Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?
It’s one of my favorite questions to ask a board. The answers are rarely the same, and most people struggle to put it in a few clear sentences.
That’s worth pausing on, because in our early meetings we hear one of two things: “We have a strategic plan” or “We need a strategic plan.” If they have one, they’re wondering how to execute it, or how to turn it into a case for investment. If they want one, they picture a long, linear, wide-reaching process — everyone at the table, buy-in from every stakeholder, goals and metrics, a financial plan. All of that makes sense. All of it matters. But when I follow up with “What is your strategy now?”, the room rarely agrees.
Strategy and planning get conflated all the time, and the confusion has real consequences. Language matters here, so it’s worth being precise about what we mean.
Here’s the distinction I use with clients. Strategy is about what you choose to do, and why. It’s the set of decisions you make about where you’ll play, what you’ll offer, and how you’ll create value — for your students, your clients, your community. Strategy requires tradeoffs. It requires you to say, clearly, what you will not do. And ideally you can state it in a few words, with a lot of conviction.
A strategy is a coherent set of choices — a few key decisions that work together to move you toward your big animating idea, your vision of success. Often a board has a sense of that big idea but can’t articulate the strategy that gets them there. So they default to a plan. Plans are comforting. But as we know, “the best laid plans…”
Once we decouple strategy from planning, planning gets clearer too. A plan is the blueprint for how you execute strategy and lean into the choices you’ve made. It identifies the capabilities and systems you need, and how you’ll build them. It converts direction into action — projects, timelines, owners, measures, milestones. Good planning is essential. But a plan can’t substitute for strategy.
When we ask the next questions — Why do you want a strategic plan? What problem are you trying to solve? — we start to uncover what keeps many of our clients up at night. A sense that the organization is busy, productive, doing good work, but not actually moving toward a stronger position or greater impact. “We need to grow by X” is a goal, not a strategy. The strategy is your hypothesis about how you, specifically, can do it — the choices only your organization is positioned to make. Skip that work and you’re left with an ambition, diminishing resources, and no shared intention.
Here’s why this is genuinely hard to untangle: the line between strategy and planning is murky. Strategy has to be translated into action to mean anything, and real strategy often crystallizes during planning — the moment you realize what you can and can’t actually do. The two inform each other. So the goal isn’t to keep them in separate boxes. It’s to make sure you’ve actually done both.
Strategic questions sound like:
What is our unique position and value?
What does success look like five years from now — and how will the world, and we, be different?
How will we define and measure impact?
What tradeoffs are we willing to make?
Who do we serve, and who do we not serve?
Planning questions sound like:
What capabilities and systems do we need to build?
What will we do this year, and who owns it?
What does it cost?
How will we measure it?
Both matter. But if your board and leadership team can’t answer the strategic questions clearly and consistently, everything you plan sits on an unstable foundation.
So what do you do?
We encourage clients to start with a one-page strategy document — a concise statement of your position, your vision, and the three to five choices that, together, move you toward it. Not a full plan. Not a vision statement that could describe any organization in your sector. Just an honest answer to: what have we decided to do, and why?
The most important thing a board can do is take responsibility for this. Not delegate strategy to staff. Not rubber-stamp a plan after the fact. Actively participate in designing the choices that define the organization’s future. That doesn’t mean the board runs everything — it means board and leadership articulate strategy together, with shared understanding and clear roles.
So, start here: Can every member of your board and leadership team say — clearly, consistently, and in roughly the same words — what your strategy is?