3 Ways Resilient Organizations Leave Room for Uncertainty in Strategic Planning
Having a strategic plan has become an expectation in many sectors. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say, “every organization should have a strategic plan.” I’ve said it myself, but I’d like to add some nuance to that statement. Strategic plans are helpful, but I’ve found engaging in strategic planning as an activity to be more beneficial than the artifact that is produced at the end of the process. The skills that people learn and the team development that comes from being involved in strategic planning are what deliver the most value for an organization.
The reason I feel that way is because strategic plans are usually for long periods of time – a year at a minimum, and often three to five years. It’s important to think long-term because meaningful, sustainable change takes time. But the reality is that we’re living in an uncertain and complex world. Curveballs are going to come our way, whether they start showing up the week after the strategic plan is “done” or have the courtesy of holding off for a few months. We need to keep learning in the intervening time. Three months after the planning wraps up, you may have had a crucial “aha!” moment about a conflict within your team, or perhaps you’ve finally gotten more details on new mandates from a regulatory body. However it comes about, you’ll likely have more information to work with and could use that to refine your initial strategy, or maybe change it up completely.
This is where we get to the skills and team development parts that I find to be the most impactful outcomes from strategic planning. Given that we’re operating in uncertainty, a critical skill to build or reinforce during the strategic planning process is how our future selves can recognize that part (or perhaps all) of our original plan is no longer the most strategic way to move forward. The planning process is an opportunity to work toward a culture that gives us permission to thoughtfully shift course when the new reality calls for it.
So how can you go about implementing a strategic planning process that is responsive to change? Here are three practices organizations can follow to create more resilient strategic plans.
Normalize uncertainty during the planning process
It’s understandable that folks often prefer to ignore uncertainty or proceed as if they have more control over an outcome than they really do. It’s much easier to plan if we create an illusion of certainty. But masking reality actually makes it harder for us to notice when it’s time to pivot because we’ve trained our brains to gloss over the very indicators that alert us to the need for a course correction. The time you spend creating your strategic plan is a great series of opportunities to challenge the team to acknowledge the uncertainty they’re facing and develop a process for responding. It may not be fun or comfortable but creating a little structure around it can make it easier to cope with. A simple way to start is by naming that uncertainty exists and talking with the planning team about what that means for your organization and situation.
Ask: What are known or predictable sources of uncertainty that impact us? (These are events or trends that you know will happen, but you don’t know what the outcomes or effects will be.)
Examples: Term limits leading to changes in your organization’s governing board members, retirements you expect in the next few years, elections and potential resulting changes in politically appointed leaders, planning cycles of regulatory agencies that impact your work.
What you can do with these: Add “uncertainty check-ins” to your calendar or action plan in association with key sources of predictable uncertainty. Use that time to talk about what you know at that point, what is still unknown, how your planned strategies are likely to function in this new situation, and whether your organization would be best served by making changes to the earlier plan.
Ask: What have been the biggest curveballs for our organization in the last few years? (These may have had a positive, negative, or neutral impact, but they’re things that surprised you and really made you shift gears).
Examples: Legislation that passed the first time it was introduced with big ramifications for your work, a newly emerged need among the people you serve, media attention to your organization or field that led to increased public scrutiny or demands for change, the ripple effects of an organization in the same field closing its doors.
What you can do with these: Look for patterns in the sources of surprise and consider if there are ways to reduce the negative impacts. Could you add or redeploy resources to monitor or research those things in the future, so you have more warning that something is coming? Could you amplify your voice to have more influence on emerging changes through things like lobbying, partnerships, and participation in associations and coalitions? Could you embed yourselves more or differently in your community to get exposure to voices and trends that are currently outside your awareness?
Ask: What contradictions are we navigating? (These point to uncertainty about how things will play out.)
Examples: A regulatory body mandated a change in practices but your governing board voted against updates to the organizational policy that is preventing you from implementing the change, the people you serve want one thing but the broader community wants something else, a key partner publicly states their support for an initiative but privately seems to be working against it.
What you can do with these: Consider the who, what, where, when, and why of those contradictions and look for options your insights might give you. Do you see any patterns? Who has influence on the outcome of the contradiction, and what do you know (or what can you find out) about their position on the matter? What actions can you take to stay aware of developments and/or influence the outcome?
