Let’s modernize strategic planning
Nonprofit Quarterly featured my article “How to transform strategic planning for social justice”
Read the full article here.
The word ‘modern’ often means rational, industrial, scientific. In today’s dominant culture, these concepts are considered virtues. Inherently good. The essence of progress.
The private sector has been held up as the paragon of modernity, especially in the context of organizational management. Meanwhile, the social sector has been characterized as needing modernization.
Between the 1980s and the early 2010s, the dominant narrative in philanthropy and nonprofit management was that nonprofits should be run more like businesses. These three decades were formative for many of today’s nonprofit leaders and organizations, and accordingly our sector has diligently instituted private-sector-inspired approaches including performance management systems and strategic planning methodologies.
But this orientation has taken us off-mission, and it can bring the wrong values to life.
What if we reversed the framing of ‘modernity’?
What if rational, industrial, and scientific now signify archaic?
What might it look like to build a practice of management that we in the social sector can call our own?
The new modern in organizational strategy
These questions are the impetus behind my article, “How to transform strategic planning for social justice,” published yesterday in Nonprofit Quarterly.
I join others in exploring practical management methodologies that build beyond the capitalist management paradigm. Here, I focus on how social justice organizations set and bring strategy to life.
In the article, I offer three mental model shifts that can help us remake strategic planning in greater service of social justice. I invite you to preview an introductory compilation of excerpts below, and read the full article here.
Social justice organizations are becoming frustrated with strategic planning. As consultants Jara Dean-Coffey and Jill Casey noted in their recent paper “Strategy for Now,” published at The Foundation Review: “Amid growing desires to integrate and embody practices aligned with equity, emergence, and complexity, concepts and points of view that dominate business continue to lead conversations about strategy formation in philanthropy and nonprofits.”
Social justice organizations are working to dismantle systems of oppression. But when strategy tools come from systems that preserve racial, gender, and class hierarchies, the resulting processes and decisions can exhibit inherent contradictions.
For example, we aspire to co-create strategy with stakeholders, but our rushed and rigid project plans are rarely built for the depth of engagement required to reach real understanding and alignment. We seek to honor the validity of lived experience, but our processes often fail to create the spaciousness and psychological safety necessary to surface and genuinely grapple with multiple experiences and perspectives. We believe in the power of emergence, yet we are drawn to building multiyear plans around scheduled, quantifiable outcomes. For organizations striving to build a more just and equitable world, conventional strategic planning can bring the wrong values to the table.
The good news is that practitioners across the sector are developing approaches to strategy that strike a balance between the realities of organizational management and the values of social justice movements. The collective wisdom from across the field points to three mental model shifts with the potential to transform strategic planning to be in greater service of social justice:
From capitalist strategy to liberatory strategy: Bringing a new set of values to life through strategy processes and strategy content.
From strategy as plan to strategy as compass: Making strategic progress through clarity and empowered alignment, instead of prediction and control.
From strategic planning to strategic management: Reframing our goal from the possession of a strategic plan to the ability to navigate our environment strategically.
Read the full article for my thoughts on what these shifts entail.
Striking a balance
Conventional strategy is an inadequate tool for social justice organizations in both function and values alignment. But our response warrants caution, as a reductionist reaction can be counterproductive.
In many areas of organizational life, our sector is in the process of calibrating its rejection of dominant systems and its aspiration to liberatory principles. Consultants Rebecca Epstein and Mistinguette Smith, for example, note a growing disconnect between leadership and staff, driven in part by a lack of appreciation that nonprofits are formal organizations, operating with different constraints, responsibilities, and modes of action when compared to social movements, which can reflect liberatory principles in different ways.
Relatedly, Maurice Mitchell, National Director at Working Families Party, cautions against growing anti-institutional, anti-leadership attitudes among nonprofit staff that are weakening social justice organizations from within. Even as our sector acknowledges the shortcomings of the nonprofit industrial complex, formal organizations remain an important vehicle for social change.
Epstein, Smith, and Mitchell call for a thoughtful, nuanced journey as social justice organizations strive to build a liberated future from within the context of their current reality.
Indeed, the private sector-built field of strategic management does offer valuable wisdom, even for social justice organizations, on how to bridge the gap between an organization's overarching purpose and its practical managerial implications.
The tensions we are experiencing are calling us into reflection, learning, and growth. Instead of rejecting conventional approaches in their entirety, we can learn to strike the right balance and remake them in greater service of social justice goals.
Growing resonance
I seek to amplify a growing resonance among practitioners across the sector. My thinking draws on and complements the wisdom of so many consultants, thinkers, and leaders—some whom I know, many whom I do not. Collectively, we are converging on a way of working that not only gets the job done, but also aligns with our values. My hope is that “How to transform strategic planning for social justice” lends greater voice and visibility to this emerging practice.
The thinking and leadership example of several leaders are reflected particularly deeply in the article.
Jessie Ulibarri and Neha Patel, former co-executive directors of State Innovation Exchange, and Karundi Williams, executive director of re:power, taught me so much during my work with their organizations in recent years. These leaders showed me what it looked like to lead and manage organizations that are building a better future not only in the content of their work, but also in how they work. They gave me the gift of feeling what it’s like to work within a new paradigm, which eradicated any doubt in my mind that a better way is possible.
Earlier this year, Jara Dean-Coffey and Jill Casey of Luminaire Group issued a powerful call to action in their article ‘Strategy for Now,’ naming out loud the side-effects of strategy’s private sector roots and laying a solid foundation on which I seek to build.
As a wise thought partner and brilliant connector, Jeanne Bell of JustOrg Design has pushed my thinking and sharpened my writing.
I also quote or reference the work of a number of others in the full article or above in this post, including Steve Zimmerman, Sarah Young, Kimberley Wiley, Lindsey Waldron, Butch Trusty, Nadine Smith, Mistinguette Smith, Elizabeth Searing, Dominique Samariand, Laura S. Quinn, Sharon Oster, Dana O’Donovan, Preeta Nayak, Karla Monterroso, Maurice Mitchell, Laurence Minsky, Roger Martin, John Kania, Mike Jones, Noah Rimland Flower, Rebecca Epstein, Yvonne Betancourt, David Aron, and Nafeez M. Ahmed.
An invitation
While my article offers some direct critique, I intend it as an invitation into constructive sectoral reflection and dialog.
I truly believe everyone has something to offer in building the future of strategy for social justice organizations. I hope we each can see ourselves as part of the journey.
Not so long ago, my own thinking, words, and actions contributed to sustaining today’s oppressive systems. I used to believe the neoliberal narrative that the private sector held the answers to managing mission-driven organizations. Now, I have a more nuanced analysis.
We are all on a journey to unlearn, relearn, and develop new knowledge with one another. It is through these journeys that the future is being built.
Let’s build together.
