How to Transform Strategic Planning for Social Justice

Social justice organizations are becoming frustrated with strategic planning.

As consultants Jara Dean-Coffey and Jill Casey noted in their recent paper “Strategy for Now,” published at The Foundation Review: “Amid growing desires to integrate and embody practices aligned with equity, emergence, and complexity, concepts and points of view that dominate business continue to lead conversations about strategy formation in philanthropy and nonprofits.” Often linear, top-down, and focused on control, these conventional strategic approaches not only fail to deliver the alignment they promise, but they also operate in fundamental tension with the values and missions of justice-focused organizations.

There is no denying that strategy can be the source of strength that social justice organizations need, but as Dean-Coffey and Casey explain, this requires a willingness to reflect, reframe, and remake our strategic concepts and practices. We need, in short, a strategic planning that works for social justice nonprofits and advocates.

An Example of the Limits of Conventional Strategic Planning

Several years ago, re:power was evolving from a respected, organizer-training institution into a Black-led, women-led organization explicitly dedicated to promoting the ideology and practice of liberatory organizing.

For organizations striving to build a more just and equitable world, conventional strategic planning can bring the wrong values to life.

Karundi Williams, the group’s executive director, wanted to clarify this evolution. “I knew that a good strategy process could shift our discussions from naming what we were leaving behind to defining what I knew we could become,” she explained in an interview.

The team at re:power entrusted its strategic planning process to an experienced consulting firm but soon found their conversations stalled. In populating standardized templates, the process failed to answer practical strategic questions. Group discussions in a handful of workshops were unable to reconcile differing perspectives and provide the rigor necessary for decision-making. The approach focused on how re:power would compete against peers, neglecting to determine how it would achieve its mission within a complex, complementary ecosystem.

In the end, this conventional approach to strategic planning—familiar, perhaps, to many readers—fell far short of Williams’s goals. A different approach was ultimately needed for re:power to clarify what the organization sought to achieve and how it would do so.

The Disconnect

Social justice organizations are working to dismantle systems of oppression. But when strategy tools come from systems that preserve racial, gender, and class hierarchies, the resulting processes and decisions can exhibit inherent contradictions.

For example, we aspire to co-create strategy with stakeholders, but our rushed and rigid project plans are rarely built for the depth of engagement required to reach real understanding and alignment. We seek to honor the validity of lived experience, but our processes often fail to create the spaciousness and psychological safety necessary to surface and genuinely grapple with multiple experiences and perspectives. We believe in the power of emergence, yet we are drawn to building multiyear plans around scheduled, quantifiable outcomes.

For organizations striving to build a more just and equitable world, conventional strategic planning can bring the wrong values to the table.

Three Key Shifts

The good news is that practitioners across the sector are developing approaches to strategy that strike a balance between the realities of organizational management and the values of social justice movements. The collective wisdom from across the field points to three mental model shifts with the potential to transform strategic planning to be in greater service of social justice:

1. From capitalist strategy to liberatory strategy: Bringing a new set of values to life through strategy processes and strategy content.
2. From strategy as a plan to strategy as a compass: Making strategic progress through clarity and empowered alignment, instead of prediction and control.
3. From strategic planning to strategic management: Reframing our goal from the possession of a strategic plan to the ability to navigate our environment strategically.

Shift 1: From Capitalist Strategy to Liberatory Strategy

Conventional strategic planning approaches are rooted in a capitalist management paradigm. In this view, the purpose of an organization is to produce goods or services within competitive markets; people are “labor” whose purpose is to make capital more productive. This people-as-labor mindset shows up in strategic planning processes via the classic model of leaders doing the strategic thinking, while frontline staff execute.

Liberatory strategy processes, in contrast, genuinely enable co-creation, in which the people most impacted by the strategy have the appropriate power to shape it. A prerequisite, or at least a co-requisite, for genuine co-creation is that management and staff must confront how White supremacy, patriarchy, and ableism are present within the organization, to be able to build internal practices for dismantling them.

According to Jeanne Bell, Dominique Samari, and Steve Zimmerman, in organizations fighting for social justice, race equity work is strategy work. In strategic planning processes, race equity maturity helps organizations honor diverse forms of knowledge and communication, work through sensitive issues and the principled tension of differing perspectives, and make decisions with transparency and accountability to the people they impact.

