels our every action for the future.

2. A systems perspective

Think ecosystem.

An exercise I do with my graduate students that you can try for your organization is to describe all of the various systems in which you exist. Their answers start with the classroom and move beyond to the higher education system, to legal, natural, family, or body systems, to global economic and financial systems — and they operate in all of them.

So does your organization. So, to get good at strategic thinking, you need to try to understand the way your world works and how that affects you. Because you can’t really know everything, you’ll have to take your best shot at gathering the right information and prioritizing the components of systems that are most likely to affect the way you work now and into the future.

It really does help though to be curious about just about everything.

While you might be an expert in interpreting the particular “business ecosystem’  in which you operate, how well do you understand what is happening culturally or politically that might also influence your future?

Read a lot. Explore new things. Talk to people outside your organization and outside your discipline as well as the people who know your system the best.

3. Thinking in Time

Liedtka suggests strategic thinkers ask this question:

“Having seen the future that we want to create, what must we keep from our past, lose from that past and create in the present to get there?”

When you think strategically, you are always connecting the past to the present to the future. You learn from the past and use that learning to make predictions. You look at the present to assess the gap between where you are now and where you want to end up.

While your focus is always on the future, you can only act in the present.

This concept always makes me think of H.G. Wells The Time Machine.

4. Intelligent Opportunism

Remember the old exercise the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.)

Well, SWOT thinking never ends for strategic thinkers. Strategic thinkers are able to spot and react to great new opportunities as they arise. They understand that the world is dynamic and they are open to change to reach their vision.

Intelligent opportunism also implies that you dig deep into your organization to hear from many perspectives. Ideas and knowledge are valuable wherever they exist — but you’ll need to look and listen to benefit from them.

5. Hypothesis driven

Finally, Dr. Liedtka says, “strategic thinking mirrors the scientific method… it is both creative and critical in nature.”

As strategic thinkers, we create hypothesis, those questions that start “What if…?”  or “If… then?” — questions that enable us to imagine multiple scenarios, analyze them as best we can based on the knowledge we’ve accumulated and then test the best hypotheses (experiment). As we act, we learn from our experience to create new hypothesis for future action.

Thus, strategic thinking dissected and explained.

Thank you, Jeanne M. Liedtka, for your article and an extraordinary framework to articulate what strategic thinking is all about.

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* The article is “Strategic Thinking: Can it be Taught.” You’ll find it in the Feb 1998 edition of the journal Long Range Planning (another interesting journal I’ve just discovered).

I’d also like to recommend a wonderful short paper from 1999 called Strategic Thinking: A Discussion Paper. It was prepared by Lawrence Eton for the Public Service Commission of Canada and is readily available online. It summarizes much of what is in the original article and also relates strategic thinking to strategic planning.

The workshop will focus on how this climate presents unique opportunities for this sector to become more intentional about strengthening the nonprofit and philanthropic infrastructure.

As a few of the grantmakers have been overly focused on mergers as the solution in these tough economic times, the discussion will highlight other opportunities shy of merger for collaboration and consolidation of management services.

Last Thursday I was chatting with a consultant colleague whom I’ve recruited to be on the panel.  She was recounting her own work facilitating mergers and how these experiences have left her convinced that mergers are often not worth the time and expense that goes into them. She was pointing out that mergers usually require costly consultation and legal services and amazing amounts of time and energy from the staff and board. Rarely did they result in more income to the new entity. While eliminating program and operational redundancies were positive outcomes of some mergers, there are other methods of achieving those same results.

I was agreeing with her that different types of consolidations — e.g.  parent/ subsidiary arrangements or the development of management service organizations — offered more opportunities for nonprofits to increase time and energy devoted to mission while improving the quality of financial and administrative services, and maybe even reducing costs  (or at the very least, decreasing inefficient or ineffective deployment of skills to task). We’ve both been participating in efforts here in RI and elsewhere to get the word out to nonprofits of all sizes of the other options worth exploring.

Barely do I hang up the phone when another colleague forwards me a copy of David LaPiana’s latest article, Merging Wisely, published in Stanford Social Innovation Review.  In the article LaPiana makes the case that funders shouldn’t necessarily be putting pressure on nonprofits to merge. Other forms of partnerships, including parent/subsidiary integration, management services organizations, joint ventures, might be much more effective.

I’ve personally been asking many of my strategic planning clients to at least imagine the possibilities these partnerships might present. I think you’ll find the article worth reading.

When CDCs work well, they demonstrate what is right with this sector. They are embedded in community, asking questions, responding to need, engaging residents. They exemplify the word partnership, making change happen through a complicated set of relationships and interactions with national powerhouses like Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and NeighborWorks(R) America, local for-profit lenders, public planning departments, sister organizations, community members, local public servants like the police, and more.

I’m in awe of their knowledge, commitment and ability to make big change happen.

I’m singing the praises of CDCs coming off five hours yesterday facilitating a strategic planning retreat with the Board and staff of Community Works Rhode Island, an affiliate of  NeighborWorks America.

Staff and board committees have been meeting and thinking over the last few months and this was an opportunity to come together and synthesize the work that has been done to date. For me, it is always a pleasure to work with caring, really smart, fun and engaged boards and staff, so thank you.

And WOW for their commitment — meeting together on a Friday afternoon till 8:00 in the evening. (I don’t know about you, but I do my best to avoid work on Friday nights).

There are a still a few more details before the plan is finished, but this organization already knows how to think and act strategically which is what ultimately matters.

Did I mention Community Work’s commitment to change that transforms communities? That word, transform, is in their mission statement and they take it seriously.

