A strategic plan: friend or foe?

LET'S GET STRATEGIC...

In 2019, three researchers named Bert George, Richard Walker, and Joost Monster pooled 87 correlations from 31 studies and asked a simple question: does strategic planning actually improve how organizations perform? The answer was yes—a positive effect, moderate in size, consistent across the public and private sectors and across countries. The paper won its field's top award. It later turned up in the federal budget as evidence for how government should set priorities.

So planning works.

And yet I have come to know the strategic plan mainly as a physical object, and not much else. Spiral-bound, nice cover stock, someone paid a designer. It lives on the shelf behind the executive director's desk, and if you ask about it, you get a small, tired laugh.

Both are true at the same time. This post is about the distance between them.

That binder is a foe. It cost real money and months of staff attention; it produced a document nobody opens, and it taught everyone in the building that planning is theater. The next time somebody proposes a process, half the room will check out before the first meeting.

It did not just fail. It made the next attempt harder.

I want to be precise about that, because it is not a figure of speech. A team led by Audrey Korsgaard followed employees at a utility company through a major reengineering effort and found that the planning itself damaged what employees believed the organization owed them, and reduced how long they intended to stay. Not the change. The planning. And the finding that matters most: that damage showed up only among the employees who thought the process had been run unfairly. Where people believed the process was fair, the harm did not appear at all.

A badly run planning process is worse than no planning process. That is a research finding, not a consultant's warning.

So the useful question is not whether to plan. It is what separates the plan that gets used from the plan that gets filed. After enough of these, I have come to believe it is four questions, and you answer all four before anybody writes a word.

QUESTION #1: WHO IS THIS PLAN FOR?

Often, this question isn't asked early enough in the process, or at all.

I joined one client in year two of a three-year strategic plan. The document was not bound and did not sit on a shelf, but it was never clear to me what had prompted it or whether the organization had actually embraced it. In one of my first executive team meetings, ahead of a board meeting, we reviewed the plan and assessed whether we were on track or needed to course-correct. It had all the trappings you would expect, including KPIs and quantitative goals to track against. What it did not have was anyone who could tell me why it had been written in the first place.

Hokyu Hwang and Patricia Bromley, working out of Stanford, interviewed the leaders of 200 randomly selected Bay Area nonprofits and matched what they heard against tax filings. Size and staff capacity predicted whether an organization had a formal plan, as expected. But those effects were dampened by something else: how tied the organization was to a professionalized outside world of funders, accreditors, consultants, and peer organizations. Functional need alone did not explain who plans.

Legitimacy did.

That connects to an older idea. In 1977, sociologists John Meyer and Brian Rowan argued that institutions adopt formal structures because those structures look rational and credible to outsiders, and then quietly disconnect them from how the work actually gets done. They called it decoupling. You know it as the binder.

That idea has a sharper edge than it first appears. Starting with the sociologist Joan Acker in 1990, a line of research has argued that organizations are not neutral containers. Acker showed that assumptions about gender are built into the documents and job structures organizations run on, beginning with an imagined, disembodied worker who has no caregiving responsibilities. Victor Ray extended the argument to race in 2019, and made a claim that bears directly on this post: the gap between an organization's formal rules and its actual practice is often racialized. Sara Ahmed, studying race equality work inside universities, documented how producing the policy document could come to stand in for the action it described. Think about how many plans in recent years added an equity goal that never made it into the budget, the hiring process, or the board's agenda. That is decoupling too, and it is not neutral.

The implication is uncomfortable. Some plans are not failures. They did exactly what they were built to do: exist. A funder asked whether you had a current strategic plan. You needed to say yes. You produced the document, checked the box, and nobody ever expected it to change a staffing decision.

If that is your situation, say it out loud and then act on it. Spend $3,000 instead of $30,000. Run a tight leadership process, produce a credible eight-page document, and do not drag forty staff through a participatory exercise whose conclusions you have no intention of implementing. Doing the cheap version honestly is fine. Doing the expensive version dishonestly is what turns an organization cynical.

