Strategic Planning: What Now?

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]good afternoon welcome everybody welcome to today's non-profit quarterly webinar strategic planning what now it's a big question so we have a big panel um and we're really glad that you're with us today my name is jean bell i curate leadership webinars for non-profit quarterly and i'm also a strategic planning consultant so today i'm kind of a third and a half panelist um and it's been a pleasure to co-create these ideas in this session with the panelists who will introduce themselves in a moment i want to start actually by just taking a breath and inviting you to as well a breath of appreciation there is not a job in our sector that has not been unbelievably challenging over the last year plus words that we use in strategic planning like adaptive hardly cut it do they for for what you all have been leading through over the last year and yet here you are still in it still trying to figure out what's next what's next for your organization so just want to take a breath around that and appreciate you all and appreciate the panelists and everybody who's trying to figure out what now what next um in our sector let me share with you some logistics about today this is a 90-minute session we have a lot to talk about a recording including the slides will be sent to you in a few days to all the registrants we use the q a box to communicate and you can talk to each other in there and respond to the ideas that we're sharing feel free to just put comments in there i may occasionally ask you to put yes or no to some a question that's coming up in our discussion so that's your place to communicate with us and one another we always evaluate our sessions a pop-up evaluation will come up as soon as the session ends please stay for three minutes such as four questions and answer that to inform our program many of you are already leading edge members if you don't know what that means i invite you to go to the upper right hand corner of our website and learn more but essentially the leading edge membership means that you come to all of these webinars you can access the archive of all of these webinars as well as getting a digital subscription to the magazine which you see there on the right the spring issue radical leadership uh is gorgeous and it's the first issue under our new editor-in-chief cindy suarez so we're very excited about the magazine and how it serves this whole non-profit quarterly platform so we invite you to look at that or re-look at it if you haven't looked at in a while two of the webinars coming up in this leading edge membership program an exciting one for movement fundraising groups that are experiencing huge surges in fundraising donors membership what are they learning how are they managing what systems are they putting in place we also have a webinar coming up on communal philanthropy the growth in things like mutual aid and giving circles and what that means for fundraising and nonprofits so we invite you to take a look at the leading edge membership program if you haven't already all right let's turn to our panelists and i i know you've read their bios that's why you registered for this session but give them a chance to say hi and introduce themselves dominique good afternoon my name is dominique samari i am a partner at p3 development group we are a consulting firm based in milwaukee wisconsin and we support organizations in designing and facilitating processes that create equitable and inclusive strategies programs and initiatives and i'm really excited to be here with you all this afternoon nadine hi i am nadine smith i'm the executive director of equality florida which is the statewide lgbtq education and advocacy organization in florida and i live in saint petersburg florida with my wife and our 10 year old son so glad you're here thank you thanks for being part of this and hello everybody i'm steve zimmerman i'm the principal at spectrum non-profit services we're based in milwaukee wisconsin as well with right down the street from dominique and uh also with offices in chicago and work around the country with organizations doing organizational strategy and business planning wonderful and as i mentioned this session has been co-created by the four of us and uh three of us are consultants and nadine of course is a very experienced uh executive director who has a really interesting strategic planning story to share so there's a lot of experience in the room and also we surveyed you in advance thank you to so many of you who provided your thoughtful answers they're incorporated into this session so there's a lot of wisdom in this big virtual room there's 378 people um in the in the room with us so that's a lot of wisdom and that's a lot of people who care about what next for our organizations and our movements um so let's get into the discussion um and i think we need to start with context the context is obviously very complicated and very dynamic um but let's name a few things and i'll start and then just hand it off to the group to see what you think one thing i would say you see the question here where was strategic planning going as a practice like the practice of strategic planning where was it headed uh before this transformational kind of staggering changes of the last 15 16 months and where does it have to go now and those it doesn't mean that some of the places it has to go now it wasn't already going but we have this sort of compound question and context i think one thing i'll say about where it was going is i think there was a very live tension around the distinction between sort of predictive and adaptive planning right um there were people who had become quite skeptical of spending six or nine months even 12 months to plan for three years or five years that there was something not necessarily matching the dynamism of their work about that cycle for others no that was a critically important cycle and it was important to always have an active strategic plan and some of you are probably along that continuum somewhere and i think that the trump election followed by kovid really amplified that issue right when unpredictable things or seemingly unpredictable things happened that for many groups forced immediate and dramatic changes in how they do work some of those changes continue on to this day so that's a live that's an example of kind of a tension around how do i even use this process how useful is this process how useful is it in this operating context and then the second thing i would say is that the acceleration of movements for racial justice i think have the way they're showing up one of the ways they're showing up in the strategic planning conversation is that groups who were born around with equity who have been bipolar serving who work directly on racial justice those groups are experiencing the kind of strategic planning issues around growth pressure media attention demand etc and a lot of other groups you know the majority of groups are trying rapidly at some pace of evolution to catch up and and integrate interrogate their own missions around race and equity and figure out what that means for their values and plans and so that i think we're going to talk about a lot today but is an example of a kind of a trend and a force that is really causing us to question our practices and and indeed perhaps change our methods um so i want to open it up um steve and dominique you're both consultants you're encountering the field and the needs um steve i think you wanted to go first on or we decided you were going first on this one um what are you seeing are the expectations that that clients have different than they were a couple of years ago you know i think the the answer is yes um and i think they are like most things in today's environment confused um because what what i see is you know there's a lot of organizations that are turning to planning because they there's a desire for some normalcy and you know strategic planning um we can think about it as being normal um within our organization something we used to do before that we can do now and yet at the same time there's a desire for urgency people we we want change now and so it is i don't think those are necessarily in conflict but it is it brings about the importance of strategy um more and then this desire for increased engagement um and so you know those those three aspects normalcy urgency and engagement um have to be kind of carefully navigated and i think at different points in the process we're seeing people emphasize emphasize them much more so than they were um in you know prior to covid dominique what would you build on i agree with everything as steve just said i think what i'm seeing that has changed when the pandemic first started organizations were in a state of panic and organizations are still to some extent in a state of panic but from where i sat that's where i saw the most innovation right and so organizations were serving populations they knew they needed help immediately and they were kind of cutting through their own internal red tape and processes to deliver that with greater efficiency because there was like true urgency inside of the beginning of the pandemic especially around social services and so one of our clients a fairly large foundation for whom we had completed their strategic plan about 18 months prior to the pandemic starting they had lifted up as a priority inside of that plan addressing the inefficiencies in their grant making process but when kovitz started that all went out the window and they got money out the door quick so one thing i've seen is organizations that are really trying to now look at okay we have these innovations in the midst of a crisis how do we sustain that right like what do we need in place to sustain that how do we plan for that and then how do we use that as a lens to really look across our other work and so what are the other mental models that we've been holding that have been keeping these things in place that we now know we can shift because we saw ourselves do it um and where else can we kind of expedite the work i think the other thing i've been seeing and uh you touched on this in your opening is that we all now kind of collectively have a shared awareness that our environment can be disrupted at any moment and so i see a lot of groups doing scenario planning and scenario thinking and so looking at it as a process like what are all of these uh various range of future possibilities both the good and the bad the expected and the surprising and then how am i creating various scenarios that help me think through right now while they're not happening