Reinventing Strategic Planning through Forward Design

Each year Signature i has a standing goal to learn or innovate a new methodology, tool or process to renew our practice. In 2011, we tackled a long-standing challenge for our clients—reinventing strategic planning to be a more robust and innovative process.

We merged our love of anticipatory learning with design thinking to craft a new approach we call Forward Design. We took the best of what has always worked with our clients and piloted some new elements with the permission of others who wanted a fresh approach.  Two national associations have now adopted Forward Design and we are now learning, evaluating and revising this new approach in the real world with association executives and volunteer leaders.

Forward Design is a systematic and creative process for exploring an organization’s current and future context, analyzing strategic issues and opportunities and inviting aspirations for design, and then using this learning to inspire innovative design solutions and prototypes for an organization’s future.   

The Forward Design cycle has four phases: exploration of current and future context; analysis and sensemaking; innovation and design; and direction setting.  The sequencing of the tasks can shift around to accommodate the culture, governance structure and schedules inherent in different associations. 

Exploration of Current and Future Context

• Leadership framing—dialogue processes to discover aspirations and assumptions for the profession and association and maybe even challenge those assumptions
• Alternative perspectives—probes for different thinking through dialogue with diverse, external or divergent stakeholders
• Futures research—systematic search for patterns of significant change to forecast future conditions

Analysis & Sense making

• Strategic issues and opportunities—assessment of strategic leadership opportunities for the organization
• Design principles—expression of aspirations and desired outcomes that set the parameters for  what the profession or association should be designed to do
• Change constraints & barriers—pragmatic recognition and acceptance of any limitations that must be addressed through design
• Problem/Opportunity Statement—clarification and agreement on the focus for innovation and planning

Innovation & Design

• Ideation of design solutions—processes to discover and brainstorm  innovative approaches to solve the problem or pursue the opportunity
• Design prototypes—creative images that convey the future direction, structure and capabilities of an organization, program, product or service

Direction Setting

• Desired outcomes—agreement on what an organization, program, product or service must  achieve
• Strategic framework—statement of vision, mission and goals for an organization
• Implementation decisions—next steps to execute the new direction and develop and pilot the prototype

Forward Design may not be right for the association that just needs an efficient way to update a strategic plan and already has volunteers deeply invested in traditional approaches. For those associations that need a way to renew their strategic planning and are completely open to big changes and innovative approaches, Forward Design may be the right mashup of proven practices and innovative thinking you need in 2012.

Planning and Designing in the Visual Age

The National Arts Education Association chose an intensely visual experience for discovering, designing and communicating its new vision and strategic framework.

The leaders of NAEA and Signature i, LLC were studying design thinking and eager to apply its principles to strategic planning.  As advocates and teachers for visual arts education, NAEA members have a natural affinity for design thinking.  Design thinking encourages visual observation, critical thinking to see challenges and solutions clearly, and prototyping ideas and new approaches in creatively concrete ways.

From the beginning the NAEA strategic planning process was a visual experience.  At the annual conference in spring 2010, hundreds of members expressed their ideas and hopes for NAEA in a collaborative art studio.  Working with a team of volunteers and the board, Signature i interpreted this outpouring of opinions and images to discover the association’s strategic issues and opportunities.

We continued this creative expression of NAEA Next when the board convened in its planning retreat several months later.  Every board member did an artistic expression of what NAEA would need to become.  They did this before engaging in more typical processes to draft a vision, mission and goals.

Yes the vision and strategic framework ultimately uses words to convey its intent and message, but the plan’s simple and clear structure can be traced to its visual beginnings.  The words are packed with shared meaning  from exploring and experimenting with the best design for NAEA through visual images.

Design thinking is also evident in how NAEA is communicating its strategic planning process and vision and strategic framework. At the annual conference NAEA distributed a “First Impression” mini-brochure not much bigger than a business card that powerfully unfolds the new plan and shares the journey to create it.

Not every organization is fortunate enough to have artists willing to see the possibilities for a clear and creative design for its future. Still the NAEA experience offers three great practices for others. 

• Invite new ways of expressing ideas and hopes for your organization.
• Think like a designer and see the bold outlines that are essential to your organization’s future.
• Design your communications to deliver both the message of the plan and the experience of creating it.

Three Horizons of Systemic Change

The really big systemic changes play out over decades and can require sustained leadership through three distinct horizons of awareness and action.

In the first horizon, leaders identify the strategic issue and work to create collective awareness of the need to change.  They challenge the assumptions defining the system now, point out the shortcomings, and invoke a vision for a preferred future. They may encourage and sponsor pilot initiatives to probe the potential for this new direction.

