Stop paying for advice you can't keep using

A strategic plan can be incredibly valuable, but on its own it is static. The moment the environment shifts, it stops helping you the way it did the day it was written. This article is about what a plan needs behind it, and the test every piece of strategy work should be held against: does it leave a capability behind?

A plan is a good thing

A strategic plan can be incredibly valuable. It captures the vision, the aspirations and the anchors: the things that don't move no matter what's happening around us. It gives us something to point at.

But a plan by itself is static. The moment the environment shifts, and it always does, the plan stops being accurate. It stops helping us the way it did the day we wrote it.

What a plan needs behind it

What a plan needs behind it is a living strategy. Not a document, but a practice: a shared understanding across the organisation, distributed enough that people at every level can carry it into their own everyday decisions.

A living strategy also means understanding the trade-offs, that choosing this costs us that, and holding those trade-offs openly instead of pretending we can have both.

I often come back to the image of a braided river. A braided river doesn't hold one channel forever. It splits, rejoins and finds new paths as the terrain shifts, and it's still the same river the whole way down. That's what a living strategy looks like when it sits behind the plan: it lets the plan keep reflecting the reality you're actually operating in, not the reality that existed the day it was signed off.

Why organisations keep buying answers

For a lot of purpose-led organisations, that muscle, the actual practice of building and holding a living strategy, is underdeveloped. So we bring people in.

Often it's someone to facilitate the room, and we walk out with a set of high-level commitments, a re-energised sense of our vision and strengths, and maybe a SWOT for good measure. Or it's someone who comes in with advice, and we walk away with their answers pressed into a plan.

If the only thing left at the end of an engagement is a document and the memory of a good conversation, we've paid for an answer. Not a capability. An answer we can't keep using once the people who built it have gone, and that doesn't help us when the environment shifts.

The test every engagement should be held against

The thing I want for the for-purpose sector is simple: stop paying for advice you can't keep using once we're gone.

That's the test I hold every piece of Aronga work against. Not whether we hand over a plan, but whether we leave a capability behind: something the team can run themselves, repeat themselves, keep alive themselves, and get stronger at using every time they come back to it.

What that looks like in practice

I watched this happen in one recent strategy engagement, with an organisation working through real complexity. What we built wasn't just a plan, or even a process. It was supporting a person: someone named as kaitiaki for the strategy, keeping it alive alongside the chief executive and the board.

When a significant shift hit, that person picked up the same architecture we'd built together and led their own people through what needed to change. Nobody had to call me.

That's the whole reason I do this work: so that a leader can still see their next step once the ground has moved and I'm no longer in the room.

When a plan stops holding up, it isn't a sign the plan was wrong. It's a sign the ground moved, and the living strategy behind it needs to move too.

Reflection

• Where are you still pointing at a plan without the living strategy behind it that would let it keep up with what's actually changed?
• What would it look like to build something you can keep running yourselves, long after any advisor, consultant, mentor or facilitator has left the room?
• Who in your organisation could hold the strategy as kaitiaki, and what would they need to do it well?

A plan without a living strategy doesn't survive contact with real conditions.