Strategic Planning & Strategy Support
Not just a strategic plan—a more strategic organization.
OUR APPROACH
Strategic Planning that Generates Strategic FUEL
Services
Thrive Street supports nonprofits and businesses with several offerings to generate Strategic FUEL
GETTING STARTED
Strategic Planning Accelerator
Get the most important 50% of strategic planning done in one day.
Nonprofits often spend 6-24 months on strategic planning. When they finish, the plan is already out of date. Rather than signing up for a time-consuming and expensive process, this Strategic Planning Accelerator helps you identify what is vital.
We’ll help you:
Identify your current strategic situation, which will help you know what kind of planning process you need—or not
Identify and prioritize strategic opportunities and issues in a way that brings clarity and alignment to the team
Create agreements about success criteria for strategic planning, which is a critical ingredient of success
Get to impact faster by identifying the things you can start to do now rather than at the end of a long process
Ultimately, this approach helps you design a planning process that works for what you need—right-sizing the effort, timing, and expense.
BUILDING THE STRATEGY
Strategic Planning Support
After the Strategic Planning Accelerator, we can co-design a larger planning process that includes only the strategy modules that are relevant.
Thrive Street has supported clients with services such as:
Last Strategic Plan Retrospective
Vision and Goal Setting
Developing a Strategic Principle
Employee Experience Survey
Customer Journey Mapping
External Stakeholder Feedback Collection
Team Charter Development
Identifying Simplification Opportunities (e.g., Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff)
DESIGNING ROUTINES
Strategic Management System Design
You can have a great strategy but won’t be great at strategy unless you have routines and culture to support it.
We’ll help you design a strategic management system that brings strategy into organizational routines, enabling the organization to learn and keep the strategy fresh.
We’ll do the following:
Identify the right questions, which, if asked and answered on a regular basis will drive performance and strategic progress
Assess the current state of your organizational routines and identify the highest leverage opportunities to improve
Identify the data that will power robust, objective strategy and performance discussions
This work may also include supporting the team with goal setting and implementing systems like Objectives & Key Results (OKRs).
BUILDING STRATEGIC MUSCLES
Strategy Coaching & Support
The only way to make change is to do the work. Thrive Street will help you do it.
Creating a more strategic team and culture requires building new “muscles” and ways of working together. That process can start in a workshop but only comes together through deliberate practice. Thrive Street will give you critical support as you go through that process.
We’ll work over 12-18 months on the following:
Facilitation for important strategy meetings or team retreats. Tactically, we’ll help you plan the agenda and provide structure around these important meetings. This service is designed to support you across multiple meetings to improve step by step.
Coaching support for the team leader. As the team works in different ways, it is often helpful for the team leader to have support in navigating the changes and problem-solving challenges that arise.
Real-time meeting observation and feedback. It is relatively easy to adopt strategic thinking in formal strategy meetings and step-backs. However, the test of Adaptive, Integrated Strategy is whether strategic thinking happens in “normal,” day-to-day meetings that power your team’s performance. We’ll observe several of these meetings to help you bring the team's intention to them.
Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits
Most nonprofits approach strategic planning in ways that take too much time and effort, focus on the wrong issues, and set up the plan to be something that gathers dust on a shelf rather than being implemented. If you want a different approach, you’re in the right place.
In Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits, you’ll learn how to lead a strategic planning process that delivers a great strategy and creates an organization that can drive strategic change and continually refresh its strategy.
THE GOOD NEWS
When You Have Strategic FUEL, Leading Your Organization Is Easier
Strategic FUEL is about helping the entire organization be great at learning and strategy, which lightens the load on senior leaders.
As you implement this approach, you’ll likely find that it:
Helps you create greater ongoing alignment in the organization (and spend less time dealing with the consequences of misalignment)
Helps you build a culture in which more people understand the need for change and willingly pursue it
Helps junior leaders develop strategic skills, which puts them in a position to take on more senior roles
Helps you not have to carry strategy alone
Industry Experience
Thrive Street serves clients from across the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, which means you’ll gain access to leadership and management approaches outside your current context.
In the nonprofit sector, we have done strategy engagements in the following spaces:
Education
Social Justice
Housing
Advocacy
Latest Insights on Strategy
Let’s talk.
If Thrive Street can help your team or organization create a strategy that sticks, or have more effective strategy conversations, please reach out.