INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATION THEORY AND
BEHAVIOR, 6(4), 107-132
SPRING 2004
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE SUCCESSFUL USE OF VISIONBASED STRATEGY PLANNING BY NONPROFIT HUMAN
SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS
David P. Moxley*
ABSTRACT. Using an action research method to study the vision-based
strategic planning processes of four nonprofit human service organizations, the
author identifies factors that influence the successful initiation of the planning
process, the formulation of a vision-based plan, and the use of the plan to guide
organizational performance. The author identifies transformational leadership
and an organizational commitment to cultural change as important to the
mobilization of these success factors and to the subsequent achievement of
viable vision-based strategic plans.
INTRODUCTION
Strategic planning requires an organization to understand its
environment and create a framework that can guide its effective
performance within a specific environmental niche (Olsen & Eadie,
1982). It emerged when many organizations became concerned with
achieving clarity of purpose since many possessed only a modicum of
the resources they needed to address the performance requirements their
environmental situations demanded.
Strategic planning offered
organizations a way to achieve focus, particularly in environments that
were undergoing considerable change, which created turmoil and
uncertainty, or that presented emergent challenges requiring the
development and use of new organizational competencies (Olsen &
Eadie, 1982).
It offered organizations opportunities to extend
rationalism deeper into their subunits, particularly into their business
-------------------* David P. Moxley, Ph.D., is Professor, School of Social Work, Wayne State
University. His research interests lie in organizational theory and development
in social welfare.
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Copyright © 2004 by PrAcademics Press
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units (Mintzberg, 1994), to identify both short and long term ends, and to
formulate plans for the achievement of these ends (Nutt & Backoff,
1992).
There is now considerable variation in forms of strategic planning
requiring organizations to adopt or adapt practices that best suit their
identities, cultures, and traditions. Indeed, there has been a
diversification of strategic planning involving such foci as the
achievement of central control, innovation, the management of
competitive position, political alignment, and futuring. Thus, there is an
array of alternative strategic planning models from which organizations
can choose and match to their needs (Taylor, 1987). Many styles of
strategic planning incorporate the assumption that an organization must
master its environment if it is to realize success and sustain itself
(Makridakis & Heau, 1987). Ultimately, however, strategy requires
organizations to make choices among competing ends and means and to
commit to a pathway that they anticipate will make them successful in
their given situations (Tropman & Morningstar, 1989).
Ideally, strategic planning encourages an organization to align its
systems and the energy of its members behind a particular set of goals
important to organizational success and/or viability. An organization that
is effective at strategic planning adopts a clear set of aims that are
consistent with its mission and pursues these aims with some momentum
(Hinings & Greenwood, 1988). It aligns its principal internal resources
and systems with the achievement of these aims, and positions itself in
its environment to take full advantage of opportunities and minimize
organizational exposure to threats.
Some strategic planning models require organizations to identify and
select strategies that enable them to out maneuver and overtake
competitors and to achieve sustained advantage over competitors that
they find difficult to emulate (Porter, 2001). But these models of
strategic planning assume that organizations operate in adversarial and
competitive niches and, therefore, the ultimate purpose of strategic
planning in these sectors is the achievement of dominance over
competitors or adversaries. Other forms of strategic planning may be
more opportunistic in design such as when organizations scan their
environments in search of opportunities that enable them to achieve
organizational success even if this requires them to change their
missions. Still other approaches to strategic planning are pragmatic and
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satisficing in which organizations identify the limits of what they can
achieve given the environmental constraints they face and the resources
they possess. As a result, they may lower their expectations of what is
possible and pursue those aims they define as most feasible.
Many nonprofit organizations, however, confront a different set of
environmental contingencies and, as a result, a different framework of
strategic planning is emerging within the nonprofit sector, particularly
among those nonprofits providing social and human services (Oster,
1995). Increasingly these organizations employ what the author identifies
as vision-based strategic planning in which they construct a conception
of a future state and identify strategies to achieve this distal end using the
perspectives of many different groups (Schwartz, 1991). It is the
purpose of this paper to explicate this form of strategic planning and,
based on four cases, to identify factors that influence its successful use
and deployment within the nonprofit human service sector.
