To paraphrase an old idea: show me where you spend your money and time, and I'll show you your priorities.
Most strategic plans tell a different story. They describe what an organization would like to accomplish.
Grow membership. Strengthen advocacy. Improve education. Develop new revenue. Modernize technology. Build reserves. Increase awareness.
These may all be worthwhile objectives. Identifying them can be an important part of strategic planning.
But a list of ambitions is not a strategy.
Strategy requires another question: What gets enough?
When Good Things Compete
Organizations have finite resources: money, staff capacity, expertise, leadership attention, and time. Strategy is therefore an exercise in choice.
The difficult choices are rarely between good ideas and bad ones. Bad ideas are easy to eliminate. The hard choices are between good things: important and more important, now and later, what works today and what might work better tomorrow.
A useful mission helps an organization decide what matters. Strategy makes that hierarchy consequential by determining where the organization will concentrate its resources.
A strategic planning meeting that produces only a list of ambitions has avoided the hardest part of strategy: choosing among them. If an organization leaves with seven new priorities but no meaningful hierarchy among them, it may have increased its aspirations without increasing its ability to achieve them.
Priorities Have Consequences
Calling something a strategic priority should change something.
If expanding advocacy is now more important, what follows? More money? Different expertise? Additional staff? More CEO attention? Less somewhere else?
But something better be different. If becoming a strategic priority has no meaningful effect on the organization's allocation of resources, it is fair to ask what "priority" actually means.
This does not mean everything else becomes unimportant. Organizations still have essential responsibilities: members to serve, employees to manage, and valuable programs to continue.
But treating everything important as strategically important is one of the easiest ways to scatter resources.
From Priorities to Resources
Most boards do not have the time or information to rebuild an organization's budget during a one- or two-day strategic planning session. Nor should they. But the inability to allocate resources with precision is not a reason to avoid prioritization.
A board can leave the room having identified the few outcomes – perhaps two or three – that deserve particular organizational focus. The exact number isn't important. The discipline is.
The board doesn't need to determine exactly how much each priority receives. It needs to make choices clear enough to guide the allocation. Management can do the arithmetic.
The CEO and management team take the board's priorities and determine what it would take to accomplish them. What money, people, skills, and leadership attention will be required? What existing work competes for those resources? What has to change?
Management then returns to the board with the implications: Here is what it will take to give these priorities enough.
Perhaps two priorities can be adequately resourced, but a third cannot without reducing an existing program. Perhaps the organization needs new expertise or additional revenue. Perhaps it should use reserves. Perhaps the objective needs to be narrowed or delayed.
Those aren't problems with the strategic process. That is the strategic process.
When Strategy Becomes Visible
An unfunded priority almost assuredly won't get done. An underfunded one can consume substantial resources without ever having a credible chance of success.
The question isn't simply whether a priority received resources. It's whether it received enough—money, talent, expertise, time, and leadership attention.
Look at the budget, staffing, calendar, and leadership attention, and an organization's actual priorities become visible.
A strategic plan can describe many things an organization hopes to accomplish. There is value in doing so. But strategy begins when aspiration meets scarcity and choices are made.
Mission helps decide what matters. Strategy decides what gets enough. Culture determines what happens next.