Do You Need to Let Go of Your Strategic Plan in Order to Live Your Values?
Oh so many organizations still hold tightly to the development of a strategic plan. Maybe the board has requested it. Maybe a funder has tied dollars to its completion. Maybe you are in the belief that it will truly help your work advance. But how does that strategic plan help you live your values?
In the ever-evolving landscape of organizational development, the question arises: is it time to bid farewell to the rigid confines of strategic plans and instead embrace a more values-driven approach? While strategic plans have long served as the roadmap guiding organizations towards their goals, they can sometimes stifle innovation and hinder adaptability in the face of uncertainty. In contrast, living by guiding values offers a more flexible and authentic path forward, empowering organizations to navigate change while staying true to their core beliefs and aspirations.
The Conundrum of Strategic Plans
Strategic plans are meticulously crafted documents outlining specific goals, timelines, and action steps intended to achieve predetermined outcomes. While they can be effective in providing a sense of direction and focus, they often struggle to accommodate the unpredictable nature of today's world. External factors such as technological advancements, market disruptions, and global crises can render strategic plans obsolete, leaving organizations stranded without a clear path forward.
Furthermore, strategic plans tend to prioritize outcomes over processes, often at the expense of innovation and creativity. By rigidly adhering to predetermined strategies, organizations may miss out on emerging opportunities or fail to adapt to changing circumstances, ultimately jeopardizing their long-term success and relevance.
Embracing Guiding Values as a Path Forward
In contrast to strategic plans, guiding values offer a more fluid and adaptable approach to navigating change. Rather than prescribing specific actions or outcomes, guiding values serve as a moral compass that informs decision-making and behavior across all levels of an organization. Rooted in a deep understanding of the organization's purpose and ethos, guiding values provide a flexible framework that can withstand uncertainty and ambiguity.
Living by guiding values enables organizations to align their actions with their overarching mission and vision, even in the face of adversity. By articulating core beliefs and aspirations, organizations empower their teams to make autonomous decisions that reflect their values, fostering a culture of authenticity, trust, and shared accountability.
Check out Development Without Limits’ guiding values at the bottom of this post.
The Power of Living Your Values
Letting go of a strategic plan in favor of living by guiding values can be a transformative journey for organizations. It allows them to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty as opportunities for growth and innovation, rather than as obstacles to be overcome. By prioritizing values over outcomes, organizations cultivate a culture of resilience and adaptability, where individuals are empowered to bring their authentic selves to the table and contribute meaningfully towards shared goals.
Moreover, living by guiding values fosters alignment and cohesion among team members, creating a sense of purpose and belonging that transcends individual roles and responsibilities. It encourages collaboration, creativity, and continuous learning, as individuals are inspired to explore new possibilities and push the boundaries of what is possible.
In our organization, because we are so responsive to the needs of clients and their ever-changing contexts, we lean into our guiding values to help us navigate the work. While we have created strategic plans in the past, they became outdated almost as soon as they were completed. They were not helpful and actually, made all of us more frustrated than inspired. Frustrated that we were not meeting the benchmarks; and, not inspired to flex or innovate toward stronger solutions.
Once we figured out what our values were, we have had to communicate them with potential clients…clearly. Sometimes we have had tough conversations about why we won’t take on certain work or work with certain clients.
What we’ve found is that as a team, we are able to make clearer, swifter decisions. We feel better and happier with the clients we work with. And, we help them make a real difference in their work.
The Bottom Line
In a world characterized by rapid change and uncertainty, the rigid confines of strategic plans may no longer serve organizations as effectively as they once did. By letting go of strategic plans and instead embracing guiding values, organizations can unlock new levels of adaptability, innovation, and resilience. Living by guiding values empowers organizations to navigate change with purpose and authenticity, ensuring that they stay true to their core beliefs and aspirations while charting a course towards a brighter future. So, do you need to let go of your strategic plan in order to live your values? Perhaps it's time to consider the transformative power of embracing guiding values as your North Star in the journey ahead.
DWL’s guiding principles
We are passionate about helping you build internal capacity to change the world. The principles that guide are work are:
Begin with what is working. We take a strengths-based approach to our work because we know that focusing on what is working gives energy, creativity and allows for innovation (Wheatley, 2007).
Embrace and expect ambiguity and iteration. To develop transformative learning experiences that simultaneously build capacity while also generating a user-friendly product is not a clear cut process. We balance creativity and analysis and use an iterative learning-by-doing process (Cravens, et.al, 2014)with clients to support innovation.
Focus on the intersection of emotional intelligence and equity. Developing adults’ emotional intelligence with an equity lens “has the potential to help mitigate the interrelated legacies of racial and class oppression in the U.S. and globally” (Jagers, Rivas-Drake & Borowski, 2018). We work to build adults’ social and emotional competencies as a way to ensure equity and justice.
Encourage reflection and behavior change. Social psychology suggests that participants can realize longer term attitude change once anti-biased behaviors are adopted (Creary, 2018). We support clients in identifying what’s working in their current behaviors, shedding unhelpful behaviors and adopting new behaviors.
Create spaces conducive for dialogue. Dialogue is a key component of the work required to address equity. While much of that dialogue can be challenging and push even the most competent equity-driven staff and leaders, we help create norms and foster dialogue that affirms individual experiences while equipping individuals with tools and strategies to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Conversation is how human beings have always thought! (Wheatley, 2007).
Connect to personal experiences. While adult learners are most motivated to learn when they have a need or desire to do so (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 2017), we know that not all stakeholders in your project may feel personally compelled to engage in these transformational learning processes. To mitigate this, we focus on our learners’ personal experiences, draw upon their own wisdom and then relate them to the broader context of how this work supports the work they do.
All learning is social and emotional. Learning and growing feels good. Building upon the National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development and the Science of Learning and Development (Aspen Institute, 2017), we promote connectedness, dialogue, and social learning. We also support the emotional engagement of all stakeholders by framing and giving space for authentic storytelling and discussion.
Be the change. In our coaching, advising and capacity-building roles, our team thoughtfully and intentionally models the language, strategies, body language, and approach we want partners to undertake themselves. We share our own journeys and how we enter the work. We also acknowledge how challenging this work is and provide safe spaces for stakeholders to fail, learn, and grow. That means: generosity, forgiveness and love.
Do the work. We are each committed to doing the difficult personal work required to understand white supremacy culture and our roles to dismantle it. We each have personal practices including mindfulness, meditation, coaching and accountability partners to continually support our own DEI knowledge and lenses. Further, as a company, we use our standing to include, elevate and heed the experience and expertise of BIPOC. We believe that humans can do anything as long as we’re together.
