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Well, I think strategy is really important.
And it's gotta be something that is a living process.
So if you put together a strategic plan,
it can't just be something that goes and kind of sits on a shelf.
It's gotta be something that people really use, and
I think what I've found has been really effective inside of
Save the Children is the engagement in the process of putting together a strategy.
So we spend a lot of time.
We just put together a brand new strategy, and it took us about 18 months.
And it was a global process, so it involved people from all over the world.
And it at times was slow, and I think a little bit painful, but
I find that if you go through that engagement process that, first of all,
you get a better strategy, so the strategy itself is much, much stronger.
Because you've got input from people all over the organization,
from all different levels, from all different places,
from all different countries, so it ends up to be stronger.
But it's also,
you've got people already bought in by the time you have the strategy completed.
So, so many people have been engaged that they already know what it's about,
they've already bought in, and so the roll out of a plan, or a strategy, is so much
easier when you've had people involved and engaged with putting it together.
So I think that's really important.
We always start with a mission, so what's the mission of the organization?
And it is about inspiring these breakthroughs and
making immediate lasting change in kids' lives.
And then it's about the goals that you set under that strategy.
So for example, as I said we've just finished a strategy process
here at Save the Children and we basically set three goals.
And we looked out 15 years, so
we didn't focus on kind of our immediate strategic plan.
We said, what do we want the world to look like in 15 years for
children around the world?
And we set three goals.
The first one was we want to end the preventable deaths of kids under five,
and sadly about 6 million children
still die every year of things that we can prevent that they don't need to die from.
So that was our first goal.
Our second goal is around our other big area of work, which is education, and
it was to get every child into school.
That's the first step.
But not just get kids into school, but
actually make sure that they learn because many of the children that we serve
get to the fifth grade or the sixth grade, and that's it.
So if they don't learn to read, if they don't learn to write and
get basic numeracy, they never will.
So that was our second goal.
And our third goal, our third vision for the next 15 years was to change the way
the world thinks about violence against children.
And if you think about it,
violence is accepted kind of everywhere in the world and we want to change that.
And we want to make sure that kids are not taken advantage of in war situations,
that they're protected from violence and natural disasters,
that you don't have high rates of child labor, those kinds of things.
So [COUGH],
those three goals really then guided everything that we did under the strategy.
So everything that we put together in that strategic plan for
the next three years was guided by those 15 year goals.
And we said, well, what do we have to actually do to get further down the road
on ending preventable deaths, on getting every child into school,
on changing the way the world thinks about violence?
And from there you just kind of ladder all the different things that you've gotta do
and all the different levers I guess that we have in order to move those things.
Well, I talked a little bit about engagement, and
I think that's one of the most important tools, actually, in developing a strategy.
We have frameworks, and we have all sorts of tools, I guess, that we use,
but I would say the most important thing is engaging people from a large,
diverse group of people in your organization in developing a strategy.
So it can't be a top-down.
It also can't be a bottoms-up.
It's got to be kind of all levels of your organization, and
I think getting people truly engaged and giving them not only the opportunity,
but the responsibility for putting that strategy together.
So saying to groups of people,
this is yours to develop in a way that you really think is going to drive our goals,
and make a change for children in the world that we want.
And that's really empowering to people, and as I said the buy in then is just so,
in so many levels, so much deeper when you do it that way.
I think when you think about putting together strategies inside a non-profit,
again, as I said, you've gotta start with a mission.
That's so important, so there's nothing that you would do
that wouldn't really be supporting that mission.
So that's super important.
I talked a little bit about engagement.
I think the other thing is making sure that you are looking at
the external issues.
So one of the things that we did in putting together our strategy is
because the world is changing,
particularly for non-profits, I mean it changes for everyone very quickly, but for
us it's changing really quickly right now with mobile and digital and
all the things that are happening in terms of using technology.
You've gotta do a really good job of looking at the external environment and
the environment not only that you're operating in right now, but
the one that you probably will be operating in five years from now.
So that's a really important piece of putting together strategy.
I think inside non-profits,
as I said, it's got to be a very consultative process.
You would never come in and kind of say, we'll take three people off in a room and
write a strategy together, that would not work.
So I think that engagement piece, again, is really critical.
I think also thinking about what are the top-level goals.
As I said for us, setting those three goals really allowed us to have
everything that we do really contributing to those and that's really important.
Metrics are super important.
We spend a lot of time on deciding, then, how will we actually measure our strategy,
what do our dashboards look like?
We try to make those very relatively straightforward and simple so
that every person in the organization can look at a dashboard and really know how
are we doing, or how are we doing against those goals and those sub goals?
And I think again, that's really important, measuring that progress.
So those are just some of the thoughts, I think, of how you take that mission and
make it into a strategy inside of a nonprofit organization.
Michael LenoxSenior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer
Jared HarrisSamuel L. Slover Research Chair in Business Administration
Scott SnellE. Thayer Bigelow Research Professor in Business Administration
