Strategic Scrappiness

Over the last few weeks, my mind has been fixated on strategic planning, which comes from being close to the tail end of a big planning process with a nonprofit organization — and thinking, How could we have done that better?

As a current client shifts from writing the plan to actually starting the work, a constant piece of advice we’ve given them is: Be scrappy. 

Here, being “scrappy” is about preventing every initiative from turning into a “project,” since a “project” requires additional planning and time to implement. 

For example, an organization that wants to improve the quality of its people leadership might turn to “training” as a solution framework. That’s certainly a reasoned approach. However, the actual work to create a training course can rapidly become the opposite of scrappiness. It often looks like: 

Identify the right person in HR who can design a course. …Well it looks like everyone  in HR already has a full plate, so let’s hire a consultant. …Well I guess we should spend a few weeks creating an RFP, and then interview people over the next couple months to find the right provider. 

By the time the actual training gets started, there’s an excellent chance months have passed!

In contrast, the scrappy approach would be something like: “Let’s just buy copies of Radical Candor or a great Harvard Business Review article for everyone and have a discussion about what we want to implement as leaders.” 

Surely that approach is less costly than the training approach, and the first steps can be completed in a few hours.

In this same vein, my mental alert light goes off when I hear teams discuss implementing technology solutions to fix challenges, since these also take time and money to build. 

What’s worse is that, in many cases, the core challenge isn’t actually the technology. For example, because nonprofits are reliant on non-customers for their revenue, strategic plans often include initiatives to improve donor or stakeholder management. And many of these are centered on implementing new donor or stakeholder management software. 

Again, that’s a reasonable response. However, the challenges the organizations face are rarely, “We’re having all the right conversations at the right time, but managing the information in our shared Google spreadsheet just doesn’t cut it.” 

Instead, the challenge is more typically unrelated to the technology. What’s really happening is that the organization is not “having all the right conversations at the right time.” And in that case, the most important solution is to address the human interactions—i.e., putting a new meeting on the calendar to analyze and coordinate outreach. That’s also the scrappy solution because it can start today and costs nothing. 

Part of the issue is with the strategic planning process itself. 

Namely, once a team or organization declares that it's in a formal planning process, it creates a framework of “There will be a time for thinking, and a later time for doing.” And in that mode, the response to every challenge prioritized is to create a project to do once we finalize the strategic plan. 

The problem, of course, is that the end of the strategic planning process is often months away! 

A more productive approach would be to reframe the strategic planning process as a strategic doing process. That is, once we’re reasonably certain that something is a top-three concern (i.e., there’s 85% certainty that it will be part of the final plan), the scrappy approach is to just start working on it. At the very least, this puts the team several months ahead when the final plan is complete.

I’m convinced that adopting that as a mindset in planning will lead to greater, faster impact.

Beyond planning, teams and organizations can also be scrappier as a cultural matter. Some ideas for how to go about it:

Implement scrappier meeting processes. 

For example, ensuring that every meeting has an objective, and reframing “Discuss Topic X” meetings to instead “Make a Decision about Topic X” meetings would provide greater focus and increase the likelihood of action. The same goes for allocating time in meetings to identify agreements and next steps.

(These are also just “good meeting processes.”) 

By the way, the scrappy version of such an initiative isn’t to roll out a big “meeting process program.” Rather, it’s for the leader to just insist upon those practices in their own meetings—something they can start doing today—and let everyone else respond to that signal. 

Identify and scrutinize delaying language.

Organizations often have patterns of language that serve as delays to progress. They sometime sounds like:

Let’s take that offline.

Let’s do some more research on that and come up with a plan.

Let’s run that by [the boss, the board, the committee], and see what they think. 

It’s not that those are unreasonable steps—but they may be mechanisms for delaying action.

One path toward addressing these patterns is to identify the common statements within your team and organization. The goal isn’t to ban them, but to use their expression as an opportunity to scrutinize how scrappy the team is. That might sound like:

What’s holding us back from deciding now?

What exactly is the information we need to proceed?

Are we checking with Susan because it’s her decision, or is there some other reason? Do we need to clarify the decision process going forward? 

Ask: How would we do this if we only had two hours and $0 to come up with an experiment?

Hint: Whatever the answer, try that first!

In some ways, this is a classic approach to agile design processes. It’s an ethic about seeing if the duct tape solution works before investing more time and resources into a more complex or lasting solution.