Strategy most often fails in implementation. With all the effort that went into developing your new strategy and writing your strategic plan, the hardest part is making the darn thing work!
Many donors, foundations and corporate giving programs create strategic plans to clarify their philanthropic goals and guide funding decisions. Too often, however, their new strategy doesn’t even get off the ground. Here are five reasons for this:
1. You are exhausted. If you are like most foundations and philanthropists, you have spent WAY too long developing your strategy. Endless meetings, environmental scans, self-assessments, board assessments, finding and engaging a small army of content experts, writing and re-writing the perfect strategic plan document (complete with beautiful graphics and theories of change). You probably spent more time crafting the RFP to hire a strategic planning consultant, reviewing their proposals, interviewing them, and hiring them than you needed to spend developing your strategy! Now that you have your beautifully written plan up on your website, you and your team are so exhausted that the last thing you want to do is figure out how to implement it. Not to mention, you are likely behind in everything else at work: a backlog of unread emails, meetings you’ve put off, and a pile of proposals to read.
2. You want to create the perfect “implementation plan.” Now that you’ve spent WAY too long developing your strategic plan, you decide you should put that same amount of time and effort developing an implementation plan. Perhaps you are setting aside a quarter or a whole year to figure out how you will implement it (before actually implementing it). You envision another shiny deliverable at the end of this: a beautifully organized implementation plan document that outlines every goal, tactic and activity, lists who is responsible for each of them, and spells out in which month or week it will occur.
3. You get distracted. Ideally your strategy should be your north star. It should be a tool you use to determine your top priorities and your path forward. As new opportunities appear on your doorstep, you can compare them against your new strategy to determine if the opportunity will help you achieve your strategic goals or take you off course on what I call a “bandwagon byway.” But you don’t even get that far. The ink has barely dried on your strategic plan and you are off and running, chasing the latest philanthropic squirrel: a president is unexpectedly elected and you decide this changes everything you’ve worked on in the past year, a new initiative is being developed in your community and you want to be part of it (despite the fact that its addressing an issue that’s not part of your strategy), the policy environment is shifting in your state and you decide to focus on policy advocacy instead.
4. You assume everyone knows what to do. They were all involved in the planning process, so they should know their next steps, right? Wrong. Your new strategy likely represents new priorities and a new way of doing business. While everyone says they like change and understand change is inevitable, they don’t like it when that means THEY need to change! What happens here is everyone goes off and does their own thing. This is likely whatever happens to be scheduled on their calendar for the next few weeks and months. Or, they might focus on their small piece of the new strategy, reinforcing the silos that you hoped your new strategic plan would break down. This leads me to the last and most important problem.
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