.svg){kind=small}
by Jeanne Bell, Co-Founder, JustOrg Design
Image: MARIANA JUAREZ, artist, San Miguel de Allende, MX [Instagram, Website]
Blog No. 2 - April 2023
If organizational values are who we are, organizational strategies are how we are.
But how we are is so often left unarticulated. It can feel safer in justice-committed organizations to talk about why we do the work (our values) than to debate, refine, unlearn, or reimagine how we do it to deepen our collective effect in the world.
Not having bold, discerning strategies to align how we do the work is deeply problematic. It leaves people questioning one another’s methods, choices, and even competence. We are left without a shared language for discussing and debating the design and execution of our work. So things go unsaid. They fester. They get personalized. We say vague things like “these folks get it,” and “these folks don’t get it.” Without articulated strategy, constantly embodied and reinforced by leadership, how can we all even know what it is?
There are lots of conscious and unconscious reasons that leaders leave organizational strategy unarticulated, but let’s start at the root. A primary reason is that we are not using a powerful, galvanizing definition of strategy. We quite literally use the word “strategy” all the time without agreeing on what we mean. Not only does this cause genuine confusion among our staff and board; it fosters cynicism that strategy can in fact inspire and align people.
In our view, how we are in justice-committed organizations is in fact three things at once. The three writers/practitioners below guide us in thinking in these three complementary ways about organizational strategy.
adrienne marie brown: Emergent Strategy
Key Insight: “Emergent strategies let us practice, in every possible way, the world we want to see.”
Jara Dean-Coffey: A Master Class for Linking Strategy & Evaluation
Key Insight: “Strategies are cross-cutting methods/means used to work toward the change the organization seeks.”
Roger Martin: A Plan Is Not A Strategy
Key Insight: “Strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you on a playing field of your choice in a way that you win.”
We can’t pull these three things apart in a justice-committed organization. Who we are becoming and how we do our work and what resources we attract by being and doing in those specific ways—it's all one big, beautiful helix. We are practicing and impacting others and sustaining our work all at once. That’s the “business model” in a justice-committed organization.
Let’s look at an example. An environmental organization has as one of its strategies: Engage young people as current and future movement leaders. Can you see how fully activating this strategy would align and galvanize all corners of an organization?
- Program staff would design their programs in ways that center the leadership and experience of young people.
- Development staff would engage young people as donors and as peer-to-peer fundraisers. They would also seek institutional funding from entities that share a commitment to youth development and power-building.
- Communications and social media would be on the platforms young people currently use and in voices with whom youth identify.
- Data collection and learning would allow for segmentation and analysis by age group.
- The human resource policies would prioritize continuing education and student debt relief as well support to people raising children.
- The facility, if they had one, would be welcoming to young people.
- The board would have young people on it and truly support their leadership development.
And so on. People across the organization, in all roles–both programmatic and supporting–can activate this strategy. It infuses the how of everything they do. Everyone is accountable to it. Staff can safely and productively ask one another, “how does what you are proposing to do engage young people as movement leaders?”
At JustOrg Design, we have made the image above to capture what compelling organizational strategy is and to suggest that what it always leads to is choices. Choices about how to more fully activate our strategies together. And over time, through learning and iteration, the choices to shift the strategies themselves when the context requires it.
Strategy is an absolutely essential lever for getting people unstuck. When we make important choices in alignment with a bold, discerning set of strategies, we are building the organization consciously. If all roles and teams are empowered to interpret strategy, alignment and momentum are entirely possible.
Questions for discussion:
- Do we use the word “strategy” in a consistent way in our organization?
- Have we sharply named the organizational practices and methods that drive our impact and attract people and financial resources?
- If not, what are the consequences of not having a shared language for how we want to approach all of the work that we do?
Sign up for our monthly blog here.
