Developing a useful strategy that holds everyone accountable to producing results requires an effective process that follows four guidelines:
- Trust the organization. An effective process doesn’t employ outside consultants to write the strategy—that’s a recipe for a document that breeds dust bunnies and gets ignored, because the people charged with implementing the strategy aren’t invested in it. Instead, an effective process trusts that the organization’s own people know enough to develop a useful strategy.
- Involve the people who know. An effective process involves people closest to the clients and community, starting with the board chair and chief executive’s close partnership and cascading down through the organization (and then back up again).
- Share and synthesize information. An effective process breaks down barriers among different program units, functions, and processes. It brings together knowledge from up, down, across, and outside the organization.
- Get results. An effective process gets results. While it may take some time to develop and execute a strategy, ultimately it should lead to noticeably better mission performance and organizational capacity.