It is also fair to push back on the request itself. The Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, a funder-led initiative, has been urging foundations to simplify and streamline the paperwork they require of grantees, on the view that funder-imposed documentation eats staff time and reinforces the power imbalance between the people holding the money and the people doing the work. Some funders are listening. If a plan requirement is producing a document nobody uses, it is reasonable to ask whether they actually need it.
There is also a third answer to "who is this plan for," and it is the one most plans never consider: the people you serve. Most strategic plans treat the community as the plan's subject, a population to reach or a need to meet, rather than as one of its owners. Some organizations, often those rooted in the communities they serve, write plans in which participants or residents hold real decision-making power. That is a different kind of plan, and it makes the audience question harder in a useful way.

But if you want this plan to change what someone does on a Tuesday in March, the next three questions are not optional.

QUESTION #2: WHO HELPED WRITE IT?

A plan without buy-in does not fail. It drifts. A drift can be more detrimental than a straight-up failure.

Failure would be easier. Failure is visible, and it forces a conversation. Drift is quiet. The plan is approved in October. In November, leadership references it constantly. By February, it comes up in about half of leadership meetings. By the following fall, the organization is making decisions with no relationship to it, and nobody has noticed, because at no point did anyone stand up and declare the plan dead. Drift is hard to catch precisely because it happens that slowly.

The standard fix is communication. Roll it out well. Do an all-staff presentation. Put the pillars on a poster in the break room. I have watched organizations do all three and drift anyway.

Buy-in is not just a communication problem. It is also an authorship problem, and the research on this is unusually specific about why.

Korsgaard and her colleagues ran an earlier study with intact management teams, and what predicted whether people committed to a decision was not whether they had been in the room. It was whether their input was genuinely considered and whether they had real influence over the outcome. Those two things shaped whether people felt the process was fair, and that sense of fairness is what produced commitment to the decision, attachment to the group, and trust in the person leading it.

Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways.

Participation theater is worse than a small honest process. Bringing forty people into a room, collecting their thinking on flip chart paper, and then adopting the plan leadership had already drafted does not build commitment. It manufactures the exact perception that input was requested and ignored, which the research says destroys it. If you are not prepared to let what people say change the outcome, do not ask.

That research studied people inside organizations: managers and employees. Practitioners working on racial equity have pushed the same idea outward to the communities organizations serve, giving it more precise language. Rosa González of Facilitating Power developed a Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership that runs through six levels: ignore, inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and defer to. Its value is that it names the levels. Most "inclusive" planning processes sit at consult. We asked, we listened, we decided. There is nothing wrong with consulting. It becomes participation theater when it is presented as collaboration.

The fix is to decide in advance, and say out loud, which decisions the people you are asking will actually share, and which ones leadership will keep. People can accept a consultation that is honest about being one. What they do not forgive is being told they co-wrote something they did not.

And as a nonprofit leader, you should not only ask; you should want to change and adapt based on team feedback and insight. Early in my career, I preferred to work quickly, develop a concept, and then get feedback from staff and stakeholders. What frustrated me was the imbalance between the work I put in and watching the initial product become obsolete during the feedback loop because my circle of advisors did their jobs. It's not great to position yourself as frustrated because the people you asked actually did their jobs. When I finally adjusted the process so that we had kick-off meetings, and I entered those spaces with no preconceived notions and kept myself open to a truly collaborative experience rather than a downstream request for feedback, my work got more efficient, my work product was more polished, and most importantly, the entire team committed to the findings because we built it together.

