Kaitlyn Kendall-Sperry
Senior Consultant
There’s a moment in strategic planning when you go from goals to action. You turn something that, until this point, had been dreams and words on a page into real-life decisions.
Organizations face two risks at this moment: 1. no action at all (the strategic plan that never makes it past the PDF), or 2. the wrong action (the implementation plan that doesn’t align with your strategy). The stakes are even higher when your strategy requires transformational changes, where the wrong decision can be worse than no decision at all.
What makes good decisions so difficult to make? As humans, our decisions are influenced by biases—that one factor that feels like it’s overwhelming everything; the comfort of keeping things the same; the loud perspectives of stakeholders; moving in a different direction after you’ve invested so much. It’s messy and complex, mostly because humans are involved.
I’m not advocating for passing your strategy decisions off to AI and the robots to figure it out. But you can balance the human element with something else. At Benefactor Group, we believe that the best strategic plans are both human-centered and data-informed.
So what’s our solution to battling biases? Data.
How Biases Show Up in Strategic Planning
We are influenced by a mountain of biases when we make decisions, whether we’re aware of them or not. Here are a few that might show up when you are deciding the work you need to do to implement your strategic plan.
Dominant Criterion
Your executive team is deciding what work to do as part of your strategic plan. There are some truly transformational projects on the table, but your team is caught up on one thing: money.
One factor is steering the whole conversation.
Status Quo
Your organization has been around for decades and your flagship event, while popular, is losing you money and doesn’t align with your strategy. Longtime volunteers and staff don’t want things to change.
The comfort of the familiar is holding you back.
People and Politics
A board member uses every opportunity to push a new initiative that aligns with their personal interests, rather than the strategic plan. They’re starting to wear down the staff and board with their insistence.
A single voice is pulling an entire organization.
Sunk Cost
You spent significant time and funds building a new program that is floundering and has not created the expected impact. The board is considering asking a major donor to help keep it afloat.
Past investments are driving future decisions.
What’s the impact?
In each of these situations, decisions were driven by bias rather than strategy. Alignment was replaced by the avoidance of tough conversations. And these each risk more than just a wrong turn. They create mission drift, waste precious resources, and fracture stakeholders’ trust that an organization is doing the right thing.
It’s easy to look at the examples above and think we would never do that. But we’re often blind to our own biases or, perhaps worse, unwilling to honestly call out another’s. Here’s where data steps in.
Battling Strategic Planning Biases with Data
Define
For each area of your strategy, clearly identify how you will define success. This requires a direct conversation between the relevant stakeholders—likely your senior staff and key board members—about the outcomes you want to create with your plan. Measures align expectations and provide clarity to everyone involved.
How to do it: Think about the outcomes or outputs you would expect to see if you’re successful in an area. If your objective is Establishing a strong organizational culture, you might see high staff engagement or strong retention—both frequent measures in strategic plans.
Prioritize
Not all things require equal attention, especially when it comes to strategy—or at least they shouldn’t. And when your priorities aren’t explicitly stated, your board and staff will start to make assumptions.
How to do it: Ranking, pairwise comparison, and weighted voting are all ways to understand the relative importance of your plan pillars. Consider this: if you had to invest $100,000 between two pillars, how would you split the funds?
Evaluate
Once you have your measures and understand your priorities, score your potential work against the two. This simple structure creates a repeatable process that you can apply to most projects.
How to do it: Score a project’s potential impact on the outcomes on a scale from 1 to 5, then weight the scores based on the prioritization. The sum of these scores becomes your strategic value, which you can use to evaluate projects. Begin by having a small group independently score the projects, then bring the group together to discuss and build consensus. Be willing to push back when you believe a score is inflated or ask for specific evidence that the project will have an impact on the measures you’re evaluating them against.
Strategic value becomes the bridge between your idea and your plan. Or it falls short when the alignment isn’t there. It is the data that opens the door to a conversation with your leadership team, your longtime volunteers and staff, and your board about how things do or don’t match your strategy.
But Data isn’t Everything in Strategic Planning
Data isn’t a replacement for the perspectives, experience, and knowledge of humans. But it does give you a solid foundation for your decisions; a shared standard for work that seems impossible to compare.
Interested in learning more about data-driven decision-making? Let’s talk.