Notably, co-creation is also premised on the ability of stakeholders to employ their own strategic thinking when contributing to the process. The recent strategic planning process at State Innovation Exchange, or SiX, illustrates what this can look like. Neha Patel and Jessie Ulibarri, SiX’s former coexecutive directors, wanted the strategy to reflect the best of the staff’s work, wisdom, and ideas.

To create the conditions for staff to engage in generative strategic thinking, SiX invested in helping individuals connect big-picture strategic dynamics to their own context within the organization. By providing human-to-human connection and space for staff to process emotions that resurface from the prospect of organizational change, staff were able to contribute from a place of real agency. In turn, the strategy eventually articulated in SiX’s strategic plan also lived within the organization’s people and work.

Content strategy always needs to shift, since the competitive roots of conventional approaches are frequently, if subtly, evident that process. As the team at consulting organization Brava Leaders explained, “Most value statements reinforce universal ‘goods’ that nobody can disagree with—pride, equity, teamwork, honesty.”

“Instead,” they said, “beliefs should be controversial enough to clarify what your organization is and isn’t.”

Similarly, while businesses define themselves by the goods or services they offer, defining an organization’s mission in terms of its services is problematic for social justice organizations. Organizations should instead build their mission statement around a “desired change” or what The Bridgespan Group calls an “intended impact.”

The re:power team took this approach in a second phase of its strategic planning process, articulating a mission to “build a critical mass of social justice movements and their leaders who embody the ideology and practice of liberatory organizing.” Rather than presupposing the activities they should undertake, this mission gave re:power a problem-solving orientation, focusing its strategic thinking on determining what it would take to reach critical mass.

Additionally, many conventional strategy methodologies rely too heavily on the 1970s-era SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) framework, borrowed from the private sector. What practitioners don’t often realize is that SWOT is simply a way to organize observations and opinions; it is not a deep analysis that reveals new insights.

Inserted between the traditional steps of “write your mission statement” and “determine your strategic priorities,” SWOT adds little value to problem-solving what those priorities should be. By contrast, developing a theory of change can help social justice organizations determine what it will take to achieve their intended impact.

SiX’s theory of change exercise, for example, revealed practical implications for its strategic priorities, including establishing key design criteria for its program model and clarifying which approaches to scaling its impact were appropriate and which were not.

Shift 2: From Strategy as a Plan to Strategy as a Compass

Despite warnings against the limitations of planning-focused strategy (including, for example, from the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Bridgespan), many conventional approaches remain overeager to develop action plans. As the typical thinking goes, without concrete actions and measurable objectives, we won’t know if we’re making strategic progress. In this mental model, planning is a tool for ensuring action through commitments, accountability, and compliance.

[The] SWOT [framework] is simply a way to organize observations and opinions; it is not a deep analysis that reveals new insights.

But an anxious fixation on action can cause us to rush past the heart of strategy development: the meaning-making, problem-solving, and decision-making that are critical to determining what our plans should be.

The strategies of both re:power and SiX illustrate that an alternative to planning-focused strategy works. Instead of prescriptive plans, they provided clarity of strategic intent: an assertion of what they aimed to achieve and by what means. They did so through a set of interconnected strategic decisions that linked a compelling purpose to a clear analysis to a coherent organizational response:

1. SiX and re:power both laid strong strategic foundations by clearly articulating their organization’s purpose, describing the compelling future they were building (vision), including the values in which that future is rooted, and the desired change they sought to bring about, in service of that future (mission).
2. Their well-specified organizational purpose enabled sound strategic analysis. A clear desired change enabled SiX and re:power to break down the challenges that were standing in the way of that change (diagnosis) and to develop a perspective on how the challenge could be overcome (theory of change).
3. This analysis then provided criteria for their organizational response. Because their theories of change explained the outcomes they must achieve, re:power and SiX could rigorously assess potential options for:
   • The value they must offer stakeholders for the targeted outcomes to arise (value proposition);
   • The programming or services that best deliver that value (program model);
   • The organizational structure, processes, and culture that best support the program model (operating model);
   • The sustainable, scalable alignment between value created and funding streams (business model); and
   • The evolutionary organizational journey to embody their aspired value proposition, program model, operating model, and business model (roadmap).

