Strategy Before Planning
Three choices mission-driven organizations skip and pay for later
In Part 1, I talked about how often we say “we need to think strategically” when what we really mean is “we need a better plan.” I do that too. I reach for the word strategy, then I end up refining timelines, workflows, and small improvements. That’s all helpful, but it’s not strategy.
The problem isn’t that we lack ideas. It’s that we skip a step. We jump from mission straight to planning, and we wonder why our calendars are full but our impact is fuzzy. Strategy is the missing layer, the set of choices that connects why we exist to what we actually do.
This post is a framework to help force that order: mission > strategy > planning.
Mission names the outcome you exist to produce for specific people. If it can’t generate a strategy, it’s a motto.
Strategy chooses where you will focus to produce that outcome, and what you will not do. If it doesn’t force trade-offs, it’s a wish list.
Planning turns those choices into projects, timelines, and ownership. If it isn’t accountable to a strategy, it’s just a calendar.
I’m borrowing the baseline from Playing to Win, but I’m writing for the context I live in: churches, Christian nonprofits, and theological education. These are places where we carry moral pressure to say yes, where the people we serve can’t be treated merely like customers, and where “good” work quietly turns into “too much” work.
I’ll start with the first three of the five choices: winning aspirations, where to play, and how to win.
The Five Choices
In Playing to Win, strategy is a cascading set of five choices:
What is our winning aspiration?
Where will we play?
How will we win?
What capabilities must be in place?
What management systems are required?
Each choice constrains the next. And the cascade can repeat at every level of the organization, from the executive team down to individual departments, with each layer getting more specific.
I find this framework useful because it holds two things together. It’s complex enough to take real time to develop, but simple enough that you should be able to answer all five on a single page of your notebook.
The challenge for mission-driven leaders is that the language feels foreign. “Winning in chosen markets” doesn’t sound like church. It’s easy to dismiss the whole thing because our aim is not the bottom line. It’s the people we’re serving. But the underlying logic, that you have to make hard choices about focus, effort, and resources, applies to every organization that wants its mission to actually advance.
1) Winning aspiration
You need a definition of winning that fits your mission and still forces clarity. Too often, winning gets flattened into vague language like “do good” or “participate.” That sounds humble, especially in a Christian setting, but it doesn’t help a leadership team make hard decisions. It doesn’t tell you what success looks like for the people you serve, and it doesn’t tell you what you’re willing to give up to get there.
For a mission-driven organization, winning is not about crushing a rival. Still, you can’t pretend there are no alternatives. There are. People have options. Students choose schools. Churches choose partners. Donors choose what to fund. Communities decide whether you are worth trusting. If you don’t aim to be the best choice for the people you serve, you’re asking your staff to give their lives to work that stays average, and you’re asking donors and supporters to fund something that never gets better.
The most dangerous trap is the participation mindset. The cause is noble, so showing up starts to feel like success. But participation is not the point. Winning means delivering a better outcome for your people than the other options available to them. It means you understand their needs so well, and you serve them so well, that your work actually changes their lives in ways that can be seen and named.
That forces two kinds of specificity. You have to name the “who” clearly, and you have to name what winning looks like for them.
A motto says, “We exist to reach the world for Christ.” A winning aspiration says, “We will be the best option for training pastors who will plant and lead healthy churches in under-resourced communities.” The first one feels inspiring. The second one can actually generate a strategy.
It also changes how you evaluate yourself. You can’t just look at the past and pat yourself on the back for what you did or what you launched. A winning aspiration forces a harder question: what changed for the people you exist to serve?
Mission-driven winning also has to be clean. It’s not “we win and everyone else loses.” The best version is that the mission advances, the people you serve are better off, and the staff and supporters aren’t used up in the process. Winning must be financially and operationally healthy enough to last, because short-term heroics are not a strategy.
2) Where to play
This is where mission-driven leaders hesitate, and it’s even harder to say out loud to staff, because it can feel like exclusion. But every organization excludes. The only question is whether you exclude by choice or by exhaustion.
Where to play is not a statement about who you’re willing to love, serve, or welcome. It’s a statement about what you build for. It’s what you staff for, budget for, and protect when time and attention are limited. A strong strategy can still be attractive to people outside your primary focus. That’s normal. It can even be a sign you’ve built something real and effective.
The mistake is letting that spillover redefine your focus every time it happens.
