Organizational Planning; Why Everyone Should be Involved

In this month's President's Letter, Dennis McMillian talks about strategic plans for organizations and tells this anecdote about the wrong approach to strategic planning:

"Early in my nonprofit management career (30 years ago), I participated in developing a strategic plan.  It was done the wrong way.  I, along with my staff colleagues, developed it. We used the Management by Objectives and Results (MBOR) framework. When MBOR was introduced, it created a revolution in planning.  Not only did organizations develop or re-affirm a mission (including the painful debate for the best words to describe who we were and what we did), they began to use something called a vision.  A vision was described as a grand expectation that would inspire us to leap tall buildings even though most of the time we rarely believed we ever could.  Visions read like “world peace,” “no one will go hungry again,” or Garrison Kieler’s “Lake Wobegone – where all the children are above average.” 

In addition to mission and vision, MBOR made goals, objectives and action steps insufficient.  With MBOR we now had to also focus on results – the forerunner of what we now call outcomes.  Certainly MBOR was a planning wonk’s dream come true.  One small problem with that model, though, was to do it right took time.  And while staff gets paid for their time, making it less a factor for them, most board members do not.  Either a few dedicated board members would heroically volunteer for the Strategic Planning Committee and spend six months or more with staff developing a plan – or the staff reverted to the path of least resistance and did a plan without much board participation.  Neither of those approaches was a good option.  We needed a better way to plan."

Read Dennis' entire letter here.

What have been your organization's experiences with strategic planning?