With clear intent, strategy can serve as a compass, enabling staff to determine for themselves what decisions or actions are most strategic in any situation, not only those anticipated by a plan. Agency to problem-solve, exercise judgment, and make decisions strategically is much more valuable than a rigid prescription of actions, especially amid complexity and uncertainty.

Shift 3: From Strategic Planning to Strategic Management

The conventional set-strategy-then-execute model, in which strategic thinking happens during strategic planning, followed by faithful execution, runs counter to the empowerment and agility sought by social justice organizations. As Bell and Dan Tucker of JustOrg Design recently noted, “What’s missing are routine, well-managed spaces to connect the dots and tie everything to active organizational strategies. A place for clear, strategic decision-making with the key players at the table.” Routine strategic decision-making is what brings strategy to life.

Routine strategic decision-making begins in an organization’s processes for setting goals, work planning and budgeting, to determine how to best pursue its strategic intent in a given period. Goals and plans developed during these processes, typically annually, are much more timely, relevant, and actionable than when developed every three or five years during strategic planning exercises that remain disconnected from resource allocation and other management processes.

This is a “know better, do better” moment for the social sector. Social justice organizations deserve a discipline of strategy they can call their own.

Routine strategic decision-making also happens in an organization’s day-to-day management, in the context of both departmental work and what Bell and Tucker describe as cross-functional tables. These are organizational “spaces” in which people move important bodies of work requiring deep collaboration across the normal organizational hierarchy and departmental structure. SiX, for example, convened programmatic, financial, and fundraising personnel from various levels in the hierarchy in a cross-functional table as it sought to evolve from historically siloed, issue-based funding to funding that supported more collaborative, intersectional work.

Even as an organization works to embody its strategic intent, it is also appropriate to refine and evolve that intent over time. Strategic contexts change constantly. Organizations learn continuously. Every day brings a better sense of how the future may unfold. As strategy advisor and Strategy Meets Reality podcast host Mike Jones described, “Strategy cannot be treated as a fixed direction to be executed. It must emerge continuously from the organisation’s ability to observe, interpret, reframe, and act coherently.”

That is where an organization’s capability for strategic evolution comes in. This capability involves reflection (“What are we seeing?”), learning (“What might this mean for our strategy?”), and adaptation (“How should we adjust our intent?”).

Notably, strategic evolution is where metrics and data collection can be most useful. Here, metrics are not employed for accountability and control, as they often are in conventional strategic planning. Instead, they support organizational learning. SiX built its monitoring and evaluation capability alongside its strategy work for this reason. It defined a learning agenda to help it test key assumptions and refine its understanding of the dynamics within its theory of change. When it reviewed the collected data, it did so not to measure “performance” but to support reflection and learning. Thus, SiX not only strengthened its muscle for strategy evolution, but it also reinforced its values as a social justice organization.

Embracing These Shifts

The mental model shifts—from capitalist strategy to liberatory strategy, from strategy as a plan to strategy as a compass, from strategic planning to strategic management—help us reimagine strategy not as a tool for control but as a tool for empowerment. The question is not whether these shifts are necessary but whether we have the will to fully embrace them.

Leaders, staff, and boards: One of the most important ways to make room for liberatory strategy is to release tendencies toward productivity, urgency, and control. As Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, noted in a 2021 NPQ webinar, strategy can be more useful when the framing shifts from urgent, high-stakes, episodic exercises to ongoing strategic journeys that move at the pace of trust, understanding, and alignment. In addition, organizations can lean into co-creation as early as when they seek consultant support, by issuing a request for information (RFI) before a request for proposal (RFP). This saves time, improves decisions, and is more equitable.

Funders: Especially now, as our nation enters what is likely to be a prolonged period of structural societal readjustment—perhaps even collapse and renewal—conventional strategy approaches will no longer suffice. Funders have an opportunity to upgrade the social sector’s practice of strategy by resourcing the deeper strategic journeys described in this article and by supporting field-building work to bring isolated, emergent practices together into a scalable discipline.

Consultants: Consultants and capacity-building institutions are stewards of the craft of strategy for the social sector. This article is an invitation. Each of us has something unique to contribute to the future of the craft. It’s time to come together to learn from one another, compost what no longer serves us, and recombine our ideas into something new and more powerful.

As Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” This is a “know better, do better” moment for the social sector. Social justice organizations deserve a discipline of strategy they can call their own. Let’s build it together.