Six things that actually move this:
Get input from people who cannot approve the plan, and decide what they will share. Program staff, frontline workers, and the people you serve. Not only because it is right, but because they know which of your proposed strategies is operationally impossible and your leadership team does not. Then go one step further than most organizations do, and name which decisions they will help make, not merely inform.
Design the process for the people you want in it. A planning retreat held on a Saturday, in English only, in a building without an elevator, has already decided who participates. Acker's imagined ideal worker shows up in planning processes too: the default schedule assumes someone without caregiving duties, a second job, or a disability. If you want frontline staff and community members at the table, offer more than one time and more than one way to weigh in, pay community participants for their time, and budget for interpretation and access. Those costs belong in the planning budget, not in the nice-extras category.
Look at who holds the pen at the end. In most organizations, the board approves the plan, and boards often look different from the staff and communities the plan is for. Women lead most of the sector's smallest organizations but just under a third of its largest, and Candid's research points to board composition as a possible driver, since women's share of board seats declines as organizations grow. If the people approving the plan are not the people who will live with it, the process has to close that gap on purpose.
Show your work. When you decline someone's suggestion, say so and say why. An idea that was heard and rejected with a reason builds more commitment than an idea that vanished into a synthesis document.

Make the cascade explicit. Every goal needs a named owner who is not the executive director. If the ED owns all six goals, the ED owns none of them.

Test it before you celebrate. Ninety days after adoption, ask three people at three different levels to name one goal without looking it up. If they cannot, you do not have buy-in. You have a document with signatures.

QUESTION #3: WHAT ARE YOU GIVING UP?

"Aspirational" sounds like a compliment for a reason. Boards like aspirational plans. They are satisfying to approve, they photograph well in the annual report, and approving one feels like leadership.

Then the staff of eleven reads the twenty-three strategic initiatives and does the math.

I want to be careful here, because the obvious advice, which is to aim lower, is not supported by the research. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent thirty-five years establishing the opposite. Specific and difficult goals produce better performance than easy ones, or than telling people to do their best. Telling a nonprofit to be less ambitious is bad advice, and I am not going to give it. The real finding is more interesting than that. Sim Sitkin and four co-authors examined stretch goals and found they pay off under two conditions: recent success and slack resources. Recent success lets an organization read an audacious goal as an opportunity rather than a threat. Slack gives it room to experiment without existential risk. Their conclusion is the line worth keeping: stretch goals are most seductive to exactly the organizations least able to absorb the risk that comes with them.

Now think about how nonprofits behave. Thin reserves. No slack of any kind. And boards that reach for the boldest possible plan in the year immediately after a deficit, precisely because morale needs a lift. That is the configuration the research says will hurt you, and it is close to the sector default.

And slack is not evenly distributed. In 2020, Echoing Green and the Bridgespan Group looked at the most highly qualified applicants to Echoing Green's fellowship. They found that Black-led organizations had revenues 24 percent smaller than their white-led counterparts, and unrestricted net assets 76 percent smaller. Among organizations working specifically on outcomes for Black men and boys, the unrestricted gap reached 91 percent for organizations doing the same work. Unrestricted money is what "slack" is made of.

A related pattern shows up by gender. Candid's 2026 compensation report found that women lead most of the smallest nonprofits but just under a third of those with budgets above $50 million, and that at those largest organizations, women CEOs earn a median of 75 cents for every dollar men earn. Elizabeth Barajas-Román of the Women's Funding Network has read those numbers as a question of which organizations get resourced to grow into the sector's lasting institutions, and which are expected to deliver without the same long-term investment.

That changes what the stretch goal finding means. The conditions that make ambition safe are unevenly distributed, by race and by gender, and are often thinnest at the organizations closest to the communities they serve. The problem is not that those organizations aim too high. It is that they are denied the cushion that lets anyone aim high without betting the organization. For them, part of the planning work is making the case to funders that unrestricted, multiyear money is a precondition for the plan, not a reward for executing it.

So the question is not whether your goals are ambitious. It is whether you can survive missing them, and if you cannot, who is keeping you from being able to.

