Harmony in the Organizational Van
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll.
Hello to the blogosphere! Admittedly, it’s been quite a while since I last posted. I’d like to say that is due to a variety of extraneous factors, or the busyness of entrepreneurial life preventing me from doing so. The reality? The importance of writing and sharing simply slipped my mind.
It’s almost like I need a strategic plan that helps provide guidance and direction, outlining when I should write and post, and even what topics may be of interest or inform others …. Nice segue, no?!
In all seriousness, over the last several months ETP has been very busy supporting organizations with their own strategic direction, and it’s been both an honour and a delight to help them elevate their own path. In our model of a thriving organization (our Venn diagram), the central positioning of strategic planning - or ‘clear direction’ - is deliberate and purposeful. While not a panacea to an entirety of organizational illnesses, knowing where the organization wishes or needs to go, describing an aspirational future and a value proposition to get there, and defining the values that will guide everyone’s progress can provide a very healthy dose of much needed medicine. Fortunately, however, unlike a famous Canadian brand of cold medication, strategic planning needn’t taste bad to work.
Strategic planning provides a wonderful way to coalesce the entire organization, to bring it together around a shared experience and help all staff (and partners) feel engaged and excited about the future ahead. It can speak to promise, to hope, to a journey together to imagine a possible new reality. Success in this form, however, requires making the time to conscientiously and meaningfully engage the entire organization. Can a few senior leaders lock themselves into a room for a day or two to devise a new strategic direction? Absolutely. But this pronounced lack of feedback - of multiple perspectives and voices contributing to the whole - disincentivizes commitment and thus ownership to the journey ahead. As one well-admired municipal leader once shared with me many years ago, “Don’t just invite me to the dance. Let me help you plan it.” This invitation to be part of the organization’s next 4-5 years together can create considerable magic. Put a different way, how might a lack of contribution to their understanding of the future they are supposed to own disengage the very staff and/or team(s) you wish to inspire? How might not knowing the band, the invitees, the intended atmosphere, and the food to be served discourage someone from coming to the very dance you need them at?
Here’s the thing: strategic planning is not just an exercise about defining a desired future and detailing actionable goals to get there. It is, far more importantly, an engagement exercise, an opportunity to (re)connect with the entire team to plan a future together and prioritize the work that will get you there. It is a road trip with everyone in the bus singing in tune to the music, not a lone rider quietly rolling towards the sunset he/she wants. Mixed metaphors aside - whether a dance or a full bus - the point remains: gathering the diverse voices and perspectives of everyone to design, build, and imagine the initiatives ahead is the real secret sauce. Thriving organizations need strategy. But, in that process, they need the collective wisdom and understanding of everyone far, far more.
Easier said than done, for sure. Gathering people, collecting their voices, sifting through ideas, reporting back, building a plan reflecting this collaboration …. that all takes time and resources, and that can be problematic. But the issues that arise from not involving everyone on the road trip planning can be far more difficult to manage, and more costly too. Everyone understanding the words and singing the same song? Absolute harmony. People not singing, not knowing the words, actively not participating, or having side conversations, due to their uncertainty and discontent? That’s organizational cacophony.
The decision between harmonic melody or jumbled noise should be an easy one. Done right, done well, a strategic plan - built with the voices of the many - can provide organizations with the right unifying song for years to come.
Interested in learning more? At ETP, we have over three decades of shared experience gathering and nurturing these voices, turning the perspectives of many - and in recent projects, the voices of hundreds - into a single strategic songsheet. Please reach out!