THE EMERGENCE OF VISION-BASED STRATEGIC PLANNING
Although markets and competitive forces are increasing within the
nonprofit sector, most of these organizations function within
environments that are qualitatively and quantitatively different from
those in which businesses or military entities operate. Many nonprofit
organizations operate in situations in which legal mandates, public
expectations, and moral requirements influence if not dominate
organizational agenda (Salamon, 1992). These expectations tend to
insulate nonprofit organizations from the market and competitive forces
of the for profit sector. But they increase the influence of regulatory and
external bureaucratic control of these organizations by federated systems
of financing such as the United Way or by public entities that contract
with them for the provision of public services (Smith & Lipsky, 1993).
The environments of nonprofit organizations are quite complex
particularly given the dynamics of privatization, consumerism, and
professional ideologies and the influence of these social forces in shaping
organizational strategy in the nonprofit sector.
Nonprofit Organizations as Extensions of Government
Privatization, in particular, has shaped quite dramatically the public
provision of human and social services over the past twenty years as
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public bureaucracies have pulled back from the direct provision of
services and contract with nonprofit organizations to operate in a variety
of service provision roles (Donahue, 1989). The shift of service provision
from the public sector to the nonprofit sector came after the failure of
government outsourcing to for-profit firms that prioritized profit over
public responsiveness, particularly to underserved populations or
communities.
Often the expectations that public bureaucracies hold of nonprofit
organizations are products of consumer activism and advocacy as well as
legal decisions that shape the provision of human and social services.
Often these expectations are translated into performance requirements
through contracting mechanisms that specify accreditation, quality
management standards, and information and evaluation capacities, and
service outcomes. Privatization in the nonprofit sector creates numerous
expectations for accountability that influence how nonprofit
organizations perform and, as a result, make the development of strategic
management capacities an important element of performance in the
contemporary nonprofit sector (Nutt & Backoff, 1992).
The emergence of strategic planning within the nonprofit sector
came to the foreground in the 1980s when privatization was gaining
momentum at state and local levels of governance. Local federated
systems of financing, such as the United Way, prescribed strategic
planning during the decade of the 1980s, which was not surprising given
the considerable involvement of the business community in these local
systems of fund development and allocation. But as the responsibility
for the provision of human services devolved from the public to the
nonprofit sector, state governments began to require strategic planning
by those entities with which they contracted as a means to ensure that
their expectations for productivity, performance, and quality would be
met (Osborne, 1988).
Under the leadership of cutting-edge governors in the 1980s, many
state governments adopted strategic planning processes as
responsibilities for human and public services increasingly devolved
from the federal to state government and as state government
relinquished the provision of critical human services to nonprofits within
local communities (Osborne, 1988). State government saw strategic
planning as a technical process of achieving more clarity, focus, and
accountability, qualities that this level of government needed of nonprofit
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contractors if it was to become a broker and not a provider of public
services (Olsen & Eadie, 1982).
Responsiveness to Underrepresented Groups
But privatization has not been the only source of influence on
strategic planning in the nonprofit sector (Moxley & Manela, 2001). The
influence of consumers or recipients of services and professional
ideologies on the adoption of strategic planning by nonprofit service
agencies also must be considered. Consumer aspirations involve those
values recipients of service introduce into nonprofit human service
organizations and that can influence what services the nonprofit
organization offers and how it undertakes service provision. These
aspirations especially may dominate those nonprofit organizations that
were founded and developed by consumer advocates, by individuals
seeking outlets for self-help or mutual support, or by those groups
seeking to create their own institutions founded on particular value sets
that were not shared by the mainstream community (Perlmutter, 1988).