Two tests I use:

Does the plan name what you will stop doing? Almost none do. Nearly every plan I read is purely additive. New program, new revenue stream, new partnership, expanded services, deeper community engagement. Where is the capacity coming from? The unspoken answer is usually that everyone will work harder, which is not a strategy. It is a staffing crisis on a delay. And "everyone" is rarely everyone. Linda Babcock and her colleagues found that women, more than men, are asked to take on, volunteer for, and accept the work that helps an organization but does little for the person doing it: the committee seat, the report nobody wants to write. A plan that quietly assumes people will absorb extra work assumes whose time is available, and that work tends to land on the same people. A plan with no subtraction in it is a wish list with a timeline attached.

Does the plan touch the budget? This is the one nearly everybody misses. A strategic plan that never appears in the annual budget cycle has no mechanism to move money, and a plan that cannot move money cannot change anything. If year two of your plan requires a new position, that position has to show up in a budget your board approves, or the goal is decoration.

QUESTION #4: HOW WILL YOU CHANGE IT?

Every strategic plan is a set of predictions about a future that has not happened yet. Some of them will be wrong. That is what predicting is, not a defect in your process.

The problem is that most organizations have no legitimate mechanism for revision. So when reality diverges from the plan, they get three bad options. Pretend the plan is still accurate. Quietly stop referencing it. Or convene an awkward meeting where changing course feels like conceding that the last eighteen months were wasted. Most organizations pick the second, and that's how drift starts.

One caution before the fix, because it is tempting to draw the wrong conclusion from all of this. You might read the case against shelf binders as a case against formality, and decide that nimble beats structured. The evidence does not support that. In that 2019 meta-analysis, the effect on performance was strongest where the planning was formal.

That finding has a serious counterweight, and it deserves a fair hearing. adrienne maree brown, an organizer and facilitator whose 2017 book Emergent Strategy draws on the science fiction of Octavia Butler and years of movement work, argues for strategy that is relational and adaptive rather than fixed. Among her principles: change is constant, small is good, and move at the speed of trust. Her work is not built on performance studies and does not try to be. It asks a different question. Not whether a formal plan improves measured results, but whether the people doing the work trust each other enough to change course together.

I do not think those two views are as far apart as they look. The meta-analysis says a deliberate, written process helps. brown says the pace of change is set by trust, which is close to what Korsgaard found about fairness. Together, they point toward the same design: a plan formal enough to be accountable, with built-in amendment rules, moving no faster than the relationships underneath it. They genuinely disagree on how much should be written down in advance. I lean toward writing more than brown would and I would rather name that disagreement than pretend it is not there.

Build the amendment process in at the start. It costs almost nothing then, and it changes what revision means later.

Separate the layers. Goals stay stable across the plan period. Strategies get revisited annually. Tactics get revisited quarterly. Most of what needs to change is a tactic, and if you have not separated the layers, changing a tactic feels like reopening the whole plan.

Put the cadence in writing. Schedule quarterly progress reviews, annual strategy reviews, and defined triggers for off-cycle reviews. Name the triggers in advance. Loss of a funder above some share of revenue. A leadership transition. A major policy shift in your field. When one hits, revisiting the plan is the response you already agreed to, not a crisis.

Say who can change what. Staff adjusts tactics. Leadership adjusts strategies. The board approves changes to goals. Without this, every proposed change routes to the board, so people stop proposing changes.

Record why, not just what. A plan revised three times with no record of the reasoning is indistinguishable from an organization with no plan at all. The revision log is the difference between adapting and wandering.

When a plan is built collaboratively and the team feels ownership, changes to the plan with an accompanying rationale are more likely to be accepted. Nonprofits can get a little sideways when they don't review, adjust, and evaluate the plan regularly. One pro-bono client I worked with had adopted a process of evaluation that lacked the transparency necessary to encourage staff evolution and collective adoption of the changes. This is especially true in founder-led organizations. Too often the founder's vision, relationships, and plans exist only in the founder's brain. And sometimes it's hard to get what is in the founder's brain onto paper. Even after the concepts leave the brain, the founder could wake up one morning, have a revelation, and start drilling down on altering specific aspects of the plan, with no real justification other than the feeling they had when they woke up. This isn't a founder dysfunction; it is a powerful characteristic that, when pointed in the right direction, can do incredible things. But if there is not an iterative process, where the founder is held accountable to the strategy while also having the opportunity to assess and adjust with team input, then the strategic plan isn't a plan at all.

