As strategic planning models became routine and accepted as a standard of practice, those who excelled in project management and repositioning content developed an a consultant industry of strategic planners who have emerged to bring expertise to “help” organizations create high impact plans. The secret that few consultants want to admit is that strategic planning is often reduced to a cookbook that illustrated with overused “fill-in-the blank” prescriptions that result in a unimaginative plans. Quite often, strategic planning is a simplistic reordering and renaming of existing strategy and approaches. Such a focus diminishes the value of strategic planning. This premise of the declining value of traditional strategic planning was identified over a decade ago in the seminal Harvard Business Review article titled, “The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning” by Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg’s main criticism is that strategic planning often stymies strategy.
I was cleaning my office the other day and came across a hand-sketched overhead transparency that I used as the basis for a keynote address to a conference of youth mentoring nonprofits that I delivered some seven or eight years ago. The conference theme was nonprofit sustainability and in the presentation I referenced five “Environmental Threats” facing nonprofit organizations. The list of threats predated the last economic earthquake (and ongoing aftershocks) and it scary to see how relevant and magnified these threats continue to be…
At the heart of the work that I do with nonprofits, philanthropy and government is to help organizations find the connection between facilitation and process. Most often that connection is at the point of strategy. Strategy is the critical element for, among other things: a) strengthening the core of social sector agencies, b) thinking creatively [...]
When working with nonprofit agencies on strategy, I often find myself making four principle statements — Be authentic, be intentional, be large, and be radical. I find myself repeating these principles because in this continuing anemic economic climate, many nonprofits are still operating out of a conservative posture. Strategy is often focused on preserving core [...]
One of the dominant themes in my blog posts this year has been outlining dimensions of nonprofit strategy and, in my conversations with clients and potential clients, strategy is still the major theme. A question that I have recently been pondering was asked by a colleague who had just gone through a strategic planning process. [...]
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- Mark P Fulop, MA, MPH
PO Box 18144
Portland, OR 97218-0144
(503) 928-4082
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