Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is an approach to strategic planning for organizations and programs that honors the teaching of Octavia Butler:
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.”
Now more than ever, the world is in a constant state of change. Rather than building three to five-year plans based on how the world looks today, adaptive planning anchors around an organization’s values to pivot when change is necessary.
How do we know we are meeting our mission? How do we grow our vision for the world? How do we actively live our values internally and externally?
Adaptive planning offers a framework that inspires and guides the work (mission, vision, & strategic priorities) through a deep (re)orientation to an organization’s values. It creates checkpoints for change by forecasting reassessments of organizational impact by returning to values on a quarterly basis. Adaptive planning is a highly participatory, collaborative process that leverages the wisdom of stakeholders at multiple points of entry for an organization. Including surveys, interviews, story circles, focus groups, and visioning retreats, our process makes space for all voices that touch the work to be heard.
Components
Adaptive Planning supports teams in articulating the following:
Vision - describes where the organization, campaign, or project is heading, answering the question of where you set your sights. Vision is the world you see and the future you hold as possible.
Values - describes what matters to the organization, campaign, or project answering the question of what principles guide your actions. Values set a foundation for adaptive planning. They provide an anchor to come home to when organizations stray from their mission.
Mission - describes the organizational, campaign, or project purpose, answering the question of why it exists. Mission is how you make your vision inevitable.
Strategic Priorities - the big-picture combined outcome categories that help organizations realize their mission. In adaptive planning, Strategic Priorities are reassessed on a quarterly or biannual basis to ensure that they remain in alignment with an organization’s values and the tides of change. Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.