WHAT THESE FOUR QUESTIONS WILL NOT FIX

All four questions are about process. Who the plan is for, who wrote it, what it costs you, how it changes. Process is what causes most failures, which is why it gets most of this post.

But process isn't enough, and it would be dishonest to leave that out.

Rhys Andrews, George Boyne, and Richard Walker surveyed 119 English local authorities and found that a strategy's substance predicts performance independently of how well the planning was run. Organizations that actively hunt for new opportunities tend to outperform. Organizations that mostly react to whatever their funders and their environment push at them tend to underperform, consistently and measurably. The middle case, defending and sharpening what you already do well, is genuinely strong in some settings and mediocre in others. Kenneth Meier and colleagues, whose broader research program centers on racial and ethnic representation in public schools, found it was the best posture of all for core mission delivery in a large study of Texas school districts, which is a more honest answer than most strategy writing will give you.

There is one more limit worth naming, and it applies to the research in this post itself. Nearly every study I have cited measures success the way leadership and funders define it. Jara Dean-Coffey, who founded the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, has traced how philanthropic evaluation grew out of an early twentieth-century focus on outputs and costs, and argues that the resulting definitions of evidence and rigor carry built-in assumptions about whose knowledge counts. You do not have to accept all of her argument to take the practical point. When the people who approve a plan write its measures, the plan can succeed on paper while missing what the people it serves would have counted.

Acker's later work explains why process improvements alone so often disappoint. She described "inequality regimes," the interlocking practices through which gender, race, and class inequality are reproduced inside organizations. She argued the concept helps explain why organizational change efforts so often fail. A strategic plan is a change effort. If it never touches how work is assigned, how people are paid, or who gets promoted, the organization it describes on paper and the one people experience at work will keep drifting apart.
That means you can run a flawless process, earn real buy-in, do the capacity math, maintain the plan on schedule, and still execute a bad strategy, because your organization has slid into pure reaction without ever naming it.

That is the next post in this series.

SO, FRIEND OR FOE?

The strategic plan is neither. It is inert. What decides which one you end up with is a set of choices you make before anybody writes anything down.

A plan is a foe when nobody is honest about who it's for, when a few people write it for everyone else, when it promises more than the organization can absorb, and when there is no legitimate way to change it. That plan will drift, and it will leave you more cynical than you were before you started.

A plan is a friend when its audience is named, when the people who have to execute it helped build it and can see where their input landed, when it is honest about capacity including what you are giving up, and when revising it is a scheduled activity rather than an admission of failure.

Same binder. Completely different object.

Four questions before you begin:

1. Who is this plan actually for, and does that include the people you serve?
2. Who will have helped write it, which decisions will they actually share, and will they be able to see where their input went?
3. What are we giving up to make room for it, who will absorb the extra work, and does that show up in the budget?
4. Who is allowed to change it, and how often will we look?

WHERE THIS SERIES GOES NEXT

Each of those four questions gets its own post, plus one on the thing process cannot fix.

• Post 2. Prospector, Defender, or Reactor: What Kind of Nonprofit Are You? The strategy underneath the plan, and why a well-run process can still produce a bad one.
• Post 3. Who Is Your Strategic Plan Actually For? The full case on plans built for funders, and how to build that kind well instead of pretending it is something else.
• Post 4. Participation Theater: Why Your Inclusive Process Backfired. What the procedural justice research says about asking for input you do not intend to use.
• Post 5. Stretch Goals Require Slack You Do Not Have. Ambition, capacity, and why the year after a deficit is the worst possible moment for a bold plan.

If you would rather talk it through than read four more posts, let's chat, or take Marque's diagnostic.