what could happen and so um you know the idea behind that is it to then build your strategies around that scenario or that group of scenarios but instead to expand your thinking to consider all these factors that have not yet come into existence um and then of course the what we'll be talking about a lot today everybody's trying to figure out how to do racial equity um but the final thing and i when i was looking at this question i'd not really given this much much thought but when you said it it deeply resonated with me and it is something that i've been seeing i think and i'm hoping we're able to sustain this part especially i think organizations are more focused on their people now like they have a deeper appreciation for their people they see how staff um and their constituents struggled through covid they saw what it meant for them and their families and their lives and they're really trying to integrate like staff well-being and staff conversations and staff you know in a different way um which is something that we definitely didn't see before the pandemic at least not to a great extent um so that kind of is what pops up for me um in the in the changes i'm seeing right now that's really helpful and nadine feel please pop in if you'd like to hear i one of the reasons i chose this photo just to share that is that i felt i mean it's a boarded up business so it speaks to kovid um but the truth to power thing i'm building on what you just said dominique i feel it all not only in society i feel it inside organizations i feel organizations trying to tell themselves a deeper truth and i feel that having an impact on their approach to strategy and their approach to people as you said so for me this this image kind of summed up that you know the self the other the org the movement you know uh feeling right now but a lot of it's starting internally are we telling ourselves the truth uh you know about our mission about our impact um about how we treat our staff et cetera sorry nadine china please sure you know it was interesting just to hear the that perspective because i i think of the cognitive dissonance that i think uh organizations are experiencing right now part of it is we are living in a time of high volatility and a deep destabilization of structures that seemed you know immovable unshakable and that office that uh that offers challenges and opportunities right so i think we are dealing with the twin you know pandemics of of racism and covid um we're also dealing with this generational shift where we are increasingly a nation of older white people and younger black and brown people and a generation that has grown up in a different racial context and so you know the ascent of trumpism has put these things into stark relief and so organizations are responding to it not simply because there's some you know a great education plan that's unfolding in front of them but it it's a necessity if you are hiring the best and the brightest you're hiring a more diverse staff than your organization has likely ever seen and so so these things are happening and i think that the cognitive dissonance between you know the structures of how we generally think about strategic planning the world is moving so fast that you plan and then it's sort of like will that even be an institution anymore will that even exist in that way anymore and are is the generation of folks who are who are moving into this work uh those things are not viewed in the same way so i think this is a time of such volatility and such an inflection point for the country that that it has to resonate within the strategic planning process and i think when we talk about our process i'll you know i'll talk about how it impacted us wonderful appreciate that um i want to show you some data at this moment which one of the questions so over 130 of you there's now 430 of you here but you know so 25 of you responded thank you to the pre pre-webinar survey and the data is really interesting obviously this is a self-selected group albeit a large one of people who are interested in talking about strategic planning so this is not a random slice of people in the world um but the degree of organizational change that you're experiencing right now the question was how dramatically has your organization sense of its purpose and positioning changed in just the last one to three years so purpose and positioning you see about half either a lot or radically and another 45 somewhat i mean barely anyone said you know our sense of purpose and positioning hasn't changed at all in the last one to three years so this also confronts the sort of just clockwork approach to strategic planning where the last one sunseted so we do another one it's like yeah but we're in a really different space we experience ourselves to be uh encountering very different demands about how we do our work and so that's that's a pressure on the strategic planning process to accommodate at a minimum would you say i mean if this is the degree of change we can't just kind of show up with the old toolbox and say okay mission vision values goal one goal two goal three you know that doesn't seem to be where people are right um a second question that we asked is have you recently or are you now undertaking planning or od work specific to race gender and other forms of identity 74 of you are in the midst of that right now another five percent of you have just recently completed it so again we we're doing these things simultaneously in the mix of the volatility that that you just talked about nadine i think that's just important to understand and that's why we're asking what now how can these processes be useful and how can they accommodate all this complexity what i want to do now is give domini dominique and steve a chance to share as as practitioners some of the ways they've been conducting strategy processes recently and what they're kind of learning why they're using those frameworks um just to give us some some substance and some things to respond to and to hear from them in their experience why these particular tools work when they work um so dominique i'm going to start with you and i know that you use uh it says down the bottom right there this results based strategy development approach can you just talk us through this at a high level for a few minutes what is this about why does it work absolutely um so we started using results-based accountability probably about uh six or seven years ago and it was developed with the support of the annie casey foundation by this guy named mark friedman um he now runs a company called clear impact um that does this work so i just want to be clear that we did not invent this framework right but it's a method that we found really helpful to folk help organizations focus their strategy and get really clear on what moves the needle as opposed to what's producing a lot of activity but not necessarily producing impact so the question that this really was born out of um out of the annie casey foundation was they were funding all of this work right um and when they looked at the work they weren't seeing the impact the programs were having the outcomes that they said they were going to have but like real population level shifts that wasn't happening and so they started with this question around why isn't the needle moving um and so out of that question this model was created and it starts with a really clear result so for example an organization is trying to address the issue of infant mortality um and we say our result is to reduce infant mortality in this community by 20 that's super clear i know how many uh uh infant deaths in the past five years i know what twenty percent looks like like i have a really clear goal um ahead of me um and then we look at get really clear on the population next step now is getting really clear on the population population level data and this is where you really want to look at the racial and other disparities and so now i'm looking across my city and i see that really if the infant mortality rate is highest in these five zip code areas and i think that's really important because oftentimes we have these kind of broad brushstroke strategies without being really clear about where to aim them right so now i know that's the population that um has the most need and that's where we could have the greatest impact so if i focus on these five zip codes that that's like 70 of my problem and i know inside of those five zip codes is predominantly african-american women and there's about 15 000 of them so i'm really clear on who i'm targeting um as opposed to looking at a city of 300 000 people and saying okay now where am i working inside of that and then we get clear about the factors so that's the next step down and clear about which factors are supporting or impeding the result and then we analyze that once we identify the factors we want to get clear on which ones do we have the most impact over and which ones have the most impact on our results so using the infant mortality example the organization um looked at where the work was being done around infant mortality and about 70 or so percent of the dollars were going towards um unsafe sleep there were campaigns all over town that coastline i don't know if this happened um everywhere but there were a lot of co-sleeping ads and like don't sleep with your baby but when we looked at the data there were only about 15 of those uh child deaths that were happening from co-sleeping and there was like really large swaths that were happening from prematurity and so looking at the data kind of focuses we have a lot of assumptions of what causes these things but this process and one of the reasons why um we use this process forces us to get really clear on those assumptions so that's why we create the factors and then we do research to kind of test our assumptions around what is the actual cause and so in this case you know the if all the money was going through co-sleeping looked at looked at what the real cause was and it was prematurity and so that allowed you know like that's what we need to prioritize um and then look that's what start to look at what drives prematurity etc and that's where um then you build the strategies on the factors that have the most impact on your result and that you have the most impact on and then from there um it's all about developing your performance measures um and getting really clear on like how will we know it's working how well do we need to do this so if you know you have a thousand mothers and you have a program that serves seven mothers a year like that's not going to do it right and so we need to get clear on like what's the scale that