Strategic planning for systems change is a whole different endeavor.

Strategic planning for systems change is a different kind of strategic planning.  Our clients are moving past putting together documents that explain what they are doing.  Our clients are on a social change journey that is about more than ameliorating a problem.  Instead, our clients are asking why a problem exists in the first place.

An individual or organization must first be able to put forward a new solution or set of solutions to a pressing social challenge. This sounds obvious, but we’re suggesting that organizational theories of change, business plans, and other foundational materials need to reflect systems thinking. The most important tool in the new systems entrepreneur’s suite is the ability to embed the solution into the larger system being targeted. https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-social-ventures-need-systems-thinking

While continuing to pursue solutions that can help prevent the problem from continuing or growing, our clients intuitively know that more can be done. They want to increase collaboration among actors, harness the power of the collective, overcome entrenched interests, and become comfortable working with many others and hence dealing with even more uncertainty.

As an example, an organization working on homelessness from a systems perspective knows that someone needs to keep feeding the homeless and offer them an array of services and options if we are going to reduce the homeless population. But such organizations also know that someone must ask a key question: how do we prevent more people from becoming homeless in the future? Our prospective clients know that this is not a task that can be achieved by a single organization. Nonetheless, a single organization or a coalition of them can agree to inspire a process of large-scale collaboration among all actors and constituencies to find a pathway to change and act in a coordinated manner to increase their collective level of impact.

Here are some of the existing factors that our clients need to be aware of when attempting to create a comprehensive strategic plan for systems change:

• The timeline in which change happens in the world has accelerated exponentially. This scale and scope of change have never been seen before.
• Many of the challenges we are facing today are experienced locally but are global in nature.
• These changes are fueled by unprecedented interconnectedness that is changing the way ideas flow in our societies.
• Technology has enabled a global marketplace of ideas, giving people access to content worldwide. Even in countries that deny open access to information, people are still engaged in this marketplace of ideas.
• Even though the world is becoming more interconnected, it is not necessarily becoming more uniform. We are experiencing today more positive progress than ever in history, and at the same time, never before individuals have existed on this planet under such extreme differences in terms of access to education, health, basic services, knowledge, opportunities, technology, wealth, power, etc.
• The external landscape is rapidly and constantly evolving. The interconnectedness that we mentioned before makes things more uncertain, presenting a challenge for traditional approaches to strategic planning. Especially if strategic planning has been pursued with the expectation of having a clear and predictable path forward.

To change systems, we need diverse and sometimes numerous actors to work together, agree on a strategic vision and a definition of success, determine the outcomes expected, divide up the work, design on a common way to measure their progress, and embrace radical transparency. At the core of this endeavor is the capacity of the collective to assess progress, external influences, agree to make adjustments, even substantial ones, and cross-correct in a timely fashion.

Strategic planning in this world of heightened complexity and rapid change is not so much a task as it is a process.  Organizations need to embrace a mission, vision, and goals to achieve.  Specific outcomes should be planned and agreed upon, but the path to execution must be reviewed often and informed by the analysis of new developments, trends, and forces. Outcomes might need to be revisited too.

We help our clients design and execute a successful process.  We draw from our own experience and from studying some of the most successful efforts in the field of systems change and sharing with you relevant insights and practical support to embrace systems entrepreneurship successfully.