SOURCES

Four caveats first, since anyone who reads this literature will think of them.

Most of the management research below is correlational, so some of the measured benefit reflects the fact that organizations which plan well tend to be well run generally. The strongest of those studies look at public agencies rather than nonprofits, so applying them to a $2M human services organization is an inference rather than a finding.

Except for Meier's research program, the management studies cited here rarely ask whether their findings hold differently depending on the race or gender of the leaders, staff, or communities involved. Joan Acker named this blind spot for gender in 1990, and Stella Nkomo named it for race in 1992. Goal-setting research has also shown variation across cultures.

And the equity-centered sources are a different kind of evidence: practitioner frameworks, a funder-side initiative, descriptive funding and compensation data, and scholarly theory. They are cited here for what they are: perspectives and data that change what the management research means, not experimental findings.

On whether planning works. George, Walker, and Monster, "Does Strategic Planning Improve Organizational Performance? A Meta-Analysis," Public Administration Review, 2019. Free full text

On process fairness and buy-in. Korsgaard, Sapienza, and Schweiger, "Beaten Before Begun: The Role of Procedural Justice in Planning Change," Journal of Management, 2002. And Korsgaard, Schweiger, and Sapienza, "Building Commitment, Attachment, and Trust in Strategic Decision-Making Teams," Academy of Management Journal, 1995.

On community engagement and ownership. Rosa González, The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership, Facilitating Power in partnership with Movement Strategy Center, 2019. Download

On why nonprofits adopt formal plans. Hwang and Bromley, "Internal and External Determinants of Formal Plans in the Nonprofit Sector." The underlying theory comes from Meyer and Rowan, "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony," American Journal of Sociology, 1977. On funder paperwork, the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project's principles.

On organizations as gendered and racialized. Joan Acker, "Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations," Gender & Society, 1990, and "Inequality Regimes: Gender, Class, and Race in Organizations," Gender & Society, 2006. Victor Ray, "A Theory of Racialized Organizations," American Sociological Review, 2019. Sara Ahmed, "'You End Up Doing the Document Rather than Doing the Doing': Diversity, Race Equality and the Politics of Documentation," Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2007. Stella Nkomo, "The Emperor Has No Clothes: Rewriting 'Race in Organizations,'" Academy of Management Review, 1992.

On ambition, capacity, and who has slack. Locke and Latham, "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation," American Psychologist, 2002. Erez and Earley, "Comparative Analysis of Goal-Setting Strategies Across Cultures," Journal of Applied Psychology, 1987. Sitkin, See, Miller, Lawless, and Carton, "The Paradox of Stretch Goals," Academy of Management Review, 2011, summarized for a general audience as "The Stretch Goal Paradox" in Harvard Business Review. Dorsey, Bradach, and Kim, Racial Equity and Philanthropy: Disparities in Funding for Leaders of Color Leave Impact on the Table, Echoing Green and the Bridgespan Group, 2020. Candid, 2026 Nonprofit Compensation Report.

On who absorbs the extra work. Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund, and Weingart, "Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability," American Economic Review, 2017. The same team wrote a general-audience version, The No Club, 2022.

On adaptation and trust. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, AK Press, 2017.

On strategy content. Andrews, Boyne, and Walker, "Strategy Content and Organizational Performance," Public Administration Review, 2006. And Meier, O'Toole, Boyne, and Walker, "Strategic Management and the Performance of Public Organizations," Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2007.

On who defines success. Jara Dean-Coffey, "What's Race Got to Do With It? Equity and Philanthropic Evaluation Practice," American Journal of Evaluation, 2018. See also the Equitable Evaluation Framework.

About the author

Andy Rathmann-Noonan

Founder, Marque Nonprofit Advisors

I work with one organization at a time. Executive directors call me when growth, a leadership change, or a funding shift has outrun the way the organization is built. I diagnose what is actually load bearing, scope the work, build the fix, and hand it back. No retainer that never ends.

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Last updated September 22, 2026.