we need to do this and then what's the difference and then we track that um so that we can refine i always say the strategy is like our best guess like it's our best guess at what's going to work um and so in order for it to be a best guess that makes sense we really need to track it both at the indicator level and the performance measure lab level so that we can refine as we go and then this last piece i think is um really important um once we have the strategies built then it looks across the strategies and says what partners what collaborators do we need to advance this work so an example that i often use when i'm talking about rba is a group that build a mental health strategy um for farmers in northern wisconsin farmers apparently have like one of the highest suicide rates of any population and once the strategies were built they identified these seed dealers were a critical part of the strategies because they had the trusted relationships with the farmers and so they trained the seed dealers how to like give them information about mental health and direct them to and connect them to someone else now of course seed dealers were not at the table and building these strategies right but it's really looking at once the strategies are built like who are the unusual suspects who are the partners collaborators that need to be there and then the last thing i'll say about this is that all of this needs to feed up into staff work plans so everyone can see themselves in the work know what they own know where they're accountable where they support the work and how they're going to report against that work so it's clear um that it's tied to like the things that they're doing every day um so that's it that's it in a nutshell which i don't think short enough questions it's the eight-minute strategic planning of course that was extraordinary can i ask a couple of follow-on questions just for people who may want to understand more how this gets played out so as you if you were doing this inside a strategic planning process and you could use what you just said at a program planning level probably if a whole organization wasn't going through it but if you were doing an org wide strategic planning process would you um essentially you know orient socialize this way of thinking uh you know to the group to the leaders etc because some people haven't been trained in this kind of thinking so there's some education that happens and then where the major work work activities are or mission elements go through this process to develop one or more strategies about each body of work is that how you might do it or so i think i can answer that first question and that yes we socialize it throughout the organization first and i'll talk a little bit about an adaptive leadership um training that we do kind of at the beginning of all of our strategic planning processes just to ground people in like our way of thinking about the work and what are the like additional tools and capacities that they'll not only need to engage in the process but also the engage in the implementation of this work and then if you could repeat the second question because i don't think i quite understood it yeah i packed way too much in there my second question was if you were doing using this results-based accountability framework in an organization-wide strategic planning process would you go through these steps for each core program area or what kind of body of work that the organization works on it all depends so it all depends on whether folks are doing a complete revamp or not and so the result can exist at any level it can be the overarching exalt and then we're identifying and then your strategy speed up to that result if you have a body of work and you're like fit so if i use the work that we did with the foundation they already had kind of they weren't result statements but they had their bodies of work outlined and so then it became a matter of creating a result statement for each body of work and developing the strategies that would then support that work as opposed to creating an umbrella result statement and creating completely new strategies that fed up to that statement does that make sense it really does and it's a great reminder about the fact that unless you are just getting founded you're not starting over right and and part of what we're trying to figure out with these processes is how do we take these ideas and put them into what is working and what you do know and make it stronger um look we adapted depending on our clients needs and it almost never looks the same the steps are the same but it's never facilitated in the same way every time because everybody everybody has different needs right but what i take away from it among other things is that starting with a result is really different than even starting with say a mission i mean some people might see them the same way but they're not necessarily the same and and the disorientation is much more to where do we want to move the dial and i know you've been using human service examples but i always say there may be a way you want to move the dial in the arts in policy right i mean we're all trying to move something right so that's what excites me about this particular methodology is having that discussion at the beginning what are we trying to move the dial on and backing into the strategies is what i'm feeling when i hear you describe that no that's exactly that's exactly right and i i'm um i often say i hate mission and visions it's not that i hate them i don't hate them i love missions and visions i love them if you name your favorite organization this natural organization i dare you to restate the mission and vision i dare you you know i love all these various organizations but i can't restate their mission or vision so i think the specificity that this missions don't tend to require specificity um they they inspire um they are aspirational they are a point to to get to i think for planning processes um the idea that you want to get as specific as possible so you know what you're being held accountable to and you can communicate that effectively and track it effectively is really where you want to get inside of a planning process right um i'm going to ask you one more question as i i see a question in the in the q a that i think probably a number of people are thinking and i know we're speaking in general terms and you said of course you tailor this in every situation when an organization can only address a small part of a problem for instance you know it has the humility to recognize that you know it's not solving the whole problem or not even trying to or when they're trying to solve something that feels um you know where the answers aren't clear all the factors aren't clear can we still get to this kind of rigor i think people feel like oh well art we're too small to do this or you know we don't own enough of the pie to do this is there a way to adapt this to smaller organizations or situations where there's less certainty about how things are going to unfold yes and so the example i can give and i think it's because our minds tend to go out to like the largest of these problems we're trying to solve right um but what we always talk about especially we do a lot of coalition building work is that like those problems can't be solved by an organization like that's just not possible right but the example i would give inside of that is i'm currently working with a church who's working on racial equity and inclusion issues and you know when they started the process because the the process feels uh it requires a reorientation as you said and it feels a little difficult um to process conceptually it's not really until you get into it so of course they started with this huge result like you know they want to fix racism in milwaukee i'm like oh okay um but what we got them to is that their result is that they want to increase the number of business and faith-based leaders who feel empowered and educated around issues of racial equity and inclusion by x percent and so they wanted you know that's they want to do i think 750 people that still of course is contributing to this larger goal but it's a piece that they can own inside that goal so getting really clear of like what is your work um that's aimed at the issue but at your part of the issue that you can address that's really helpful example thank you so much and i know we'll be referring to this as we move on in the conversation uh thank you for walking us through that um steve do you want to share a little bit about how you and your team at spectrum are are approaching strategy sure so you know a lot of it is actually really similar to what dominique said using different words in in some cases you know i mean i think strategy is inherently about where to focus to best accomplish our missions and um you know at its simplest it's about really predicting the future and done correctly making decisions or trade-offs to get to that mission or vision um and the problem or challenge is that we're we're not very good at predicting the future i think we're not we're horrible as individuals as groups we're somewhat better but we're not great so you know as a result a lot of organizations tend to focus on the word planning and and do the planning part because that's what we can control as opposed to the strategy um we've talked a lot already in today's webinar about kind of the dynamic nature and a little bit of adaptive strategy and so where we've really turned is focusing on the organizational model and you know essentially helping people understand what how does this organization function and it starts um up top there with impact now we use intended impact um i'm in complete agreement with dominique around mission and vision um so i'm you know i'm an accountant by training wordsmithing not my uh not my forte and you know there tend to be big and broad and inspirational but we really focus around what specifically does this organization is this organization want to accomplish and what will what will their role be in that so that they can measure progress and be held accountable for results in that so we spend um that's our you know that is where we start with impact and really understanding that aspect from there kind of creating out a impact strategy or a theory of change as to what needs to happen in order for that to be successful to be achieved and then tying that into um okay so then what's the what's the financial model all right how do we generate resources um i'm still i'm still traumatized by working in non-profits as the finance guy that you know we'd come out of a weekend retreat and we'd have great