From the decade of the 1960s to the present, consumers or recipients of
services in many domains of human service have demanded more
accessible, meaningful, and responsive services that enable them to
address practical outcomes like housing, employment, and family
support.
Although part of a broader consumer movement in American
society, consumerism in human services has resulted in important role
changes for recipients (Moxley & Mowbray, 1997). These changes
involve their movement from passive recipients of professional services
to more active involvement in roles as providers of services and selfhelp, and in organizational governance, service evaluation, and
advocacy. For many nonprofit organizations recipients are important
stakeholders whose values and needs they must legitimize in charting
any strategic direction.
Professional Ideologies and Models of Service
In addition to the influence of consumers, professional ideologies
often shape the form that service provision takes. Often these ideologies
introduce moralistic perspectives into the provision of human services
(Moxley & Manela, 2001). For example, professionals may assert that
models of provision or delivery should help homeless people gain
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housing and not just shelter. They may assert that children achieve
family permanency and not languish in foster care. Or, professionals may
argue that elderly people must be offered opportunities to “age in place”
in their own homes and neighborhoods rather than be placed in long term
care facilities.
Often these professional ideologies are incorporated into prescriptive
models of service and become frames of reference for best practices in
particular service domains or fields (Moxley, 2002). Policy systems may
incorporate these ideologies as models and prescribe wholesale change to
service systems and to the nonprofit organizations that compose them.
Privatization and consumer activism may themselves drive the
dissemination and deployment of these models and prescribe their use as
important aspects of organizational performance. Nonprofit strategy
must take into consideration the values these models introduce and how
professional ideologies can actually influence the substance of the
technologies the nonprofit organization uses to achieve its mission and
principal aims.
The process of strategic planning in the nonprofit human service
sector can become very complex as organizations seek to balance the
influence of their various stakeholders. Strategy itself can become a
vehicle for the integration of disparate values into a common perspective
or frame of reference that is so essential to the establishment of
organizational purpose and ultimately to effective nonprofit performance.
Strategy formulation involves the struggle for meaning participants
undertake to make sense of the world or situation in which they find
themselves (Fox & Miller, 1995). Strategy can facilitate the formation of
meaning and can serve to produce the overarching metaphors that
increase cohesion between what may have been disparate groups before
the process of strategic planning was initiated. Vision-based strategic
planning may be more about the achievement of meaning across multiple
stakeholder groups than it is about the rationalization of organizational
performance.
PROPERTIES OF VISION-BASED STRATEGIC PLANNING
Privatization, consumer activism, and professional ideologies can
combine to reframe how many nonprofit human service organizations
undertake strategic planning (Nutt & Backoff, 1992). The expectations
privatization introduces through regulatory mechanisms and contractual
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relationships, the aspirations and preferences consumers hold and the
roles they assume, and the requirements professional ideologies
introduce, often in the form of best practices, can become important and
perhaps dominant aspects of the contexts shaping the organizational
strategies of these entities. Taken together these forces can influence how
nonprofit organizations engage in strategic planning and can contribute
to the emergence of a distinctive form of strategic planning within the
nonprofit human service sector (Nutt & Backoff, 1992). The author
labels this distinctive form of planning as “vision-based.”
The Pluralistic Quality of Vision-Based Strategic Planning
Often nonprofit organizations must strive to reconcile potentially
conflicting value sets that their respective stakeholders introduce into
their organizational cultures since many different groups likely lay claim
to the identity, purpose, and ends of the nonprofit organization and, as a
consequence, they can introduce potentially disparate visions (Mitroff,
1989). It is likely that nonprofit organizations that engage in vision-based
strategic planning must confront the reality that many of their diverse
stakeholders will simply hold different values or priorities that, in turn,
suggest that this form of planning will be characterized by conflict at
least until stakeholders achieve a sense of common purpose.
