As a strategist and facilitator, I spend a lot of time in boardrooms, working with executive teams through their biggest strategic challenges. While I typically work with non-profits, crown corporations, and post-secondary institutions (organizations that have complex relationships with government), I have built strategies with several national and for profit organizations this year. And guess what? All of these organizations have more in common than you might think. In this blog, I'm going to share the top three meta-themes that have come out of all of the strategic planning projects I've led over the past year. My guess is that you'll see some parallels with your own organization - and maybe have a few aha! moments that can spark new ideas for how to address your organization's challenges.  

While approaches to dealing with strategic challenges may be different depending on the region, scale, and type of organization, many of my clients are experiencing very similar obstacles to success. To understand why that's the case, I think we need to take a step back and acknowledge what we've all gone through over the past five years. 

Forces shaping strategic plans

Depending on the budget available, most of my projects involve some combination of interviews, focus groups, and surveys with key stakeholders. That can include Board members, executive teams, staff, donors, clients, and partners. Through these conversations, I typically gather information to present back to the client in an Insights Report - effectively a combination of a SWOT analysis and a PESTEL analysis, but considered through the lens of what the most important issues are, which the organization needs to address in its strategic plan. 

The global pandemic disrupted culture

In 100% of the plans I've completed, the global pandemic was raised as a driver of many current-day strengths and weaknesses of organizations. And in most cases, the pandemic led to a real loss of tangible culture within organizations. Where there used to be a clear focus for how employees worked together, in today's environment, where there are a variety of workplace accommodations in place, but often no real strategy for maintaining an intentional culture, stakeholders lament the reality that their culture seems to have disappeared. The truth is, they still have a culture. It's just not the one they want. 

Workplace culture evolves, based on the people involved and their intentional (or unintentional) focus on building norms for how employees and clients engage with one another. The absence of a deliberate focus on culture doesn't mean that culture ceases to exist. It just means the culture will evolve in a direction that people may not like. 

The pandemic disrupted the drivers of culture that had become so normal, they became imperceptible. You know - the rituals of daily conversations in the elevator, taking breaks at the coffee shop down the street, and the ways we celebrated birthdays, work anniversaries, and life events. But culture was also shaped by how we worked together. The vibe of leadership, and its openness to people popping in to ask questions. The relative availability of colleagues and supervisors to collaborate. The expectations that employees would contribute to lists on a whiteboard or participate in ideation sessions. The pandemic forced a hald to all of these cultural behaviours. And leaders were so busy figuring out how to meet the ongoing production needs of their organizaitons, they didn't stop to think about the importance of establishing new cultural drivers within a hybrid environment. 

Even though 2020 seems like a long time ago, in many organizations, the employee experience still feels unstable and unpredictable. And unfortunately (this is my bias coming out), there is a trend in some organizations to try and return to the way things once were, before that global disruption. There is a naive belief that if employees come back to the office, everything will return to normal. What those managers forget is that the drivers of culture have changed. But more importantly, people have changed. 

The people have changed

I remember advancing my career in the public service, where, as far back as 2006, there was a strategy for how the organization would ease the loss of the Baby Boomer generation from our workplaces. That was almost 20 years ago, and in many workplaces, there are still a few Boomers on staff. Today, there are five generations in the workplace, each with its own biases, characteristics, and work styles. I am a card-carrying member of Generation X and regularly talk to my kids in frustration about their peers, who don't seem to have the same work ethic and loyalty that I did. My kids are good at reminding me that most of their peers are working in the gig economy, juggling 2-3 jobs just to pay their bills and afford a night out with friends every once in a while. 

Every generation is guilty of looking down their noses at those that came after them. And in workplaces today, these differences are absolutely exacerbated by the mobility of younger generations. No longer will young people put up with jobs that lead nowhere, or bosses who abuse them, just for the sake of a pension (which probably won't exist by the time they are eligible anyway). They don't see the value of staying with a single company for an entire career. And so they are hard to attract, and even harder to retain. 

Add to that the social disruption caused by the pandemic (yep, we're going back to that), and we are seeing the newest generation in the workforce criticized for not having the social skills to adapt to workplace norms. For anyone who had teens during the pandemic, this is not a surprise. My younger daughter spent the better part of two years wearing pyjamas and taking zoom classes - screen off - from the couch. Returning to the real world was a pretty harsh adjustment. However, my daughter left high school and entered retail, where she very quickly re-learned how to interact effectively. But other young people didn't have such a crash course in reintegration. Maybe they continued their education or took jobs like driving for Uber Eats, which didn't require the same social skills. Of course it's hard for them to integrate into a social workplace. 

The challenge is that once again, organizations aren't being deliberate and intentional about filling the gaps that they lament. They haven't changed their approach to onboarding, and so they're shocked and disgusted when they hire 20 seasonal staff and only 4 show up for orientation. Existing teams are stretched thin. Hiring teams can't hire fast enough. Nothing seems to be working. 

Governments have changed

I work with a good number of non-profit organizations here in Manitoba. In 2023, there was a wave of excitement, especially among my socially-focused clients, when the NDP government was elected with a majority mandate to the provincial legislature. They believed that, unlike the previous Conservative majority, which seemed to hold its purse strings tightly, the NDP would be more generous with community-serving organizations. The collective sigh of relief among these organizations was audible across the snow-swept landscape of our province. Unfortunately, their dreams of easy money and political support have not materialized in the way most organizations anticipated.  

Just as every organization is struggling with the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, generational changes, and economic pressure, government is in the same boat. Plus, they need to find money to fund all of the worthy social services and causes that matter to their voting constituents.

Nationally and provincially, most public services are broken. Whether understaffed or overstaffed, they are pulled in too many directions to be effective, too bureaucratic to be efficient, and too removed from decision-makers to be decisive. As someone who dedicated almost 20 years to a career in public service, the state of the public service breaks my heart. 