programmatic goals and absolutely no way of paying for that or no way of putting in to it um you know allocate how we're going to allocate resources to build that financial model so we really look at that what is the revenue strategy and how does that align with um the impact and how do we make sure that there is strong alignment there and then all of it you know is is about people we're a people business um people that we serve people that volunteer with us people that donate to us and as importantly people that work with us and so who do we need not only at the table during this process but who do we need to have feedback loops with on an ongoing basis and and each of these you know there are three distinct areas but they're all so interconnected throughout and and our belief really is that if you understand this model and you understand how these pieces kind of work together for one is you're creating an inclusive process because then anybody can meaningfully engage in a strategic discussion about what the future of the organization is i mean we've all been in things where somebody has said something and everyone just kind of rolls their eyes because they know that will never happen well it's it's because they don't have the information perhaps um to really meaningfully contribute and so this is a way of trying to to you know pull back the curtain and let everybody see how the organization can move forward now you know once you have the model it enables an organization to really you know adapt as it goes along to address opportunities and challenges we do identify so on in the next slide gene we have kind of you know we recognize organizations operate in this dynamic environment and so given this moment in time what are the strategic priorities to be able to those arrows kind of going out to be able to expand the organization's impact and and influence in the greater uh community in our world or market there and recognizing that there's always kind of pressures on that system but that hopefully you know that that model will hold now it may change as you learn and as you adapt but each of those components tend to be pretty solid but the priorities by which you would expand them would change in response to that market um moving forward so there's a lot of things i want to ask so one is what i'm hearing you say is that essential to your work is almost like a collective deepening of the understanding of the engine of the organization like the fundamentals of the organization the the the fundamental reason it exists the fundamental way it gets paid the fundamental way it engages people and that that you're sort of articulating that in that inner circle that now has blue around it as we all need to know this or at least you know a lot of people need to know this on board and staff when you said that this allows people to engage i wasn't sure did you mean that some people will be more comfortable in one of those circles one or two of those circles and can contribute more say on the revenue planning or on the people planning or on the impact work kind of similar to what dominique described i mean i think that we we each probably have um a circle that we live in or that we're most comfortable with but if you are involved with an organization each circle over you know overlaps the other and so there is there needs to be an awareness of the other circles and there needs to be a at least comfort of finding out who who is who is deep and knowledgeable about um our people strategy our impact and and making sure that um they're part of the conversation uh the conversation as well okay and then you're you're differentiating between if you're going into a strategic planning process let me ask you would introduce this concept and flesh it out if they were new to it or as dominique said if they already you know had a lot of the pieces of the model or had worked with you before or something you would sort of revisit and refine that and then you would do okay in this context what are our priorities that's kind of the goal setting piece what what been akin to the goal setting piece in a traditional process yeah so i worked at one point with a client that was a an association of psycho analysts and i'll never forget because at the end of it the guy said to me you essentially are doing what we do which is you take the subconscious and you make it conscious um and and that is in many ways what we're trying to do is we're trying to actually you know like when we talk about intended impact i'm not trying to change their impact i'm trying to articulate it now does that mean that we don't you know just like with a revenue strategy we may need to refine and adjust we need to get more specific but you know even for a startup organization why why did you start right what is the impact that you want to have so i feel like people already know that it is trying to to move it further now i will say i think the people the the the people circle there is the one that is changing um that's the one where we're seeing the most change in organizations as they recognize that they're not um equitable they're not inclusive they're not you know really reflective of their community and so that is an example where actually just documenting what they've done isn't gonna cut it and you need to you know you need to change right one person's asking there's been you all have been debating the relative value of mission and values why do you have it on this model so you know i have it on the model because i do believe that organizations um still use the mission as a touch point i think that the mission for me the mission is important in communicating broadly and inspiring people broadly to become part of an organization i happen to think that values are very important so please don't take that out i think they're very important but i like to do them last because look i've been again too part of too many processes where um we will we we will lead with them and then that will be done and then then we'll actually do the work and so what i do is i try to say you know if we're going to do them is i try to do them last and say what what are the what are the values that are reflected in here and if something is missing then we need to go back and change but that it's you know that way you're really living it as opposed to um as opposed to just putting it on the poster that's really interesting idea to do values last talk about again telling the truth to ourselves you know if you if you've made all these strategies what values do you see expressed there i mean they obviously you're as you've developed them they they are your analysis they are your um your sense of what needs to be done they obviously reflect values that's really interesting i could imagine it's pretty radical i think for most people most you know to say oh we're gonna do those last um so love to just have some people comment on that in the q a you mentioned theory of change and someone's asking um what's your opinion of that are you using that term sort of you know generally or do you actually create a document or is that the impact strategies you referenced yeah so so i i do think um so we tend to use the term impact strategy and the reason why is because you know theory of change has its roots in evaluation and and and we're actually just trying to document more than we are trying to evaluate i also think it is a little yeah we're all comfortable with it but i think it is a jargon barrier with boards and with others and so um when we talk about impact strategies how does an organization accomplish impact and and we do a one-page graphic that really shows it really shows that that you know organizations it would have the intended impact it would have kind of what the outcomes necessary for that impact are what the strategies are for to accomplish that and then what the current program portfolio is to accomplish those strategies and it it just helps kind of be a touchstone so i would say for us coming out of the process you know i know we're going to talk about product later but part of the product is these documents that are a touchstone and i would argue a framework or model to have those those further strategic discussions right so in conclusion for now about that you would document all three of those things in the model so the in your inner circle there yeah and that might be a couple of pages i'm guessing you know not not very long uh because they're sort of the essential engine not that they're fixed but as you said they you know they're how it goes and and to to go back and revisit one of those means that some force in this larger circle has really caused us to question our fundamental something our fundamental impact our fundamental business model our fundamental approach to working with people and so that gets documented and that you can kind of use that you can use it as a communications tool a hiring tool i would imagine right i mean this is how you articulate as you said what the organization is um okay let's let's move along um because i want to get i want to get to nadine's story and um thank you all for the comments you're putting in here i want to offer with my strategic planning consultant had on my third and a half panelist hat on um one thing that you said about values for me and my work what i'm excited about is connecting values to methods and i know steve you and i have talked about this a lot the chosen way of doing the work um so to me that chosen way of doing the work is an expression of value so we could all want um you know a particular outcome but the actual approach we take to that work i think is really important to articulate so that that's what you socialize people to that's what you want them to own is the special sauce the methods the ways the organization shows up to people to the work and for me i like to make a jump from values to methods or i like what you said steve let's look at in fact this is i guess what i do let's uncover our methods what are we doing underneath all these programs and that is going to give you a lot of insight into what you believe right and if there's a dissonance to use nadine's word there that's a really rich place this is how we're working but this is what we believe uh-oh right or this is how we work let's update let's get bolder and articulating our beliefs because we're really doing something here or you know in some exchange there i think is a really powerful strategic thinking process um okay so thank you both for sharing those models and it's fun to see the similarities and the complementary-ness of them as well as the different tools involved the four of us want to talk about the tensions