Restating Your Scale
Recently, I’ve been helping two clients translate a new strategy into work plans that are useful every.single.day. (Why have a new strategic plan if you don’t change what you do every day?!)
During this part of the process, I feel like a detective, finding patterns and opportunities that the organization can build on. Sometimes the clients seem surprised at what we notice. The surprises typically fall into two buckets - both of them related to the strengths of the organization.
1. The scale of your ambitions.
In a recent moment a client was challenged to consider if their new goals were ambitious enough. After six months of working shoulder to shoulder with this client, I knew that they were ambitious, but the question sent us looking for more information to understand just how ambitious they were. And, their goals were ambitious - top five in the country, as a matter of fact. With a new strategic plan in hand, they could help everyone - board, staff, partners - celebrate their impressive commitment to their mission with a very ambitious goal.
2. The scale of your actions.
With another client, we committed to making each department’s most important work visible for the future. The results were eye-opening to them and me! SWIM produced a starter list of important work, but once we were together, we nearly doubled the list. With a new strategic plan in hand we could ask -- how well does this current activity match our future goals? Does it supercharge our future? We found a few of those. Was it good for our last chapter, but might not move us ahead in our new chapter? Found a few of those too!
You don’t have to wait for SWIM to come along and be your detective. At your next team meeting, be your own detective and ask:
When we look at our goals, what can we use as a comparison to demonstrate the scale of our ambition? Goals of our peers? Research about need? Historical data?
When we look at our to-do list for the next month, what are the one or two items that move us most quickly towards our goals? What seems negligible? How does that change what we work on next month?
We love to help organizations make their work visible, during strategic planning, or even mid-plan if you need a reset. Interested in talking more, start with our Strategic Planning discovery form. Then, we'll schedule a time to connect.