Hey Changemakers,
Imagine this groovy vision of your organization in ten years: The strategic plan is humming along like a bee on steroids. Revenue is through the roof. A program officer from a foundation you’ve been courting for three years calls to say she keeps hearing your name. Your team is growing, and a journalist from a national outlet covers the model you built as a possible answer to a suite of Big Problems.
Boy, that vision is energizing! But I left something out: actual impact on the outside world. That omission is one of the most common traps in strategic planning, and it’s worth a pit stop on our tour of the strategy spine to talk through it.
Ambition Is Not the Same as Direction
A recent Harvard Business Review piece, Is Your Strategic Plan Too Ambitious? Or Not Ambitious Enough? asks whether…well, you get it. HBR’s Rebecca Knight talked with Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar, who treats ambition as a calibration challenge. Set it too high and “you’d be setting yourself up for failure,” Iyengar says. Too low and “you’d be settling for mediocrity.” The sweet spot is a stretch that pulls people forward and still feels achievable.
This connects to what we discussed back in August: creating Jim Collins’ “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” and offering a vivid picture of what reaching it looks like. I think another question is tucked underneath the “just right” dose of ambition: Is your ambition in service of the world you actually want to bring forth?
Big goals are easy to set: Let’s double revenue, expand to three new cities, build a national reputation. But before you rally the troops, ask, what is all the growth for?
The Epic Return of Mission, Values, and Vision
Hello again, trusty companions! Your mission, values, and vision exist to catch the kind of gilded goal with nothing underneath. Thoreau knew all about those. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be,” he wrote in Walden. “Now put the foundations under them.”
Your mission, values, and vision are those foundations. Run every ambition through them. Does it honor what you believe? Does it point toward the future you’d like to see? Does it connect to your distinctive competence? If it passes all three, you’ve got substance.
Before we jump ahead too far, here’s a quick reframe on the word “goals.” In our practice, we follow the wisdom from the Bridgespan Group and use the word imperative: the strategic “big bets” that will help you make progress toward that envisioned future. Run every strategic imperative through that filter before getting anywhere close to implementation. This foundation gives your ambition guardrails, direction, and a big forward push.
Clarity Through Alignment (and a Smidge of Confusion)
Once your imperatives are tried, tested, and ratified, the temptation is to declare the hard work done and start executing. In my experience, that’s skipping a step.
First, you ask: Does your team have a sense of shared ownership?
Most orgs have no built-in way to invite the people who will carry out a bold strategy into the conversation about it. Once imperatives are set, the ask jumps from “What do we think?” to “Let’s get going!”
The strategy is ready to start sailing toward that distant shore, and the crew might need a minute. Some people are still processing; some may be skeptical. If this isn’t the first go-around, which it often isn’t (and that’s okay; iteration is important!), people might be holding off on buying in until they trust that leadership has a realistic plan to get there.
And once the planning phase is over, there’s often no formal space left to raise those questions.
When teams get muddled in the middle of a strategy rollout, many leaders I’ve worked with start to sweat. I treat that confusion as a signal—one of the most valuable you’ll get. When committed people ask different questions about the same imperative, that almost always means they care enough to pay attention. That’s the raw material of alignment.
Maybe that’s where you are right now. Ready to run with your strategy, ready to invest in the next phase of the work, and yet sensing your team doesn’t quite share the core narrative yet. Good news: When you invite that kind of collegial candor into the process, you invite a breakthrough that leads to transformation. It’s pretty thrilling!
Recently, we’ve been testing an approach with leadership teams: a table read. We put the strategy on paper, read it aloud together like actors in rehearsal, and talk it through. When I asked one team what the session meant to them, a leader said, “This is our roadmap for success!” Another said, “Things are starting to click; this helped me connect the dots.”
That’s what ambition sounds like when a whole team owns it.
Want to try it? Here’s the recipe.
Try This: The Strategy Table Read
- Pause. Set aside a session with one purpose: hearing the strategy together.
- Write the script. A short, plain-language document about where you’re going, why, and what it means for the work.
- Read it aloud. Go around the table, with everyone taking a section.
- Talk it through with ORID:
- Objective: What words or phrases stood out?
- Reflective: Where did you feel energized? Where did you tense up?
- Interpretive: What does this mean for our work?
- Decisional: What do we change, and what’s our next step?
- Revise and repeat. When your team can say it in their own words, take it to your board and community.
ORID comes from the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Technology of Participation (ToP).
Now, go back to the groovy vision at the top. Put the impact in. Read it aloud, together, and listen closely: What does your team hear?
Here’s to a season of putting foundations under our castles!
Until next time,
Kimberley