and opportunities that this climate uh presents as we said earlier what do we fit inside this tent called strategic planning or something else if we need to and i want to start by sharing this data that i alluded to we asked you have you recently or are you now incorporating race equity that might be updating your values or trying to revising strategies etc into your strategic plan or if you don't have a plan just into your organizational positioning so one of my wordy questions but you got it apparently so um yes like you know 76 percent of people this was about half or a third of you who responded to the survey um said yes we are now in the process or recently have had wanted to revisit our strategies based on our deepening commitment to race equity um or you had recently done it only eight percent of you said no um and then selfishly as as consultants because this is what we're experiencing and we talked about in one of our planning calls we asked you are you therefore asking two or more consultants maybe a strategy consultant an equity consultant or an equity strategy consultant who also wants to partner with someone else right are you asking people to integrate their work because you're trying to integrate the work and it was about half and half who are you know asking consultants to configure in different ways which i think has huge implications for process and product and price actually and a lot of things right about how we do this work um so that was really interesting and then here's a big uh slide of words but you know you you're all getting the slides um in the recording which you'll get in a couple days you might want to go back to this because i pulled from a number of really evocative quotes when we asked you what are the challenges that you're experiencing right now with respect to your strategic positioning or process um and i'm just going to lift up a few words i know some of you may be reading these or not but it's you know this one here's one this inability to have productive conflict the fragmenting of staff around organizational structure in regards to hierarchy and power showing up in our decision-making processes raise your hand dominique steve i mean are you seeing this your clients right so we're inside this quote strategic planning process but there's a ton of conflict about who gets to decide and how much trust is there and how do we disagree and that's why i put that truth to power image in the beginning one of the reasons it's like we're trying to do that and call it strategic planning right somebody said it's really difficult to have a truly uh participatory process when we recognize the power dynamics across different stakeholder groups i know nadine is going to talk about that here's a group that you know is doing dei learning and went uh oh we have to go back now and look at the strategic plan we just did and try to merge these two thinkings how do we do that there's resistance to looking at how our organization has to change just change resistance like seeing that we're not as relevant how do we make that change there's lots of folks and i experience this a lot who are struggling with the fact that some people in the organization think that equity work is not their work right they think it's just culture work or or side work or personal transformation work which it is all those things but it's also the work in many cases and trying to figure out well then equity work is strategy work and vice versa the role of governance and how do we get our board and staff aligned when we're trying to be community centered right this last to our one of them is a racial justice organization saying oh my god now we have overwhelming demand and no space to think or be because you know finally there's enormous demand for what we're doing and then the last person talked about needing to realize that as a hunger organization they weren't really addressing the income inequality that was at the root of humber and needing to create a new position called a hunger solutions advocate and what does that mean and how do you resource that and how do they influence the programming and so these are the kind of quotes we saw of just really really challenging questions that we're trying to address some of them are about how we work with one another some of them about the purpose of our organization as we do this work um so thank you for sharing those so i want to turn to this tension between process and product we've spent you know a lot of time talking about process so far and we also have this thing called are we developing a product a plan a document a video a powerpoint you know what is this thing that we're culminating with and nadine i wanted to ask you to spend a few minutes sharing your interesting story as an executive uh surfing that tension between process and product sure well you know we we actually began our strategic planning process uh in 2018 and and our initial thought was we're going to go to collaborative labs which is a based on a college campus and they do work with nonprofits and with corporations and you know you you bring the stakeholders in you spend one or two days sort of locked into this conversation professionally facilitated breakout groups electronic anonymous voting so it had all these tools that could let people who might not want to speak up in front of their manager get their thoughts into the process and at the end of it they produce a document that that gives you a head start on your strategic plan uh and for some people that is actually the strategic plan the whole process so that that was sort of you know so in 2018 it sounded very appealing to go through something that at the end the facilitators would go here is what you all just told us uh you're about um and but then along the way we said you know what we we're not the right cohort alone we've got to get the stakeholders into the space and and that happened because we were having these conversations around the state that we were going through this process we were about to put out a questionnaire to our membership and and so the moment that we decided that we were going to have cohorts uh black lgbtq leadership latinx leadership business leadership trans and gender non-binary leadership have their own separate cohorts before our staff board and leadership team came changed everything because what was coming out of those for no resemblance to the assumptions that were embedded you know in our in our document so can i just make sure that people know what you mean by cohort so you mean you flipped it and decided to that process where you go in the room and everyone dreams and they document it you decided let's have these stakeholder groups do that yeah because part of it is and everyone you know i know that uh you know as a black lesbian doing this work it's hard to know if you're a pioneer or a token in a space until you look backwards and so we thought if we pulled together a room that was you know a mix of a lot of different folks that they're like there's a different energy that comes when you are you can speak in your own shorthand with people with shared experience and so we didn't want to create you know uh that question of you know we wanted we wanted the conversations to produce what the community in that space wanted it to produce and um so that changed everything about how we began to approach this and um and it opened up you know i was i was on a panel not too long ago with uh jim arnold who is a neonatal surgeon and she's on a television show um about little people and she was talking about getting her job at the at the hospital and how the administrators came to her and said we're going to assign someone to bring a stool to every exam room whenever you need it so that you will have no problem conducting exams which she thought was very kind of them to be thinking in those terms but quickly it became super uncomfortable and she said finally i just said can you just put a stool in every exam room which they did which was sort of a blazingly obvious thing that only comes from actually speaking to uh the impacted party and we had a thousand of those kinds of uh moments of that is so obvious you know it you know and so we became so committed to that a process that drove our strategic planning through um that lens uh you know you know i'm happy to talk more about that you know how it actually unfolded yeah thank you so much for that uh there's a lot in there and i want to ask you as the executive director because you're not a consultant how do you make it sounds like then you probably went back to your team and your board and said you know what that wasn't we're not done we're not going to finish this year we're not going to like how did you change people's relationship to the process maybe is the product or you know almost yeah well i think that i think everyone reading the documents uh were everyone was going wow this is so rich there's no way that we're going you know this is we just scratched the surface and there were things that that immediately were apparent that we had them flipped upside down we like we were approaching it with assumptions that had just been completely dismantled in these conversations um share here i know we're going to come back to in a minute but i just want people to hear hear the fundamental shift in your overall thinking um you know sort of the uber strategy that emerged from that but then you're still serving in this process well i mean i think the big themes that emerged from from everything that we were doing was how was that we needed to center the most vulnerable in terms of prioritizing our work in fact i love when steve was talking about making uh conscious the subconscious because i think the uns you know sort of the unspoken thing in around lgbtq politics for a long time was that the standard of what is appropriate for the agenda of lgbt people tended to be what was important to the most protected right and um whether it was spoken or not it it became that and and the funding flowed to those um to those priorities and so when we showed up in the aftermath of uh a number of incidents of police brutality um and racist vigilante uh you know violence um when trayvon martin was murdered we and we began to speak on that we got a lot of pushback we lost some donors mostly white gay men who were like why why are we talking about this i mean it's it's mission drift it's not you know inequality florida's bailly way and even as an organization that had put racial justice you know embedded it in the origin of our organization you know we were upset to discover that pushback but it was also a moment of going how is it possible for that for