Why Participatory Strategic Planning Works: A Lesson From the Boardroom

For years, I sat on the boards of nonprofit organizations, and every one of them needed a strategic plan. Funders required it, so we made sure we had one. In some organizations, we built the plan ourselves as board members. In others, we brought in a consultant to guide us through it. Either way, we understood the plan to be the board’s job, with the CEO responsible for putting it into action once it was done.

We built good plans – plans that would have made a real difference in our cities. Then we handed them to the CEO to implement. The CEO folded the plan’s priorities into the operational work already underway, telling staff, “this is what the board wants.” Staff, who already had a full workload, weren’t happy about the extra weight. In every board I sat on, the plan didn’t really get put into action. Some board members shrugged this off. As long as we had a plan on paper for the funders, that felt like enough.

Later, I became a CEO myself, leading an organization through its own strategic plan not long after three organizations had merged into one. I didn’t want what I’d watched happen on all those other boards to happen here. So instead of leaving the plan to the board, we opened it up. Staff and volunteers had a voice in building the plan, not just hearing about it once it was finished. I was sure that including the people who’d be doing the work would give the plan real ownership. It made sense to me then, and it still does.

It still wasn’t quite enough. Months in, implementation stalled. When we talked it through, the answer was plain: we didn’t have enough internal capacity to implement the plan well, and we hadn’t figured out what that capacity required before we started.

That sent me looking for research that took participatory methods and capacity development seriously together. I found it, partly, in Norton and Kaplan’s work at Harvard, where I came across a number I still use when I explain why this work matters: 70 to 90 percent of strategic plans fail to be executed. That wasn’t a surprise, given what I’d already watched happen on board after board. What it did was confirm the problem wasn’t specific to any one organization. It was structural, built into how most strategic planning gets done.

That research, combined with what I already knew from whole-systems change work, is where Strategic Planning the Genuine Contact Way came from. Over years of facilitating this work across cultures and organizations of every size, I arrived at something more specific too: a shorter process holds its energy better than a long one. Ninety days, not nine months. A planning process that drags on drains the momentum a plan needs before implementation even starts.

What I’ve watched, across all of it, comes down to three things that need to be in place. Purpose has to be clear before the work starts, along with naming who will lead the plan’s creation and who will lead its implementation – decided early, not assumed. The people who’ll do the work need real involvement throughout, not a finished plan they’re asked to accept. And progress needs milestones that are easy to track as you go, not discovered missing once the year is already over.

The clearest recent proof of this, for me, is an organization I know from the inside. By 2020, the International Genuine Contact Organization had grown through some real changes of its own – chief among them, a new membership model that let far more people participate fully than before. The strategic plan already in place had largely done its job. What the organization needed now was fresh direction from a much bigger group of members about where to focus energy next, together.

As Director at the time, Rachel Bolton took that purpose to the Co-Owners and asked for a mandate to lead the refresh. That mandate was clear from the start: Rachel would lead the development of the plan, and the members – the expanded community the new model had brought in – would be the ones implementing it. Naming both roles – who will lead and who will implement – early, before the work began, is exactly the practice I described above. It wasn’t left to sort out later.

Over about four months, more than 40 people from across the organization – from many countries, at every level of involvement – took part in shaping it: discernment sessions, a readiness assessment, storytelling, an Open Space Technology meeting, and then the work of pulling it all together into an updated plan.

What came out of that process wasn’t a single document to set aside once finished. The refreshed plan holds five strategic themes, each with specific, tangible goals attached to it – concrete enough that anyone reading the plan can see where their own contribution fits. From there, each goal breaks down further into work packages, and each work package has its own milestones. Nobody has to guess what progress means in the abstract. It’s visible, theme by theme, goal by goal. This is the third practice I described above, at work: milestones that are easy to track, not just easy to write down.

By the time that plan came to the Co-Owners for a vote in February 2021, much of it was already underway. People had been engaged early enough, and fully enough, that they’d started acting on what the process surfaced before the formal approval even happened.

That’s what join-in from the beginning actually produces: a plan people are already living, not one they’ve agreed to after the fact. Buy-in gathered once a plan is finished asks people to accept someone else’s decisions. Join-in from the start means the plan and the people who would act on it were never really separate to begin with.

None of this happened by accident, and it didn’t happen because anyone planned harder. It held together because purpose was named before the work began, because the people doing the work helped build it from the start, and because progress had somewhere real to show up once the plan became action.

Where has a plan in your own organization’s history actually held – not just on paper, but in what people did next? What was different about how it came together?

In genuine contact,

Birgitt