Churches are a useful test case because the gospel call is open to all who will come to Christ, and the church will always include people from many walks of life. Acts makes that obvious. And yet the early church still made focus decisions. They devoted themselves to specific practices. They handled real needs without letting those needs displace what they believed had to remain central. Acts 6 is a hard moment like that. A legitimate problem threatens to crowd out the apostles’ main work, and the solution is not “everyone do everything.” The solution is clarity about who is responsible for what, and a structure that protects the focus.
Paul’s pattern carries the same logic. He didn’t try to do all ministry everywhere. He focused on key places, used natural on-ramps for the message, gathered believers into churches, raised up leaders, and kept moving while staying connected. The mission was broad. His choices were not.
That’s what where to play does. It answers three questions in plain language.
Who are we primarily building for.
What work are we primarily going to concentrate on.
What are we not focusing on right now, even if it’s a good thing.
Mission-driven organizations lose here because we confuse purpose with focus.
Purpose is why we exist. Focus is where we will concentrate our limited resources so the mission actually advances.
A few tough cases make this concrete.
A church can welcome anyone who walks in on Sunday and still decide, without apology, that its main build is a clear pathway for disciple-making and leader development rather than an ever-expanding calendar of events. Welcoming is not the same thing as building.
A seminary can serve a wide range of students and still make clear choices about which students it is primarily designing programs and support around, and which kinds of new programs it will not launch, even if someone asks loudly.
A nonprofit can care about many needs and still choose one population, one geography, or one kind of intervention as its main focus, even when donors try to pull it into side projects that sound good but dilute the work.
Where to play is the discipline of limits. Not because you don’t care, but because you do, and you know you can’t build something strong by spreading yourself thin.
3) How to win
This is the choice that turns “where to play” into action.
Why should the people we’re building for choose us, trust us, and stay with us, given the other options they have.
In mission-driven work, those options aren’t always direct competitors. Sometimes it’s another church or school. Sometimes it’s an informal network. Sometimes it’s doing nothing at all. Either way, the alternatives exist, and they shape outcomes whether we acknowledge them or not. If the mission matters, we can’t be casual about losing.
Most teams get stuck here because they confuse “how to win” with a list of good initiatives. Or they make a promise their model can’t support: broad access and high-touch customization, lower cost and high-cost commitments, low overhead and premium experience. That’s how you get staff strain, mixed signals, and outcomes that don’t match the claims.
An easy way to cut through this is to ask, “Are we winning on our cost structure or our people’s preference?”
Cost structure means what it costs you internally to produce the outcome. Not what you charge but instead, what it takes to deliver. You can pass that efficiency on as a lower price or you can reinvest it into quality, scholarships, outreach, or reach. Either way, if it costs you too much to do what you promise, you either burn out your people or start breaking promises.
Preference means your stakeholders choose you when they have options. In mission-driven work, that shows up as trust, loyalty, retention, donor confidence, or partner commitment. It can also show up as better outcomes, but only if those outcomes are visible and valued by the people you serve.
These two are not opposites. But you have to know which one you’re leaning into because they shape what you build.
A Christian college can press into affordability and still be relationally strong, community-driven, and serious about discipleship. Faculty can still care. Students can still be known. What you can’t promise is the expensive version of high-touch: low faculty-to-student ratios, guaranteed one-on-one mentoring, and every premium support expectation, especially if you’re also committed to keeping price down. Low cost is not low excellence. It just means you’re choosing what you’ll do with excellence, and what you won’t promise.
The same logic applies in churches. A church can be theologically rich, biblically serious, and deeply pastoral, and still make a choice about how it wins. That choice might be doctrinal depth and thick community through ordinary means over time, rather than a constantly expanding menu of programs. You’re not excluding who can attend. You’re deciding what you’re building for and what you’re willing to staff and sustain.
Conclusion
These three choices, what winning looks like, where you’ll focus, and how you’ll win, are not a strategic plan. They’re the decisions a strategic plan is built on. Without them, planning is just organized activity.
And that’s the trap most mission-driven organizations fall into. Not a lack of effort, but a lack of sequence. We plan without choosing. We choose without defining what winning looks like. Then we wonder why good people are burning out doing good work that never quite adds up.
Before you build your next plan, make sure you can answer these three questions clearly enough to write them on a single page:
What does winning look like for the people we exist to serve?
Where will we focus, and what will we stop pretending we can do?
Given those answers, how will we win?
In the next post, I’ll cover the final two choices: the capabilities your organization must build and the management systems that hold everything together.