anyone to know our organization and be surprised by that that's our failure to articulate and walk that talk in a way so we had to go back and say okay that's that is on us no one should ever be surprised to see us when we show up as a repro justice organization as a anti-racist organization and so um i think that the you know so much of this process was a it was a mirror that was that was being held up and so we began to say why did we show up for example in aids and hiv what was the argument it wasn't unique to the lgbtq community what were the things that made it so obvious that we did not even need to articulate why it was a major part of our work and it was the disproportionate impact um and that the and that the response to it was hampered by stigma and bigotry and if that was our criteria why isn't that our criteria across the board and where does it cause us to show up where we aren't showing up because of the you know subconscious way that the agenda is set by a funding environment that was tilted very much to a particular race and economic class within our movement thank you so much um i saw someone just made a comment about the distinction between strategy and planning um and what you just said is you know the most quintessential example of a strategy now it's leading to all kinds of plans i'm sure and we'll hear some more about that but you had a record you know obviously you know this i love that language of how are people misinterpreting us well how are we not showing up that way why are they surprised to see us show up that way that's the dissonance again to use your word right between what you thought you were doing you know and and what you personally believed i'm sure and what how actually the organization was was being received by some of these other communities right and so the strategy is to go to that and then figure out what do we do right what what can we do well and i think one of the things that we did that really was more important we realized at the time was when we brought the cohorts together we didn't lead the conversation equality florida didn't leave the conversation the facilitators from collaborative labs did but we said don't restrict your thinking to a quality folder ask what this community needs because it may not fit into our our organizational bailiwick but don't be restricted by saying we like this we don't like that just and and because of that the conversation just completely shifted and we began to see you know we we thought we were saying do that because at the end of it maybe some of this information will be useful to community centers or to foundations or to others but it really showed us this is what i mean when i said we discovered that we were offering to bring the stool to the exam room instead of listening and saying what do you need um and so so yeah it's it began a journey that we are still on we have not produced the document called the strategic plan yet but it's already it has been changing our organization uh at each you know iteration it's it has become a part of every single board meeting a year-long uh process with our board and staff around racial equity um it's brought to you know there's just so much that keeps flowing from this um that we have a we're supposed to finish it this year in september but we'll see because you know it may who knows what's going to happen uh as we go through this process because we want a document that we we're prepared and eager to share with the public that that tells people this is who we are how we're going to operate the values that drive what we're doing our assumptions and to do it in a way that has that allows people to go hey you know what i think some of these we disagree or we're you know this is great and somebody else is already leading in that space and then we you know whatever comes of it i feel like what we what we're really building in is the ability to be nimble and have these sort of values that we can sort of um we call it a a safety fall when you you know it's like whatever is happening we know that we are going to center the most vulnerable and we're going to ensure that the the community that bears the brunt of the issue is their voices are centered centered in it and we know that if we follow those two guideposts then we're gonna then then we're being true to our values and that's what's gonna drive our mission so powerful and i mean if i may that that's a richer example than i could ever give of the connection between values and methods like the method is or the strategy you know whatever it is you're saying we're always going to do this that's who we are we don't know what it's going to lead to but the fundamental strategy is an expression of our values and our recognition that this isn't happening enough in our field or our movement thank you for sharing that i want to move us to the second tension and opportunity that was so centered in all the data we got from you and it also was part of the impetus for us coming together to design this session which is our own experience as consultants and executives on is that are we trying to for those of you who are doing equity work which is an awful lot of you right that's not everybody but a lot of you 75 of the people who responded to the pre-survey were in the midst or recent midst of doing equity work in the organization um is are we trying to see that as embedded in or the frame four or what of of strategy work and i know there isn't one answer but we want to surface some ideas around this dominique i'm going to start with you on this one what are you seeing around this tension between demand and readiness and where does this fit in the process yep so i um i'm kind of lumping people into two categories um and inside of those categories are a myriad of you know um other ways i would describe clients i'm working in it's organizations that have been working on this um and so prior to the events of last summer they had some type of focus on racial equity and had started the work and then organizations would not been working on this but now feel a sense of urgency to do something they're like okay everybody's doing something it's a you know they're getting pressure from their staff and sometimes um but less often from their board and they're really trying to figure out um what that looks like and so and i think when we first spoke i think that was the question you led with was around like organizations that are fully integrating this into some overall strategic planning process organizations that aren't doing it all in organizations that are kind of running these processes parallel um one another and and what i told you then and what i i maintain now is that i don't know if there's a right way to do it because we haven't seen how this all shakes out yet right so you use the term readiness and i also tend to use the term readiness but that implies that we know what it takes to do this work we've never genuinely created racial equity or social justice in the united states to date we really don't know exactly what it takes to do this work and so i just want to say that too um that you know there's this idea of like we want it to be a process that we know will achieve an outcome at the end but we've never done i mean we just haven't done this before and i think we have to be okay inside of that we have to be okay that we are um that we're experimenting and creating and documenting and you know that's going to be different for every organization and that it has not happened for anyone yet um the other thing about readiness i think that it implies that some of the characteristics capacities and attitudes like need to be in place before you start work on racial equity or social justice and i don't think that's all together true either for me it's more about an assessment of where you are what you need to prioritize and where where you can realistically get in a time frame i think what i've been seeing from organizations and i i tend to frame everything kind of around the adaptive leadership we work we do is that we always talk about technical challenges and adaptive challenges so technical challenges are those where we have expertise or past experience or in existing capacity like we know how to do it i mean people don't really have to change we could come up with a plan and we can move that forward and then adaptive challenges are outside of our expertise they require people to change um their habits beliefs loyalties etc and racial equity and inclusion is a super adaptive challenge and what i see people treating it like is a super technical challenge and so what i've seen um you know out the gate from everybody shopping last summer was um you know everybody had a racial equity statement right right everybody put something up on their website like we know how to do that we know how to do that we can craft something we know what that means um we know how to do that but i i um equate that to i had a client who um they were having issues with trust amongst their partners um and the leader was like you know what we need a newsletter no ma'am no ma'am that's not gonna that's not gonna do it um so that is like the it's like the technical solution to the adaptive challenge i think what we have to recognize is that this work inherently um triggers both conscious and unconscious anxieties with your staff your leadership is forcing people to um examine their personal values your organizational values all your norms and behaviors like nadine was saying it forces you to test your assumptions and it is difficult work um you know we're not making widgets all of the work that we do is difficult work but we want to fit it into something that feels more formulaic but in order for people to do this work and be successful you really have to design a process where people can find their own entry points into the work in a way that reflects their own identities and like what it means to them both as an individual um personally and inside of the organizational context and you have to be okay with that frictions going to arise right you have to have a leader that can hold that tension and understand that it's going to be uncomfortable not just for some people for everybody and that everybody is coming to the work from a different place they have uncertainty and shame and it's really um it's it's it's going to be difficult for everybody to process especially your people of color but i don't want to minimize the experience for white people inside of this work also and if you have a culture that doesn't support naming the elephant in the room and having uncomfortable conversations and being able to see things from different perspectives and