The plan is ending, or starting. There's an offsite on the calendar. Or you did the last plan, and nobody can tell you what it changed.
Strategic Planning
A plan your leadership team works from: what goes first, who owns it, and how you'll know it's working.
Book a conversationThirty minutes by video, and it's free.
What you get
- A read across the organization before anything is decided
- A planning offsite with your leadership team
- The plan in order — what goes first, who owns it, and what tells you it's working
How long
Usually three to twelve months, depending on the size of your organization and how much the plan has to cover.
Everything feels urgent.
What it looks like now
- A plan ending, or startingYour current plan is ending, or a new one is due, and it's time to decide what the next few years are about.
- An offsite on the calendarThe date is set, and your leadership team will be in one room. Ask four of them what the top three priorities are right now, and you'll get four answers.
- The last planYou did the last one. Eighteen months later, nobody can tell you what it changed.
What it usually turns out to be
Everything was a priority, so nothing was first — and no one could tell how their own work connected to the number at the top.
Time, energy and attention are as limited as money and staff. Spread across everything at once, they don't move any one thing far.
Where you end up
Ask four people on your leadership team what the top three priorities are, and you get one answer. Each of them can point to what tells them their part is moving.
Everyone who was in the room knows their first next step. Sometimes it's to act, and sometimes it's to wait. What waits hasn't been given up on: the things that make it possible are going first.
How Strategic Planning works
Whole Room™ — my change management method
I'm not the only expert in the room.
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The Organizational Assessment, sized to the plan
A read across the organization before anything is decided
1Diagnose the CageA plan is an open invitation to put everything on the table, so this is where I ask what has been getting in the way, along with what you want next.
I start with what you already have: the last plan, the numbers, the documents your people work from. Then I gather what's missing.
I take the questions that material can't answer and design interviews, focus groups and a survey around them, and I host those conversations with people across the organization: the ones doing the work, the ones leading it, and the ones with the power to change how it gets done.
Then I analyze all of it, looking for the connections that are hard to see from the inside. That's the full picture of where the organization stands, and I bring it back as one synthesis that everyone reads before the offsite.
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The planning offsite with your leadership team
They decide what it looks like when the plan has worked
2Facilitate the BreakthroughYour leadership team decides together what the organization looks like when this plan has worked, tied to your mission — down to what each role would be doing and saying.
Every barrier gets named, with what it would take to clear it. That's when people can commit, because now it looks possible.
They choose what goes first
3Co-Architect the Path ForwardThen they choose what goes first, with the tradeoffs laid out. The question I put to the room is which of these makes the others easier. Those go to the front of the line, and the rest get permission to wait.
Often the first moves are at the top: what your leaders need to be on the same page about before anyone else is asked to change.
The plan, in order
What goes first
Your priorities in order, and a place in line for everything that waits.
Who owns it
One named owner for each priority, and every leader can say which part is theirs.
What tells you it's working
For each priority, what you would see or count if it were moving, so you can tell long before the plan's last year.
The plan is yours. It reaches as far out as it has to, whether that's three years or twenty.
It starts with a concrete action plan for the first few months, kept short on purpose: the point is to get things in motion, see how it's going, and adjust. After that come milestones.
Things will come up, and the work won't always go in order. The plan has enough in it for your team to keep finding the way on their own.
Where the plan needs something built — a program, a process, a way to measure it — I design it and hand it to your team, or we build it together, with an end date, until they can keep it going on their own.
In practice
St. Martin Parish Schools · 888 employees
- Before the plan
- The district's leaders had already worked out why a major investment wasn't changing results, and had built their own new model of leadership in response.
- The plan
- The plan came last, once they knew what they were planning for. It named everyone who needed to be involved, and what had to stay in place to keep the new model alive.
- After
- It was what the district took to carry the work forward on its own.
Working with her felt like a genuine partnership, where our conversations sparked ideas that she then shaped into something concrete and immediately usable.
I also speak on this
We Did the Strategic Plan. Nobody Can Tell Me What It Changed.
How to decide what goes first when everything feels urgent
I also lead it as a working session with one team — from a single morning to a few days spread over several weeks. See how Workshops work →
What I need from you
- Your decision-makers in the room for the whole planning offsite.
- Protected time for the people whose view the work needs — on the calendar before the work starts.
- Access to what already exists: the plans, the numbers, the past reports.
Is this the fit?
It isn't if the answer is already decided and what's wanted is a process that arrives at it.
It is if you want the plan to change how the work gets done, you're willing to put everything on the table to get there, and you'd rather get the outcome than protect how it's always been done.
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes by video, and it's free. You tell me where your planning stands and what you need the plan to do. I tell you how I'd approach it, and you decide whether there's a next step.
Book a conversation