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by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders
Photo AI generated
Blog No. 12 - May 2025
ILLUSION ONE: Strategy is co-created by everyone in the organization.
Good strategy is highly opinionated. It is risky. It is as much about what an organization will not do as what it will. It is about the necessary alchemy of organizational opportunity, talent, and resources. It defies logic to argue that everyone in an organization can or should co-create strategy.
There are so many costs to this illusion, including the great energy we invest as leaders into "strategy retreats” where the real tradeoffs of strategy options cannot be discussed because the people in the room have wildly different understandings of the organization’s opportunity, talent, and resources. Another cost is that we have trained nonprofit staff to believe they should not have to execute anything they didn’t co-create; when in fact, as humans, we do this all the time.
But a less obvious and even more costly result of this illusion is that organizations are spending months and months on strategic planning with very little attention to execution, which is what most people in an organization know quite a bit about. What if we flipped the use of strategic planning time around? The people with the greatest strategic insight–from staff, board, and/or community–spend two months developing the new strategies and then the whole organization focuses for ten months on how execution needs to change to activate the new strategies in earnest. Execution and iteration of strategy actually are everyone’s job.
ILLUSION TWO: New strategies can be adopted without changes in people, structures, and processes.
For decades, a majority of nonprofits have been living the graphic below: episodic alignment events–a new theory of change, a three-day retreat, a strategic planning process–followed by slides back to the status quo.
The illusion that fuels this cycle is that new strategies can be adopted without changes in people, structures, and processes. They cannot. Real shifts in strategy require real change. People need new mindsets and skills; often new talent needs to be added; teams need new configurations and charters; systems need to be upgraded, and so on.
What is chronically not working for justice-committed organizations is the adoption of bold new strategies only to be placed down on legacy organizational models. Instead, as we develop new strategies we have to also engage in organizational design questions; are we designed for these new strategies to flourish? We express this in the graphic below.
ILLUSION THREE: Strategy activation is best captured in metrics and memos.
And the third illusion justice-committed organizations can no longer afford is that we track and reckon with strategic progress through metrics, dashboards, and quarterly memos to our boards. We know it’s not working. If we are even using these tools, we use them in fits and starts, begrudgingly, and only in pockets of the organization. We recognize that these methods, which rely on lag indicators about work long since completed (or not), are not nurturing strategic alignment across our hybrid staffs and complex strategies.
Instead, organizations must develop a shared practice of strategic alignment. As we have written about before, a practice is not an episodic event or a document, but a way of engaging strategy every day: in our hiring, our shared language, our team charters, our meeting design, our decision-making, etc. One way to think about this is the old phrase, “show your work.” In other words, through daily practice, we learn to show strategy activation in the course of the work itself, not through after-the-fact metrics. This allows us to collectively improve how we craft, activate, and iterate organizational strategy.
Justice-committed organizations and the people we support, organize, and fight for are under extreme threat. If we are not aligned internally–if our strategic alignment practice is not in full bloom–we will not bring our full power and efficacy to the struggle.
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