Stop Calling It a Strategic Plan If You Don’t Fund It

You’ve decided it’s time for a new strategic plan – so you call you board together, discuss concept, and decide to move forward. Perhaps you’ve hired a consultant, engaged stakeholder groups, researched best practices you’d like to incorporate, or sought input from your clients and customers. You’re doing everything right, and yet…. Does your plan not land? Look back at your shelf, with old strategic plans. Were those successes?  

Often what makes or breaks a plan is how much support it gets, from the top on down. For management, that means more than repeating the talking points. It means resources. From funding to staffing time, you have to resource your plan if it’s going to work. And a good strategic plan will have people throughout your organization, at all levels, working on specific initiatives to help advance the goals. It’s not enough to come up with a good idea and expect someone else to do all the heavy lifting. There is nobody on the payroll named “we”.  So when someone says, “We should do x, y, or z”, the real question is, who? And, how? 

Strategic planning is more than just envisioning an end-state. It’s coming up with the concrete, logical steps to get you there. And the funding is the gas in the tank that makes the car run. Without the right resources, a strategic plan turns into an ornate wish list. And when it comes to actually making changes, we all know how wishes turn out…