Plans are only useful when they are created with a clear and compelling purpose – to answer a specific question, to guide a specific effort – and when they are designed to be used rather than to simply comply with a requirement or norm. Otherwise, they sit on shelves gathering dust. As with everything else we create, we believe the content of your plans needs to be meaningful, measurable, and manageable.
We create meaningful plans by first building clarity and consensus around why you are planning and what the plan must accomplish. Then, we design a process tailored to your team and timeline and a plan format that serves your unique needs. No templates. No formulas. By working collaboratively to design a tailored planning process, we have a greater chance of producing a plan that key stakeholders own, understand, and will use. Further, by engaging stakeholders in the design of a planning process, we aim to build your organization’s capacity for thoughtful planning and intentional design.
While every planning process is unique, they all have a few things in common. We use data and engage stakeholders to inform decisions. We collaborate with your team, relying on their expertise and valuing their perspectives. We offer expert facilitation and synthesis skills to find areas of convergence and turn insights into impact.
A plan that cannot be implemented is useless. To ensure that your plans come to life, we pull from our continuous quality improvement and project management toolkits to logically and methodically plan how you’ll implement your plan to achieve your goals. We explore the interdependencies between tasks, so we can sequence them in logical ways that avoid delays and rework while keeping your team informed and aligned. We develop timelines and tools to support accountability and progress monitoring. We develop your team’s skills for planning and project management, so long after we’re gone, your plan lives on.
Guided by these commitments and this approach, we have helped organizations:
- Develop focused yet flexible multi-year Strategic Plans and workable annual Action Plans
- Clarify and articulate their organization’s Mission, Vision, and Values
- Test the alignment of their organization’s What, Why, How, and Who
- Transform generic, vague, and unwieldy strategic plans into meaningful, measurable, and manageable ones
- Plan multi-year projects and collaborations