a process and the tools and the capacities to do that it becomes all together um more difficult um so i'm gonna stop there because i know i'm like just kind of going on and on and no no not at all and and i'm i wanted to invite you to there was a phrase you used in one of our conversations about you know the internal culture the external strategy and helping people especially if they're trying to come at this in the context of a strategic plan can you can you share that that culture strategy idea yep so i am and this is a familiar saying that how you do one thing is how you do everything and so to say that you are um doing uh work around equity and inclusion in your pro your external facing programs and strategies but that you're not doing that work internally it just isn't true right and so like you can't if you are not equitably inclusive be doing that so we often talk about the equity lens and the equity mirror so the equity lens looks at the how um how you are looking at the data disaggregating the data using targeted universalism understanding that people are kind of coming at this from a bunch of different places and that you're designing your strategies in order to address where people are even though you're trying to get them to the same place so nadine when you talked about um your work and kind of this pushback that you had from um economically privileged white men who are like this is not a part of your work kind of under that umbrella of targeted universalism like it's all our work it's just that your way out here on this we have these marginalized communities they're starting here so we're prioritizing those strategies in order to get them where you are understanding that we're all moving towards the same finish line um so that's how we kind of think about the lens i think underneath that it's really an appreciation and this is often based in um education for the historical context that created those disparities right and so i i hear a lot of conversations and they're you know we recognize the disparities but we're never having the back conversation like okay how do we get here like let's look at the policies and practices that have been in place over the last you know 100 years that actually got us here that really grounds people in the truth of like why this is like this is because again you're dealing with people and people have only their lived experience to bring to the table so whatever education whatever awareness i have around that that's what i'm bringing to it and if i don't have that then i have if i don't have uh an in-depth understanding of why we are where we are then i'm bringing my own judgments my biases like based on what i know about the world right um and then the other side of that we talk about the equity lens is the equity mirror so looking at who is at your table um and looking at how decisions are made at your organization for your community or the intended beneficiaries so the people you serve and so if it's an issue you're working on then how many people are at your tables that have lived experience with this issue how many have friends or family with direct experience with this issue if it's neighborhood based or geographic based then how many people live in the area how many people have family that live in the area how many people on your team reflect the demographics of the people you serve or from other historically disenfranchised groups um and how many people work directly with the population and so we kind of look in that in four buckets and the thing about it is that you and this is i often frame diversity just as difference and in my personal life um as well as my professional life it really is just about creating enough difference at the table where you can see more of the picture right and so um i often tell this story about which i'm sure you all have heard about the the blind men and the elephant have you heard this story yes and so like we i need all of you here so i can know what i'm looking at because you are describing this elephant as a trunk you're describing it as a tail like i need to know um get as much of the picture um as possible and then kind of underneath that or above that you then will need to look at the power dynamics around your engagement um and how people are showing up in those conversations and do they have the tools to lean back do they have the tools to appreciate the input even if it's not communicated in a way um that they are used to receiving like there are all these other dynamics when you start to engage difference the reason why we're different um is because we do things because we're actually different and so that means that what i hear a lot of people what i imply from what i often hear is that they want difference but they don't want the way they change or they don't want the way they operate to change so like yes of course we want all these different people at our table but we still want to do things exactly how we do them right like you're invited to this table as long as you can play by these rules and that is where i think the um friction comes into place because what true inclusion looks like is making space for that difference and collectively deciding what works for all um so yeah and i and i i go back and forth but i i do i used to say you should prioritize your the inner work before you start your your outer equity work but um now i i feel like you have to do them um in parallel processes and then you just have to be really honest with yourself and your organizations like where are we in this what parts are we good at how do we know um what are we actually trying to move towards like what do our partners think about how we do this how can we be more honest with them i mean these are the questions that you need to evaluate as you're on your own internal journey and thinking about doing the work externally that is so helpful to me what you just said because we do a lot of this binary kind of thinking like if you haven't done your work you can't do this work when it's what i'm hearing you saying this has been my observation too it's actually a little more nuanced than that i mean if you haven't done any work you certainly can't go out and do work but if you're doing the work you can show up in transparency about doing the work and and you know as nadine referred to you'll find out if other people think they're ahead of you in that space you'll find out if you know if people still don't find it resonant or what have you but it it's not like you've finished the work you're never going to finish the internal so if we wait till we all get finished that that's can actually be avoidance i think of engaging in the challenge of doing the work right with others so yeah i love that guidance because that's a shorthand we use and it's much more complicated than that i i would agree with you i need to be aware of our time as i knew i would need to be so there's more that we could say there um and maybe we'll do that in our on our final thing i may come back uh to some of these issues around partnering as consultants but let me i want to um in a rather contained way uh on these next two slides now nadine could you share people are very interested in the methodology so if you'll repeat again uh the group that you used to facilitated those cohorts um and maybe just give us an insight about i know from our conversations that it changed some of the way you're working around economic justice around trans justice do you want to give an example of what that who the engagement was and then a specific action that came out of it um sure i well i'll use our transaction program that we started which um was an idea we'd gotten from south carolina and in florida the the statewide trans organization kept sort of coming apart because they didn't have much of a they didn't have the structural back end you know they didn't and so we as we said at the eve of of what we thought was the collapse once again of a statewide trans organization that we would provide you know the non-programmatic things you know bookkeeping and you know taxes tax preparation all that kind of stuff and they could focus entirely on program and when the conversation by the time the conversation was over they wanted to be part of the of equality florida have a have it be a part of the organization and our counter was yes but let's keep it separate enough that if you at any moment with if you all want to start your you know just take off as a separate organization it it's there so there was a structure for that and the the first gathering of that um statewide trans leadership produced a list of priorities and number one by and far you know far and away number one was a resource guide you know where do where can i find a a doctor where can i shop you know without being harassed where you know just just these basic day-to-day living um issues not that was nowhere on equality florida's you know uh strategy it had not occurred to us the things that we thought were going to be top priorities as reflected in our strategic plan were completely uh and so it became that transaction still exists it operates somewhat autonomously the part part of equality florida and builds a strategic plan that is incorporated into quality florida's strategic plan and um you know and so i i define you know i want to describe that structure because it is always difficult when you join a board i've joined many boards where i am one of a few people of color you know one of the few people from the lgbtq community and there's a tension in trying to figure out how you show up in those spaces how how vocal do you know i don't want to you know show up those first meetings and look like i'm here to dismantle this but i also don't want to sit quietly and be complicit when i'm seeing do some messed up things and so the idea that communities needed to be able to speak honestly with each other in order to produce something that wasn't distorted by the very entity that was seeking to be changed by the product of those conversations was a part of you know what informed how we how we built that um that structure and we did it in the sequence so that by the time our board staff uh what we call our council leaders which is largely uh board members who have turned off but are still involved and some of our core volunteers we purposely structured it for last and said the conversation we were going to have was going to be informed by the products of those stakeholder conversations that proceeded um that this group would not show up with a blank page and so um i think that there were you know there's so many things that that dominique which is saying that we're so like the the tension