In the second horizon, leaders have created some momentum for change and they have the results from their pilot initiatives to guide significant investments in new capabilities and systems infrastructure. For individuals and organizations, this is an intense time of unlearning and relearning to move in this new direction.  This is a time for identifying and inculcating best practices.  

In the third horizon, leaders have achieved the transformation. They are now engaging in continued learning either to improve the new system or to address the unintended consequences that inevitably emerge when a different reality replaces the status quo. They are working to align the culture to sustain this change.

If we can understand systemic change as a slow and sustained process, it can give us the patience and reassurance to keep working for the really big and important changes.  Rather than asking, why are we still talking about this change a decade later, we can instead ask, where are we now in this change?  

For example, in healthcare we have been talking for several decades about the importance of prevention and the need to replace an acute care and chronic disease medical model with a health promotion and prevention model. We have navigated the first horizon and have collective awareness that this is where we need to go. We even have proof of many concepts from a multitude of pilot initiatives. The healthcare reform law is a second horizon move to instill this priority into the system.  Major employers and insurers and public health organizations are doing their part to move more resources into prevention. Prevention is a good example to illustrate the challenges of the third horizon. Without a cultural shift of profound significance and breadth, this will be a difficult transformation.

In the long arc of significant systemic change, leaders have to understand and accept where they are in the horizons of systemic change. This can be part of the story they tell to inspire individuals and organizations not to give up even when the change is decades in the making. 

Future Scanning Jolts Systems into Change

The most surprising insight most organizations get about their future from futures scanning is not knowledge of a new trend or issue; it is confronting their own unwillingness to act on what they already know about the future.

These scans rarely shock leaders, because they work hard to stay informed and have many opportunities to hear what the best thinkers in their field believe about the future. My best scans amplify the significance of key change drivers, mute the less important trends and issues, and give people a better way of understanding and talking about what is at stake. 

The power of these future scans comes from transforming trends and issues into the story of their future.  Stories move us, even when they are disguised as well researched and cited reports.  Change leaders know how to move these stories into their organizations. They use them to inspire strategic plans. They retell the best parts of the story to counter resistance to change.

I no longer take exception when leaders thank me for a great scan and then in the same breath say but,  “We’ve been talking about these strategic issues.” I simply point out the value of having a powerful new tool to help make the case for change.  It is fun to watch them take these scans and run hard straight into candid strategic conversations, overdue decisions and new directions.

A good futures scan is simply a shock of insight that can get the entire system humming with the possibilities for a preferred future.

Shared Value a Welcome Blurring of the Profit Line

Nonprofit sector strategists have long forecast the steady blurring of the line between for-profit and nonprofit business models.

When associations and nonprofits create the blur, they are usually striving to adopt more corporate approaches. As they become multimillion enterprises, this is simply good stewardship as well as good business.

When philanthropic organizations create the blur, it is often through social entrepreneurism—generating a profit to underwrite mission-driven work.  These hybrid enterprises meet social needs in very creative and self-funding ways.

Now strategists Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in the January/February Harvard Business Review are urging businesses to blur the line to fix capitalism.  This is a big idea that goes beyond corporate social responsibility and proposes a business model based on creating shared value.

Shared value is defined as the policies and operating practices that enhance the competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates.  Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress.--Porter and Kramer

This is my idea of a preferred future for business where major players in the sector unleash talent and resources to meet societal needs—and makes money at it!  Porter and Kramer offer three routes to creating shared value:

• Reconceiving products and markets. They advise businesses to ask if their products are good for customers and they open up a wider view of who those customers might be. They cite the growing number of business successes found in meeting the needs of the poor and often overlooked around the world.   
• Redefining productivity in the value chain. This is a strategy that values the environment, uses fewer resources, and respects and cares for employees.
• Building supportive industry clusters in the company’s locations. Forget the rush to outsourcing to the cheapest solution wherever it might be. This strategy builds up local communities by strengthening local suppliers and partners. Associations are seen as an important part of a supportive cluster that can help companies grow. Companies help create value by supporting a strong community infrastructure in education, transportation, transparent markets and other public assets.

Porter and Kramer acknowledge that not all societal problems can be solved through shared value solutions.  But theirs is a welcome wake-up call to the for-profit sector that invites companies to rethink their basic assumptions.  And for associations and philanthropic organizations, this is also a welcome blurring of the lines. We’ve all got a stake in building a better world and we are more likely to succeed if both nonprofit and for-profit organizations work together to create shared value.