Strategy When Everything Feels Urgent
Every day, leaders in nonprofits, collaboratives, and public sector organizations are balancing more than ever before. The needs in our communities are deepening and expanding. The pace and complexity of changing conditions feel relentless. Teams are stretched thin, funding feels uncertain, and there’s always one more meeting, one more report, one more urgent task that needs attention.
The challenge isn’t knowing whether to think and act strategically, it’s doing it amid the push and pull of daily responsibilities, with tools and processes that fit. In this climate and context, strategic planning and strategy management aren’t luxuries or optional “extra work.” They’re ways for teams to make sense of complexity together, creating shared clarity and focus, that connect people to what matters most.
Having a clear sense of direction isn’t just strategic—it’s sustaining. In complex environments that direction stays useful when it’s actively held, revisited, and adapted over time.
How Strategic Planning and Strategy Management Help
Leaders in this space already bring incredible intentionality to their work. They balance mission, governance, operations, and community needs in complex systems that don’t stand still. Strategic planning and strategy management build on that intentionality by offering a structured way to connect the day-to-day with the long-term.
At their best, these processes create shared purpose, clarity and alignment. When everyone (from the board to frontline staff, every partner in a network, or every team member within a department) understands what the ultimate goals are, what matters most when everything feels important, and how their work contributes, they can all row in the same direction.
And, in fast-moving environments teams need to add adaptation to clarity. They need ways to calibrate priorities, make decisions when conditions change, and stay aligned as new information emerges. This is where strategy management comes in, helping organizations and networks hold strategy as a living practice, not just a moment in time.
What We Mean by Strategic Planning and Strategy Management
Strategic planning and strategy management are two sides of the same coin — the planning and the practice.
Together, they help organizations, departments, and networks clarify what matters most and act with strategic intent as circumstances shift. Planning focuses attention and sets direction; strategy management provides the routines, roles, and decision-making practices that keep that direction relevant over time.
Strategic planning helps an organization, department, or network get clear on its most important priorities which are the few things that will most effectively move its mission and vision forward over the next few years and prepare it for the future ahead. It’s about focusing attention on what matters most, amongst everything that matters, to make the biggest difference for the mission.
A strong strategic plan gives direction and focus within the organization and its broader context. It clarifies how vision, mission, and values translate into priorities, objectives, and practical steps, while also scanning the environment, systems, and relationships the organization is part of for any shifts or changes. Importantly, it sets up the conditions for how the strategy will be stewarded and adjusted after it has been launched.
At its core, strategic planning is about clarity and alignment. It helps people across an organization, department, or network see where they are headed, what they are trying to achieve, and how their collective effort connects. This creates a shared purpose and focus for the path ahead.
Strategy management is how organizations hold and use their strategy once it’s in motion. It connects strategic priorities to everyday decision-making, operational planning, and governance routines. Rather than locking plans in place, strategy management creates regular moments to check progress, reflect on what’s being learned, and make intentional adjustments.
In practice, this might include light dashboards, decision pathways, quarterly or semi-annual strategy check-ins, and clear roles for who stewards the strategy over time. The goal is not control or compliance, but shared accountability, learning, and focus so the strategy remains usable as conditions change.
Our Approach: How We Support Strategic Planning and Strategy Management
In our experience, strategic planning and strategy management are most effective when they’re supported by a clear, people-centred way of working.
Planning helps clarify direction and priorities; strategy management helps to hold, use, and adapt that direction over time. Do/able’s approach is rooted in Organization Development (OD) principles and is shaped by evidence, relationships, and ongoing learning.
At a high level, our work integrates three core elements that support both planning and management. We begin with evidence and assessment, grounding strategic planning in a clear understanding of current realities, pressures, and opportunities. We then support shared sensemaking and learning, helping people interpret what they’re seeing together and align around what matters most which informs both the plan itself and how it will be stewarded. From there, we move into co-creation and adaptive practice, shaping priorities, decision-making routines, and ways of working that support implementation, reflection, and adjustment as strategy is put into practice.
The phases that follow show how these elements come to life. Together, they create clarity of direction, shared ownership, and practical ways to keep strategy relevant and usable over time.
