In the absence of strategy, an organization tends to react, and redo, and look around for “best practices” instead of getting to know their own business. Individuals set off in their own incompatible directions or succumb to groupthink. This wastes a lot of time and effort.

A solid strategy can help everyone to be more effective. It keeps people focused for more than the next fiscal quarter. It can even be inspiring. There is nothing less inspiring than not knowing why you’re doing things.

If you’re strategy keeps changing, you don’t have a strategy.

Whatever you need an external perspective for, we probably have the experience. Maybe we haven’t seen it all, but we’ve seen a lot.

What it is

A custom engagement built to help you articulate and answer key questions and create a coherent plan to guide your communication, marketing, fundraising, product, branding or operational decisions over the next year or 5.

Who it’s for

Any organization of any size trying to do something useful that needs help figuring out the landscape or finding its way. In other words—you.

How it works

We use an inquiry-based approach. This means we show up and ask a lot of questions, some of them will be uncomfortable. But don’t worry, we have a lot of experience with this stuff. 

We begin by working with you to clarify the problem at hand. Then there will be conversations, definitely internal, maybe external. This could include background research, interviews with subject matter experts and representative audience-members or partner organizations.

Once we have an initial sense of what’s going on, we’ll share that with you and work out any inconsistencies or gaps. 

Then we will finalize the recommendations. The deliverables will document what we’ve all learned and agreed to, but the most important part is the understanding that develops along the way.

There isn’t anything mysterious about this process. Most organizations should do the work, but put it off until they’re in a crisis because they didn’t do it. 

Reasons you might not be able to start doing the right thing on your own:

• Everyone else doing it ("best practices"/FOMO)

• Curse of knowledge

• Staff too afraid of executives

• Sunk cost

• Wishful thinking

• Fake urgency

• Just need an external force to overcome habits

Outcomes

A coherent narrative, recommendations, and a plan. Maybe there will be concepts for further exploration. The specific artifacts depend on what will help your organization best understand itself and its work to move forward.