Most of 2020 was spent updating and refining the strategic plan for Alliance for Children Everywhere. I have found the experience of creating a five year strategic plan for an INGO to be one of the greatest exercises in communication and teamwork, but most importantly, problem solving. The end goal of a strategic plan is to move an organization forward for a certain period of time. The assumptions and decisions made will impact the organization, its clients, and other stakeholders for a long while. Problem solving is used in the creation of a strategic plan through reflecting on the past, weighing which risks are wise to take, and through preparing for the future.
Reflecting on the Past
A well-run organization knows its mission statement and goals and creates programming and work to fulfill both. Strong management understands that reviewing programming, staffing needs, resources, and internal and external environments is a crucial part of the strategic planning and performance management process. This requires problem solving through reflection on the past, especially looking at failures and deciphering how they occurred. In my work with Alliance for Children Everywhere, we create a five-year strategic plan and then review it quarterly for this very reason. To do so, my strategic planning team must not only look at data to see if something worked or not but ask why the program did or did not work. During 2020, our strategic planning team analyzed the data to see why programs were meeting our organizational goals and dug into the factors that caused the budget for a project to go awry. It's through these moments of reflective problem solving that we are able to learn how the past is shaping our present.
Calculating Risks
Strategic planning involves taking risks as we cannot fully predict the future. Possibly now more than any other time in history, running an INGO holds seemingly countless unforeseeable risks. The task of the strategic planning team at ACE is to analyze what we know, brainstorm about potential future situations, and analyze appropriate responses by our team so that risks are taken wisely. Risks do not mean to not try. ACE, like many organizations, utilizes SWOT charts (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to think richly about the internal and external factors that will be or could be facing us. Problem solving forces attention away from the fear of the unknown and places control in creating stable budgets and plans for programming that are flexible and able to withstand both successes and unforeseeable road bumps.
Future Planning
With a well thought out strategic plan in place, performance management can then be created. One of the most important stakeholders in a strategic plan is the staff. Without reflection to connect past to present, there is not a path forward for the future of the organization through well written work analyses. When job descriptions match the work required by the strategic plan, employees, volunteers, and management all understand what is expected of them and how their contributions fulfill the mission and goals of the organization. In this instance, problems are solved before they ever form. The critical thinking of the board and the management allows for others to think deeply about their own work and role withing the organization. For ACE, this builds unity across multiple nations all working toward the same goal, and it allows for fairness in how work is assessed as emphases is placed on competencies instead of behaviors. As one team, we are able to continue thinking about how we serve families in the future.