From Roadmap to Compass: It’s Strategic Planning Season!
By Vash Ebbadi-Cook (he/they), Founder, Endura Consulting
Spring is a time of renewal. For many cultures, spring represents the New Year with the coming of the Spring Equinox and celebrations such as Nowruz in West and Central Asia. For many organizations it also signals the coming of the new Fiscal Year, and with it planning of new priorities and, oftentimes, new directions.
Picture it: It’s a grey March day. You and your leadership team are knee-deep in finalizing reporting for the 2025/26 Fiscal Year. There’s some outstanding progress reports on projects that funders are expecting, and you look over the organization’s Strategic Plan for inspiration on how to frame the successes of projects and programs in alignment with your priorities and vision. But then you realize this strategy was a refresh during the COVID Pandemic, biding some time in a shifting environment, and reads “Strategic Plan 2023-2026”. You realize, it’s time. Your team is ready to envision a plan that reflects a new and changing context. You have ideas, and so do your team members, but bringing them together feels overwhelming even though it would be tremendously valuable.
Boy have I been there! For our team at Endura Consulting, we’ve all been there. As leaders, organizing Strategic Planning engagements with board members and staff to gather their immensely valuable insights trapped in their amazing brains. And also as participants, sitting through yet another team meeting looking at one another with the lingering questions of “what’s next?” and “what can we start and what can we stop?”. This is why when we engage with clients to support their strategic planning processes, we can truly and honestly say “come with me, I’ve got you”. So, what makes the Endura Consulting approach different?
Starting with people not priorities
We pride ourselves at Endura Consulting that we “care for people, who care for people”. This isn’t just a slogan but a philosophy of care that we bring to all of our engagements. It’s about centring people first, and by extension the communities of which those people are a part. Understanding an organization's values, it’s true “why”, starts with engaging in reflective practice, not just as teams and organizations but as the people who drive organizations forward. What drives you to do the work that you do? Our passions, values, and morals don’t disappear when we come to work. In fact for those in the social impact sector, they’re our reason for doing what we do. Understanding strategy from a deeply human perspective sets the foundation for our clients to achieve their goals, stay in alignment, and navigate complexity.
Focus on your compass and the map will follow
When tackling a new strategy, we’ve found that organizations tend to articulate their needs as a “roadmap” or a series of instructions that will get them from their current state to a desired future state. Although this is important in establishing direction, what often gets overlooked is that medium and long-term plans are rarely clear linear paths. Think of it this way, you’re hiking a mountain path. There are steep rocky parts, some flatter areas, but generally your main goal is to “go up”. When we are trying to do something as challenging as climbing a literal mountain, we rarely go just directly up. We may need to walk some “switch-backs” or there may be a washed out area that we have to navigate around. Soon what we envisioned as “going up a mountain” starts looking like “let’s turn around and go left instead of right”, or taking a slightly longer way to avoid obstacles. We ultimately get to the destination, but the journey might not be entirely what we had planned.
In this way, our Endura Consulting team aims to not just give teams a map of what they’ll encounter strategically over a three or five year period. But we help them calibrate their compass to navigate the uncertainties that are likely to come up. This approach is deeply rooted in what guides your organization, its values and commitments, and how they’re used to make tough decisions.
As you and your organization look at those mountains and think, “now how are we going to climb that?” book a consult or get in touch with us at info@enduraconsulting.ca. We’re here to help, and I promise we will have fun along the way.