Phase One: Listening and Strategic Planning Foundations
Strong strategic planning (and effective strategy management) begin with a clear understanding of current realities.
In this phase, we focus on gathering and integrating the evidence needed to ground strategic choices and support ongoing learning over time.
This evidence comes from multiple sources, with listening playing a central role. We listen closely to staff, leadership, partners, funders, and, where relevant, interest-holders and people with lived and living experience to understand what is working, where there is friction, and what people are experiencing on the ground. This listening is complemented by organizational assessment tools, internal documents and data, governance requirements, and environmental assessments. In some contexts, this phase also incorporates elements of strategic foresight (helping teams consider how needs, systems, and conditions may evolve over time). Paying attention to organizational history and past strategy work helps teams build on what’s already been learned and avoid starting from scratch.
Taken together, these inputs create a shared, credible foundation for strategy. They help clarify strengths to build on, constraints to account for, and opportunities to explore, informing both the development of a strategic plan and the design of how that strategy will be managed, revisited, and adapted over time.
Phase Two: Shared Sensemaking, Synthesis, and Strategic Priorities
With a strong evidence base in place, the focus shifts from gathering information to making sense of it together.
We bring the internal planning team together to explore what the evidence is revealing and to surface the full range of strategic issues. This includes identifying issues related to impact (on interest-holders and community), work and infrastructure (such as service delivery, public affairs, partnerships, and operations), and team (including culture, skills, processes, governance, funding, and internal capacity).
Through shared sensemaking, teams explore how these issues connect and where common themes are emerging. This shared sensemaking helps people move beyond individual perspectives or functional silos and toward a more integrated understanding of the organization or network as a whole. Patterns become clearer: where pressures are converging, where strengths can be built on, and where choices will have the greatest influence on future impact and sustainability.
From this collective understanding, teams are better positioned to make strategic choices. Together, they determine which issues are most important among everything that is important, selecting a focused set of strategic priorities that best position the organization or network to be relevant in its current environment and for the future. This process builds shared ownership and learning, ensuring that priorities are not only analytically sound, but also understood, supported, and actionable by the people who will carry them forward.
Phase Three: Framing Priorities and Shifting into Implementation
With strategic priorities clearly identified, the focus shifts to translating intent into action in ways that feel clear and feasible.
In this phase, teams work together to define what success looks like for each priority and to articulate a small number of related objectives that describe the future state they’re working toward. From there, they identify directional milestones which are practical markers that help people see progress over time without locking the work into overly detailed plans.
As priorities move into practice, attention turns to how the work will be held and supported. This includes clarifying leadership and accountability, understanding how priorities connect to existing operations, and the use of tools to support coordination and learning. In some cases, teams choose to conduct a light implementation risk triage (a quick, practical check on capacity, dependencies, or timing considerations) to anticipate challenges early and reduce friction as work unfolds.
To support ongoing focus and learning, simple dashboards and check-in routines are put in place. Dashboards provide shared visibility into progress against milestones, while light quarterly check-ins create space to reflect on what’s working, what’s shifting, and what adjustments may be needed. Together, these practices help strategy remain active and usable, making it easier for teams to stay aligned, learn from implementation, and adapt thoughtfully as conditions change.
What This Creates
When these phases work together through grounding strategy in evidence, making sense of it collectively, setting focused priorities, to supporting them with simple, adaptive practices, strategy becomes something people can genuinely work with. It creates shared clarity about what matters most, stronger alignment across roles and teams, and a practical way to connect long-term direction with day-to-day decisions.
Just as importantly, this approach makes strategy feel more manageable. By breaking the work into clear steps, using light structures, and building in regular moments for reflection and adjustment, organizations and networks gain confidence in their ability to move forward without having everything figured out at once. Strategy management becomes a steady, supportive practice that helps teams hold priorities over time, respond thoughtfully to new information, and maintain momentum as conditions change. In Part Two of our series on Strategic Planning and Strategy Management (When Strategy Meets the Real World), we explore how this way of working becomes embedded in organizational and network culture.
Read on to learn more: When Strategy Meets the Real World
