A Strategic Plan Is Not an Action Plan

In a filing cabinet not far from you, there is a very good chance a strategic plan is resting. It is handsome. It has a vision statement that took a full morning, five goal areas, and the warm memory of a retreat where the right things got said. It has been consulted, since the binding cooled, approximately twice.

I don't say this to tease anyone. The organizations with resting plans did what everyone told them to do, and the retreats were often genuinely valuable (the conversation is usually worth more than the binder it produces). The trouble, I've come to think, is that our sector uses one phrase, "the plan," for two different documents, and most small organizations are handed the wrong one first.

A strategic plan, at its honest core, is a small set of choices about direction: who we serve, what we offer them, what we've decided not to do, and where we mean to be in a few years. It's a compass. An action plan is a different creature entirely: a short list of commitments, each with a name, a date, and a first step. It's footprints. The compass tells you which way; the footprints are how anyone can tell you're moving.

Small organizations, I'd argue, usually need the footprints first, and for a reason that goes a little deeper than logistics: trust in planning is a renewable resource, and at many organizations it has been spent. Staff and board members who watched a forty-page plan go to sleep in a drawer draw a rational conclusion (planning here is ceremony), and they bring that conclusion, politely unspoken, to the next retreat. The fastest way to rebuild that trust isn't a better retreat. It's the experience, rare and wonderful, of watching the organization say it will do three things and then actually do them. Completed commitments are the only argument that persuades a planning skeptic.

There's a second reason to act first: action teaches. A season spent executing three concrete priorities tells you things about your capacity, your community, and your constraints that no amount of visioning can. Strategy written before that education tends toward aspiration; strategy written after it gets to be true.

So what do the two documents look like at a scale that respects a small team?

The action plan fits on one page, and I mean that literally. Three priorities (not eight; the eighth priority is where plans go to nap). For each: the owner by name, the date, the first step small enough to happen this week, and one line about how you'll know it worked. Then a standing ten minutes at each board or staff meeting to ask how the three are moving. That cadence, humble as it looks, is the entire machine. If your organization has recently taken an honest look at itself, the priorities are usually sitting right there in the findings; the discipline is choosing three and letting the rest wait their turn, because a diagnosis without prioritization is just an overwhelming list.

The strategic plan, when its moment comes, can be nearly as short. For a community-based organization, a page often does it: who we serve, what we do for them, what we deliberately don't do, what we're building toward, and the two or three bets we're making to get there. The forty-page version exists mostly because plans have audiences (funders, mostly), and there's no harm in dressing the page up when someone asks. But the working document, the one that actually filters decisions, should be short enough that everyone can roughly recite it. A strategy nobody can remember isn't guiding anything.

And here is the pleasant part: the two documents feed each other. Run two or three seasons of one-page action plans and patterns emerge (what energizes the team, what the community keeps asking for, what you keep deferring), and suddenly the strategic questions have evidence to work with. Set the one-page strategy, and choosing the next season's three priorities gets dramatically easier, because now there's a filter. Footprints sharpen the compass; the compass picks the next footprints. Neither needs to be an epic to do its job.

If your organization's plan is currently resting, my suggestion is not to feel bad and not to schedule another retreat just yet. Open the binder once more, pull out the three most alive commitments hiding in its goal areas, give them names and dates on a single page, and go. You can tell the funders, honestly, that you're implementing the plan.

I hope the next planning document your organization produces is its smallest ever, and its most used: a page that gets creased, argued with, updated, and occasionally spilled on. Documents in mint condition aren't guiding anyone. The plan that changes an organization usually looks, by spring, a little loved and a little worn, and that is exactly how you'll know.