Is there a strategy gap on your horizon?
Lots of charities have a gap in their strategy.
They have a great vision statement, something like “Our vision is a society in which…” but very often there’s a huge gulf between that vision, and everything that sits underneath it.
And by underneath, I mean the “we’re going to do more of this and get better at that” kind of stuff that makes up the bulk of most charity strategies.
Your vision might be, for example, that all children with multiple complex needs get access to an education specifically designed around those needs. And you might have half a dozen schools of your own where that’s precisely the case.
A strategy for doubling that number will help a lot more kids, of that there’s no doubt. But there’s a huge gap between delivering that strategy and realising your vision.
Some people will rationalise away their strategy gap with phrases like “well, the vision is more of an ideal aspiration really” or “it’s not something we expect to see in our lifetimes”. Others might not even see it as a gap – the vision is there, because, well, strategies need a vision.
But the gap is important. Really important. Because as long as that gap exists, your vision will remain just words on a page.
The strategy gap is where your answer needs to be to the question: what would it take?
What would it take for that society you’ve just described, to actually come about?
It’s a hard question to answer – if it were easy you’d have done it by now. But it’s worth answering, because whatever the answer turns out to be, it’s rarely as simple as “doing what we do, just better and more of it”.
So, let me offer a simple framework that can help. It’s called the “three horizons” model, and it was brought to prominence by one of its co-developers, Bob Sharpe, in a book he wrote in 2012 with that same title. Or you could just look online and you’ll get a pretty good flavour.
Either way, it’s a model I’ve found myself using more and more, to help leaders and trustees to think about how their organisations can, actually, change the world.
In brief, horizon one is the near-term. It’s what you need to fix or get sorted right now. It’s the financial turnaround, the new premises, the ongoing staffing crisis, the campaign plan for next year.
Horizon two is the bigger, medium-term stuff. It’s the innovations you’re developing, the investments you’re making, the transformation you might be planning, the merger on the horizon.
And horizon three? Well, that’s where your vision sits. That’s the place that asks the question “what would it take?” and demands a serious answer.
But here’s the most important rule for the three horizons model. You don’t put anything in horizon two until you’ve properly thought through horizon three, because everything in horizon two should be designed to get you to horizon three.
Back when I had what my mother still calls a real job, working in corporate strategy development, we used to call this “future back strategy” – start from the future you want to see, then work backwards from there.
For charities who genuinely want to see their visions in the future, this means answering a series of questions that take you from your vision, in horizon three, backwards to what you therefore need to become as an organisation, in order to bring that vision closer to reality.
These are the questions.
What would need to change? How might that change happen? Who needs to be part of that change? And finally, what’s the most impactful role we could play, to properly get things moving?
Now, when you look at the medium-term, you can actually start to see what would need to change for you, for your organisation, to play those roles, to make that visionary change come about.
That’s what goes in horizon two. And that’s what fills your strategy gap between vision and action. It’s not rocket science, but it does demand some serious thinking.
Of course, you could forget about all this academic waffle and just focus your strategy on “doing stuff better” rather than “doing better stuff”.
After all, we know what we’re doing with horizon one. It’s our safe space.
Although, it’s also where ambition goes to die.