points that i see that i is um largely along racial lines this adaptive versus technical i think is one of the biggest challenges where the you know um whiteness calls for a checklist of you know if that's a problem give me the checklist i'm going to fix it we want to act you know fast where um you know bypoc folks were like what wait a second you're first of all understand that this has been a long round for a very long time and if you think you have a hot tip a quick fix you know just sit with the arrogance of that statement you know understand that what we're trying to do is get to a place where uh there's a shared understanding and if we bring up things that are painful we don't want you to quickly brush past them and give us a quick solution and that and i think that we our board and our staff went through um a year of meetings uh once a week or twice a week wow uh that we're all about diet having dialogue around racial equity specifically that we're not solution oriented that we're about just being with the these realities and how you react to them and uh so much of that was about trust building that the desire to not have to deal with it wouldn't produce quick fix that quick fix mentality that these are deeply rooted that and it and i think it you know we've seen many organizations that go oh we our racial justice the optics don't look good let's bring a bunch of people onto the board or let's hire our first person of color trans ed and then you see how quickly that person you know after the big splashy uh press release a year and a half later that person's gone because the structure wasn't ready and so i think that is part of this the pace that we have taken but also just embracing the fact that we're going to get it wrong you know i think that's one of the other things about this these processes everybody wants to get it so that when you finally step out onto the stage you are absolutely certain that there's no place for critiques you've thought about everything it's impossible you will get critiqued because you can't do in fact you should want to it is part of how you know that you're actually heading in the right direction for some people to say you know what i for all your talk you're only you're only doing this you're not doing that just and i so within that strategic planning process i think preparing organizations for that reality for that uh tension within the process is an important part of it you will you were will never be impervious to critique you shouldn't want to be it is part of the ongoing process and um you know we are dealing with a structure that has long preceded us that we are not close to dismantling and it informs every part of of this work and we and and so um i think that's why we you know in terms of making the conscious the subconscious conscious i think what we were we are saying in this lengthy process of building our strategic plan is that we are consciously saying we are not going to give in to the quick fix we are not going to presume that we are going to fix these things but what we are going to do is make sure that along this journey we are asking ourselves who is the most vulnerable and we are asking ourselves how do we make sure whatever step we take is informed you know and driven by the folks who are bearing the breath thank you there's some so much in that a lot i want to follow up on and and we don't have time at the moment but i i just can't underscore enough that your story of stakeholder engagement that term isn't even adequate right that's like a consulting term and you're talking about a fundamental value set and a shift in how the organization views its role um that i think is a really great bar for some of us who might be using language like that but aren't in fact ready to be influenced uh by what we learned um the last tension that we that we had on here was around leadership and structure issues coming up inside these larger strategies slash equity processes and i'll just name a few things that i'm seeing in my practice i'm seeing a lack of trust in strategic planning processes because they were originated without acknowledging the history in the organization and sort of starting from a place that doesn't feel honest sometimes to staff right and there's there's a sort of beginning and ending inside a much larger context often bored and executive driven that i think is increasingly difficult for staff to believe in in organizations where there isn't trust up and down that structure i think there's a higher than ever desire to experiment with structure as a tool in addressing equity and deeper democracy in organizations and that the strategic planning processes bring up that tension and again to this cognitive dissonance people feeling like well wait if these are our values and this is what we want in the world is our organization function structured in in a way that aspires to that or are we saying that but still operating in really old terms at the same time i think there's a big confusion about structure versus practices and an over reliance as a technical fix on structure so that i'm saying on both end that on the one hand people are hungry to dismantle structures and try different things in the experiments towards greater equity the danger that i'm seeing and especially from white leaders is well let's just change the structure okay then put that role on the management team um i see what you're saying add a diversity officer uh right and this gets to what dominique and nadine were just both addressing which is these technical fix and structure as a technical fix rather than kind of an ongoing experiment around equity and power sharing so i lift that up because i see i saw that in your comments some of you and i certainly see it in my practice that there will be challenges to how we're organized as we try on new strategies and refine our values we have time for a 30-second comment from each of you um to this last prompt and i'm going to be vigilant on my 30 seconds um so you can just raise your hand if you're ready to go and then we'll do 30 seconds each and the question is how can we best show up to this to our next process and i'm thinking of all of these groups and there's more because of course there's community as well but this call the people in this caller are largely identifying as one or more of these categories and i just want your your thought given everything we've talked about how do we show up to this kind of work in this context who's got a thought i'm happy to start off and i'm just going to like pair it back what steve said earlier that's why i was trying to get ahead of him on it um but i think it really is about um about making the subconscious conscious and like making a commitment to be really really clear about where we are and really honest about that and transparent about it and vulnerable as a way to then figure out where we can get to and where we want to get to i think often times we're like planning around our blind spots you're like well of course that's what you want to do but like that that's not grounded in the reality of who we are as an organization and then if i have like 10 more seconds the second thing i would add is that you know um we we coach leaders around this and i think now that the harvard business review and others are starting to lift up uh vulnerability and transparency as critical components of leadership i think it's giving people permission to really think about this differently but a leader recently was like really nervous about going before her staff and um having this conversation and in the conversation we talked to her about like we'll say that right and so she got it but she said i don't know what i'm doing and i'm super nervous about it and i want you to hold me accountable and we have to figure this out together and that then creates the space for all the possibilities but when you get up and you say i know what i'm doing this is where we're headed that you know people know that's they just do especially your people of color they're like this is not going to work and so i think really um investing in like whatever tools you need as a leader whether that be coaching or whatever that looks like that gets you to a place where you can operate in a space of like courage transparency and vulnerability as you lead this work is critically important thank you awesome nadine your 30-second answer to a massive question sure i i had written down three things uh vulnerability clarity and um and motivated self-interest and by that i mean i think often when we think about uh racial equity there's a there's a sense of you know i what i see a lot is people feel like they are going to be criticized they're not going to get it right they will be called hypocrites if they do it one way you know it's never fast enough never enough and when i say motivated self-interest what i'm really saying is understand that the reason for embedding this in your work is not etiquette it's not um optics it's not just um you know uh right trending what it means is if you don't your organization will not exist because you will not be relevant to the context whatever it is you're working on so the motivating self-interest is if my organization is going to have impact and do what we say we do we were going to have to wrangle with this no matter how uncomfortable it gets no matter how sharp the learning curve for different parts of our organization we will not be relevant to the the population as it changes in america thank you so much steve um that was great and i think you know for me i'll pair it back a little bit what nadine said earlier it's not a checklist it's a journey and so to really ask yourself why you're going into it and to approach it with that openness that you you are embarking on a journey i mean each of these areas are so complex and to think about the fact are you are you really gonna do that in a four to six month time frame you know um strategy is about an approach and so really thinking about how do you capture that vulnerability how do you capture that openness and how do you collectively walk that journey towards the impact that you want to have articulating the impacts the easy part the strategy is the hard part the three of you are amazing um thank you again and just to reiterate that this was very much a co-created session through multiple conversations and i appreciate each of you for showing up and sharing your stories and thinking collectively about what now thank you all thanks to all of you who participated in the survey thanks to all of you who are leading edge members and we welcome those of you considering it and your evaluation will pop up now take care