Your Plans Are Clear. Your Strategy Isn't
Planning feels responsible. Strategy forces choices.
I’ve said it more times than I want to admit: we need to be more strategic.
When I say “more strategic,” I mean I want the why to be clear and the priorities to match it. Mission helps, but it won’t sort the work for you, so drift starts when we keep adding “good” things without choosing what matters most.
Planning feels safer. You can point to it. You can manage it. You can prove you’re being responsible.
Strategy doesn’t give you that comfort. It asks for choices, and choices create exposure. Strategy is stepping into uncertainty and placing a bet you can’t control...and that’s scary.
Strategy is happening all the time, whether you name it or not. Every yes is a no. Every budget line is a vote. Every hire, meeting, and program you keep alive is a claim about what matters and who matters.
So the question isn’t whether you have a strategy. You do. The question is whether it’s clear, whether it holds together, and whether it fits your mission.
Planning is how you carry out work. Strategy is the set of choices that decides which work deserves a plan in the first place. If you skip that choice-making, you can build a clean plan and still have no strategy.
I fall into this trap myself. In my own leadership work in theological higher education, I’ll talk about strategy in vague terms. I know better. I’ve read the books. I can explain the categories. And still, in practice, I’ll say “we need to be more strategic” when what I really mean is that we need to get clearer on what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to do it.
Mission-driven work makes this easier to excuse. It’s often small. People wear multiple hats. There isn’t one person above the fray “doing strategy” while everyone else executes.
Over the next several weeks, I’m going to work through a short series on strategy for mission-driven organizations, especially the waters I swim in: churches, theological higher education, and ministry-based nonprofits.
Definitions: Mission, Strategy, Plan
Mission tells you why you exist. It sets the moral center and gives your organization shared language. It matters. It’s also too broad to guide hard decisions when resources are finite and opportunities never stop showing up.
Strategy answers a different question. Given our mission and our constraints, how are we going to move the mission forward in this context. Who are we primarily here to serve. What outcomes are we going to prioritize. What are we going to become unusually good at. What are we going to stop doing so the mission doesn’t dissolve into busyness.
Plans come after that. Plans are execution. Plans organize work such as timelines, owners, sequencing, budgets, check-ins.
Good plans are necessary.
Good plans are also a convenient way to avoid strategy if you build them without making the choices first.
Strategy is choices that move people
Strategy is a connected set of choices that aims to get specific people to take specific actions so the mission moves forward.
Business language calls the people you are trying to move “customers.” In mission-driven work, that label can feel off…and that’s understandable. The fact remains. Your mission advances or stalls based on decisions you do not control.
Prospective students. Donors. Church members. Volunteers. Partners. Boards. Communities.
You cannot force their decisions. You can only make choices that make the action you want more likely.
That is why strategy is hard, and why planning is tempting. Planning stays close to inputs you control. Strategy makes you face the outcome you want and admit you have to earn it and you can’t gaurantee it.
You can gaurantee a plan. You can’t gaurantee a strategy…and that’s scary and hard.
Money matters, but it is not the mission
Healthy mission-driven organizations treat financial stewardship as a core responsibility, not an embarrassment. Fiscal responsibility is what gives the mission longevity. You cannot advance a mission you cannot fund.
At the same time, healthy mission-driven organizations are not run by the financial scoreboard. Money is essential, but it is not ultimate. It is a constraint and a stewardship. Mission is the point.
Strategy has to hold those together. It has to pursue the mission in a way that can be sustained, and it has to protect financial health without turning survival into the goal.
Why mission-driven organizations drift
Mission-driven work carries a unique pressure. You’re trying to help people. You’re trying to do good. There’s a moral weight to it, and that moral weight makes exclusion feel wrong.
So we try to help everyone. We try to meet every need. We try to keep every program. We keep adding good things because we believe in the good that we’re doing.
And over time, that posture produces a predictable outcome. Everything gets a little attention. Nothing gets enough attention. The organization becomes busy, fragile, and hard to lead. Leaders call it an execution problem. It’s often a strategy problem.
Mission is not the issue. The absence of strategic narrowing is.
A definition of strategy
Strategy shows up in tradeoffs. It forces a refusal. It makes some things easier to fund, staff, measure, and protect, and it makes other things harder.
If it does not force tradeoffs, it is not strategy. If it does not change what gets funded, staffed, measured, and protected, it is not strategy. If it can sit beside contradictory priorities without creating friction, it is not strategy.
Most “strategic plans” fail right here. They are comprehensive and sincere. Everything gets a little attention, nothing gets enough attention, and leaders call the resulting exhaustion an execution problem when the actual issue was the refusal to choose.
Strategy is a way of leaving good options on the table. Not because you don’t care, but because you do.
Where this series goes next
In the next post, I’m going to take a framework drawn from Playing to Win and adapt it for mission-driven work.
I’ll start with the first three choices: winning aspirations, where to play, and how to win. A set of choices you can actually use, including what you will not do. And as with this post, we’ll view it through the lens of mission driven organizations.
Then I’ll close out the framework with capabilities and management systems. What you must become unusually good at, and the habits and decision rules that keep the strategy alive in an ordinary week.