What’s as impressive is that this organization is the child of a recent merger between the Elmwood Foundation and Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services. Based in the Elmwood neighborhood of Providence, both CDCs have worked in Providence’s Southside for more than 30 years, creating close to 1,000 units of affordable housing and investing more than $60 million in the community. Kudos once again to my friend and colleague MJ Kaplan of Kaplan Consulting LLC for guiding these groups through the merger and for lining up a really stellar board.

Next for me, typing up those flip charts (not my favorite task) and merging all the details on paper into a written framework that reflects all the smart and truly strategic thinking that went on last night. Then guiding this phase of planning to its conclusion.

Mr. Nowak’s talk focused on the role of arts and culture in redefining and revitalizing cities. As part of its effort to capitalize on this enormous local asset by rebranding as “The Creative Capital”, Providence has recently launched a community planning effort called “Creative Providence: A Cultural Plan for the Creative Sector.”

Throughout his talk, Mr. Nowak wove an exciting and hopeful thread for a bold reimagining even as we experience the grim unraveling of an economic tapestry based on debt.

Using Philadelphia as an example (he hadn’t toured Providence yet) Mr. Nowak offered a number of illuminating examples of how artists and creative sector entrepreneurs, using an appreciative approach,  “uncover, express and repurpose assets.” Two examples included resuing heavy industrial mill buildings for creative industrial workspace or reclaiming vacant lots for a sculpture park that helped redefine neighborhood. The question posed to the room was how that ability of artists to see can be harnessed to truly reinvent cities that are searching for new identities and economic models.

In thinking about the many interesting concepts presented last night, I woke up this morning thinking again that this third sector of ours needs to stop apologizing for the way it works and stop idealizing some fictitious “smarter than us” for-profit business and leadership model. Instead, we need to reclaim and boldly proclaim our unique way of seeing based on quality of life, a belief in public service and a philanthropic compass to guide our action. It’s time to take the high ground for the what, the why and the how of the work we do.

“The idea that no person or organization is a stand-alone entity seems rather obvious. However, the extent to which a person is connected in a system can be much greater than one thinks. This was definitely one of the most important things I learned early on in this course. It is now something that I think about often…”

— Reina

As a teacher, it is always incredibly rewarding to hear back from a student  that they have found meaning and value in your courses. I always learn from my students — which is why I enjoy teaching (despite all those papers I have to review).

Poet John Donne may have coined the words “No man is an island, entire of itself” more than a half millenium ago, but I interact with too many nonprofit board members who haven’t discovered the power of systems thinking that Reina experienced in just a few weeks.

Each of us, both individually and within organizations are parts of larger systems – think “ecosysem” – that span both the natural systems which supply our water, air and food and also the global web of people, organizational, family and business systems.

How can you apply systems thinking to your organization?

You can start by becoming incredibly curious about the world around you. Here are a few questions to get you started:

• What outside forces affect the people we serve? How?

• What outside forces influence our organizational effectiveness?

• What is happening to those spheres to which we are intricately connected and how would/could that affect the way we work now and in the future?

• What about inside our organization? What is happening here? How do all the parts connect?

• What are the assumptions or “mental models” we carry in our heads? Are they shared throughout our organization? What would we do differently if we saw things from a different perspective?

You can use free or low cost software to make “mind maps” that help you trace how these systems work. You can find a list on Wikipedia to get you started at  http://tinyurl.com/25eq9p

In my view, the most unexpected of these factors is the success (and recognition) of old- and new-fashioned community organizing. And this, I think, is where nonprofits badly need to pay attention.

In TIME magazine, Joe Klein describes how an Obama volunteer spent six months gettting to know the folks in tiny Algona, Iowa, before his vital and surprising caucus victory in that state. Klein says “Obama’s decision to expend so much effort on a field organization was quietly revolutionary.” Schmitz notes that the Obama campaign refused to choose between online and on-the-ground organizing. It excelled at both, creating many different online and face-to-face niche communities and ways to participate in political action for Obama.

We know the result. The organizing strategy generated more dedicated volunteers, more cash contributions and more votes than anyone could have imagined. Now President Obama stands to? prevail in the political battles ahead.

What’s Obama’s political campaign got to do with nonprofits? These days, far too little. Hundreds of thousands of? nonprofits have become deeply integrated into the systems serving critical needs like health, education and many others. No longer movements, they have become guardian institutions for the status quo.

The imperative to capture resources to pursue already-settled courses of action means that the constituents’ money has far more value than their ideas or energies. These nonprofits spend heavily on direct mail appeals without investing in the back end to activate or educate constituents as volunteers and advocates. The message to donors here is: “Just send us the check – we’ll take it from there.”

But, the donors, like the voters, are fed up with enforced passivity. We don’t want “input.” We want to do something. Check out Paula Poundstone on NPR this morning. With great humor, Paula expresses my sense of anxious frustration as I wait for the Big Thing that President Obama will ask of us. We just want to help fix things.

Obama won our votes and our contributions because he asked for so much more. However, my guess is that President Obama will be far too busy to offer most of us satisfying opportunities to help save the nation. (Besides, he doesn’t actually know how to fix everything – some of this we need to figure out for ourselves.)

But our nonprofits do offer a vast range of ways ordinary people can help make the needed national change. The energy and optimism is out there to be captured, if only we can rediscover our neglected organizing muscles.

Block argues, and I agree, that “How?” isn’t the most important question. “How?” is a distraction from the important question “What resistance am I postponing?” or, in other words, “What am I really willing to commit to and act upon?”

I frequently share this quote with teams that are about to embark on strategic planning as I believe it captures the essence of the planning process.

“Most of our problems upon this planet … Have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage.”

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