The reality of government is that elected officials run in a popularity contest, promising outcomes that they truly don't know whether they can execute. And when they are elected and come to office, they are faced with 98% of their budgets already allocated to existing programs and services that are inefficient and ineffective. But, not wanting to raise the ire of the media and public, they resist cutting programs and services in favour of blanket reductions to budgets. They ask their departments to trim 5% or 8%, which typically involves holding positions vacant rather than cutting programs or eliminating processes. 

Unfortunately, the internal pressure to maintain the status quo means government struggles to find money to fund innovative and important work being done in community. With the threat of potential tariffs, which is already tanking the Canadian dollar and driving up the cost of our debt, I don't see this changing anytime soon. So the only way forward for social serving organizations is to consider approaches to funding new initiatives that don't involve government. Social enterprises and other lines of revenue which, unfortunately, redirect efforts away from social support, are growing as responses to the current financial reality of government-dependent organizations. 

Trends in strategic plans

Independently and in tandem with one another, these forces apply significant pressure to the organizations I work with. While there is variation in the impacts of that pressure, there are three realities that I keep seeing over and over again.

Operational excellence as part of a succession strategy

Most organizations are understaffed, or at least understaffed with knowledgeable and experienced employees. As older generations have exited the workplace, the knowledge they carried in their muscle memories and in their actual memories left with them. This has created a huge void in terms of how organizations train and develop employees. In the past, they would work closely with an experienced team member until they learned all of the unwritten rules for how to do the job effectively. But today, those experienced employees are either gone, or they are already in senior roles with jobs that are too big to enable them to train entry-level employees. 

In the 1980s, there was a surge of operational efficiency investment under the banner of Total Quality Management. New versions of it re-emerged following the 2008 financial meltdown as organizations sought to trim expenses. I believe we are coming up on another resurgence of the group of innovation methodologies that stemmed from the work of W. Edwards Deming in the 1920s. Methods like the Toyota Production System, Lean, Six Sigma, and others are highly effective tools that can help organizations document and streamline processes. Complemented by methods like Human Centric Design, they can optimize systems through the lens of client and employee experience. 

To solve for both loss of institutional knowledge and to pre-empt the planned retirement of long-serving leaders, many of my client organizations are investing in training staff in these methods, bringing consultants in to lead projects, or both. By documenting and streamlining processes, they ease the challenge of knowledge transfer and set the organization up well for transition to new leadership. 

Doubling down on strengths

I love working with organizations that have had terrible experiences with strategic planning. Personally, I find the process to be one of the most powerful things a leader can do to effectively engage their team and help them start to row in the same direction. But many organizations have viewed planning as a required exercise - kind of like issuing an annual report. They don't optimize the value of the process and often miss the forest for the trees. 

This starts with the Insights Report. A lot of clients have talked about their SWOT analysis as a boilerplate step in the process of planning. That tells me they had bad advice. The input into strategic planning should be a highly insightful tool that supports a conversation about how to address the issues raised in the report. 

Simply put, when you engage in strategic planning, one of the first conversations should be about what matters most. We don't make a list of strengths just so CEOs can pat themselves on the back. Each of the quadrants of a SWOT analysis represent an opportunity for action. The most overused quadrant is Opportunities. Everyone loves chasing down new ideas. But the most overlooked, and often, most important quadrant, is Strengths. 

In a number of the strategies I developed this year, the organization plan focuses effort in reinvesting in what does best. For example, in all of the stakeholder engagement I completed for the YMCA-YWCA of Winnipeg plan, the thing I heard most was that the Y created a sense of belonging and community. And in fact, the entire strategic plan for Y Winnipeg is built around their mission to create community. They didn't build a 3 year strategy to optimize new opportunities in AI or other tech. They leaned into their competitive advantage. That's strategic. Even if it feels simple. 

Building stronger relationships and partnerships

Every organization has a slight, but sweet arrogance about what makes it amazing. It's an important part of culture, as it elicits a sense of pride in employees and leaders. Coming out of the pandemic, most organizations consider the fact they survived as an accomplishment. But surviving isn't thriving. And a strategic plan should challenge an organization to move past survival mode. 

In surviving the pandemic, most organizations turned inward, drawing on the commitment and strengths of their teams to get them through. Collectively, they generated creative solutions to problems and tightened their belts. In fact, many organizational strategies written during the pandemic reflect a deficit-based language of doing the best they can with limited resources. They focused on direct-delivering service and products to clients. But very few lifted their eyes to the horizon to collaborate and partner with other organizations to creatively serve the same clients. 

Yet that tide has turned. In most strategic plans that I developed in 2024, there is a commitment to working in collaboration and partnership with others. There is a recognition that public funding is limited and so collaborative advocacy is necessary to secure financial support for promising initiatives. And there is an acknowledgement - especially on the part of larger and more established organizations - that they need to step outside the safety of their buildings, show up for community, and take the difficult steps of initiating new relationships. 

What does this all mean?

By no means does this handful of trends reflect the complex nature of every organization. However, I do find it curiously coincidental to see so many consistencies across organizations in different sectors, provinces, and of different sizes. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of a strategic planning process is that it helps organizations - and especially leaders - see themselves with fresh eyes. It neutralizes old stories and legends, grounding the organization in the reality of today. Most importantly, it provides clarity for alignment and decision-making as the next set of strategic challenges begin to emerge. By understanding the essence of the organization and how it can best navigate choppy waters, leaders position themselves to lead through whatever uncertainty comes their way. 

If your organization might be in need of some strategic planning support within the coming year, I'd love for you to book a chat where we can talk about what that might look like for you. If you're not ready for a chat, then make sure to connect with me on LinkedIn and sign up for my blog.