Identify aspects of uncertainty and how they might impact potential strategies
By taking the time to name different sources of uncertainty and which strategies they might impact, you’ll have a starting point to check against in the future. As your planning team generates possible strategies, have them identify the conditions that are required for each strategy to work the way they hope. Then ask them to consider how sure they are that those conditions will be present. Flag anything that the team feels less than 50% confident about as a source of uncertainty to check on regularly. (Or choose a different threshold that’s more appropriate for your work.) Finally, identify precursor conditions that could help you overcome the uncertainty. Here’s how this might look in practice:
Potential strategy: Develop and implement a peer mentor program to better leverage the expertise of seasoned employees and help reduce turnover amongst new employees that is driven by the steep learning curve.
Required conditions for success: Someone in HR has time to organize the program and create expectations for participants; workloads are under control so that supervisors can give their staff time to participate; seasoned employees volunteer as mentors; participants are respectful and inclusive in their peer mentoring interactions.
Uncertain conditions: Workloads (precursor condition: we need all units to reduce their backlog to 10 cases or less before we implement); respect and inclusivity (precursor condition: we’ll encourage our DEI committee members to sign up and only proceed if at least three do).
This process can also be a helpful sorting tool to decide which strategies it makes sense to include in your strategic plan. If you have some strategies where most or all the conditions required for success are uncertain, it might be prudent to discuss how much effort that strategy will require vs. how much impact you think it will have. This is not to say that you should avoid high-uncertainty strategies in your plan. Sometimes the work we most need to do is the most fraught with uncertainty. (That might be part of why we haven’t done it yet….) But I do encourage you to seek a balance in how much uncertainty you invite into your strategic plan. Having at least some strategies with low uncertainty can be sources of momentum and provide anchors to fall back on when you have to pivot on other things. If every strategy is deeply uncertain, you might end up starting from scratch in a few months.
Check in on uncertainty frequently during implementation
You can jump start your organization’s competency with uncertainty during the strategic planning process by talking about it and building your team’s skills and comfort in this area. To realize the benefit after laying that groundwork, you’ll need to keep coming back to it throughout implementation. I already talked about the concept of scheduling “uncertainty check-ins” focused on sources of predictable uncertainty. I recommend including a similar “uncertainty check-in” on the agendas for project team meetings for projects generated by the strategic plan and for ongoing meetings to touch base on overall progress with the strategic plan. Make sure that you have a mix of perspectives for those conversations so that you can get as complete a picture as possible of how uncertainty is affecting your efforts.
The Pattern Spotters tool from the Human Systems Dynamics Institute is a useful framework for these uncertainty check-ins. The amount of time needed for this conversation will depend on how often you’re having it. It might only need 10 minutes if you use it at the beginning of every weekly project team meeting. For something like a quarterly update on overall progress with the strategic plan, you might need 30-60 minutes, or possibly more if you’re working on many strategies at once. Here’s a series of questions based on Pattern Spotters that you could use or adapt:
In general, how are things going with this project/our strategic plan?
If this is a project for which you identified uncertain conditions, what’s going on with those?
What contradictions are we seeing related to our project/strategic plan? (This might sound like “on the one hand __________, but on the other hand __________.”
What has surprised us related to this project/our strategic plan?
What do we wonder about with this project/our strategic plan, given what has happened so far?
What does all this mean for our project/strategic plan?
Do we see any patterns or trends over time? What do those tell us?
Does our original goal still make sense? How about our approach to reaching that goal?
What adjustments do we recommend?
Go forth and adapt!
I hope this has sparked new thinking about ways to leave room for uncertainty in your organization’s strategic plan. Whether you’re about to start a new round of strategic planning or still have three years left on your current plan, you can begin to acknowledge the uncertainty you’re operating within and spend time considering what that means for your planned strategies. If what you see is that your efforts aren’t yielding the results you’d hoped for, consider whether it’s the “what” or the “how” of your strategy that might need to shift. Then make a change! Pay attention to what happens as a result and keep adapting.
If you could use some support along the way, I’m happy to help. Get in touch and let’s figure this out together.