Monday's post talked about the relationship between strategic planning and relevance. In short, the typical process we use for strategic planning (scan-plan-implement-evaluate) actually skews us towards remaining merely relevant, as opposed to advancing our memberships to the next level. Even if we intend otherwise, we usually settle back into "next year plus two percent." As long as we're not dead, we're good.

But if all we say is "strategic planning sucks," we never get anywhere new. A couple of years ago I started to write about a simpler model for strategy work that would take it out of the world of complex and carefully worded consultant models for strategy work, and back into the hands of execs, staff, and members. I said that strategy work is simply about four things: understand, choose, do, and learn.

YOU have to figure out how to do those four things, but you have to do them. You may not have the money for a full environmental scan, so what are you going to do–now–to ensure that you have a deep enough understanding of your members, your marketplace, your internal capacity, etc. to move forward strategically. I'm doing this with one of my clients by making ongoing changes to the way they do Board meetings. I'm creating specific agenda items for retrospective learning, and looking inside at member needs. My Board President wants to create a strategy task force to really dig into a longer term vision. Cool, we're making progress on understanding.

I want to do the same thing with the choice issue. Too often this client would make choices (like approving a budget for next year) without realizing that they had made a significant choice, so I'm working on their board conversations to make those choice points more clear. Then I'll do the same thing with do and learn. I can't completely overhaul everything they do, but I'll work on it, rather than settling for mediocre.

I would argue that they will make more progress than they would if they paid $25,000 for a traditional strategic planning process. HOWEVER, even if it's better, I think it is STILL skewed towards relevance. Even if you do understand, choose, do, and learn better than right now, the floor still seems to be tilted towards relevance. As soon as you can match up your understanding work with something close to last year, you'll lock in and move to the next step. We're so busy, and we want this strategy work to be done, so we just push through it.

So how do we break this pattern? One answered occurred to Maddie and me when we were developing the CalSAE session on Relevance is Not Enough. She and I were looking at how powerful social media has been for us professionally. She has experience helping clients use social media in ways that create powerful engagement, and some of my own personal experiences as an association member where I was able to go beyond relevance were directly tied to my social media activities. How does social media do it? Here's what we came up with:

First, social media is not afraid of death. Loopt was popular for a while, but now it's FourSquare, which may be gone in a year. Tools come and go, and it's no big deal. This lack of drama about death makes sense, of course, because social media was only just born. It has no decades of history to rely on, nor does it have board members who've patiently worked up through the ranks. Social media tries new things, constantly tweaks and modifies them, and if they don't work, social media drops it and moves on. In doing so, social media opens up more possibilities for going beyond relevant. It is constantly generative, rather than focusing on merely staying alive. 

So what drives this generative power? Listening. 

 As Maddie and Lindy's chart indicates, social media strategy has a similar cycle to scan-plan-implement-evaluate, but it puts these steps in a tight circle (so it happens more than once every three years), and in the middle of that circle it adds the listening step, which is connected to every other step in the process. You never stop listening and engaging your system in an ongoing conversation about what is valuable, what works, what matters, and what has meaning. It's not just monitoring. It's engaging in ongoing conversations. It's allowing ideas from the periphery to bubble up. It's much more precise definition of what works and why. 

That's what is missing from strategic planning. As one executive mentioned recently, our association leaders are too busy to be working on strategy all the time. So what do we do about that? What do we put in the middle of our strategy making chart?

Yes, I'm going to tease you again and say that I'll write more about this next week. That's partially because this post is long enough as it is, but also because I want to challenge you. What do YOU think goes in the middle? What could association staff and volunteers be doing on a more continuous basis that would serve the same function as "listening" in social media? What can we be doing to make our strategy work my generative? I'll post my answers next week, but show me what you can do, people!