The formulation of vision, that is, a preferred end-state or future, in
which stakeholders make explicit their values, combine their preferences,
and negotiate priorities, enables a nonprofit organization to engage in a
process of “satisficing” so that it can achieve a level of stability when
involving multiple stakeholders who can introduce diverse perspectives
into the planning process (Chandler & Plano, 1988). The vision-based
strategic planning process is designed as a means to involve different
groups in the governance of the nonprofit organization. The process can
encourage these groups to collaborate in the identification and
combination of their values and to use these values to map the future of
the organization to produce as much common ground as possible
(Weisbord and Associates, 1992).
The aim of involvement comes from the idea that nonprofit
organizations are an expression of collective community life and are not
merely autonomous organizations with their own interests and direction
(Kramer, 1981). Even though many are dependent on some form or level
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of philanthropic and governmental support for their existence, nonprofits
must often act as representative structures in democratic cultures and
reflect the specific aims of citizens to bring about outcomes that the
public or private sectors cannot--or are not willing to—bring about.
Vision-based strategic planning is a reflection of the representative
function of nonprofits in American society and the stewardship
responsibilities of nonprofit human service organizations (Block, 1993).
The Developmental Quality of Vision-Based Strategic Planning
The process of vision-based strategic planning is developmental in
design and process. Its intent is to reduce inter-group competition over
the purpose and aims of the nonprofit, and to align these groups within a
common framework of action. The process of vision-based strategic
planning should enable these groups to combine different values into a
narrative that describes a future state to which all parties ultimately can
subscribe and lend their support and to formulate strategies to bring this
vision or major elements of it into reality (Fairhurst & Sarr, 1996).
Whereas the achievement of dominance within a particular niche
may be the principal aim of certain models of strategic planning,
particularly those the business and military sectors may employ,
collaboration and the cooperation it can produce are two values that
likely steer the kind of strategic planning many nonprofit human service
organizations increasingly undertake. The demands and requirements of
collaboration place considerable pressure on the leadership of nonprofit
human service organizations to build commonality among people who
likely come from different backgrounds and social statuses. Increasingly
these leaders face challenges to develop a common enterprise among
groups who can more easily find differences that separate them than
similarities that can contribute to common ground (Herman &
Heimovics, 1991).
The leader of this form of strategic planning must be inter-personally
oriented, politically astute, and command the trust of many different
groups. Strategic planning, in this sense, is not command-oriented and
does not respect hierarchical boundaries. And, it is not elitist. It
demands leaders who can reach out to those groups that are often
underrepresented in organizational governance to establish a
participatory form of group and community reflection in the face of
inter-group differences. It requires leaders who can foster the formulation
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and use of vision and, as a consequence, instill hope among members of
an organization (Maehr & Midgley, 1996).
Most approaches to vision-based strategic planning combine the
formal steps of strategy formulation with organizational development
tactics to bring multiple groups together to facilitate their synthesis of
common vision. The facilitation of this form of planning requires the
identification and affirmation of mission, environmental scanning,
scenario development, internal auditing, the formulation, evaluation, and
selection of strategies, and the linkage of strategy to organizational
budget. However, the precursor to all of these steps is the work the
organization undertakes with multiple stakeholders typically in small
group meetings, retreats, and large community meetings or forums in
which various stakeholder representatives find welcoming and safe
environments in which to express their values and perspectives
(Weisbord and Associates, 1992).
This early stage of vision-based strategic planning is particularly
important when one stakeholder group holds more power than another
does, or when one group controls more resources than another does.
Those nonprofit organizations that serve people who are considered to be
on the margins of society may find it challenging to create a sense of
organizational community across groups whose members may differ
substantially in their social standing and integration, demographics, and
interests. The planning process itself requires a pre-planning stage in
which members of stakeholder groups are able to gain some familiarity
with one another, obtain insight into the history and culture of the
nonprofit organization, discover differences and commonality in group
values, learn new roles, and air differences.
It is not surprising that organizational development is important to
vision-based planning and requires the use of tactics that foster
community-building across multiple groups, the achievement of mutual
understanding among people of diverse backgrounds and characteristics,
and the emergence of a collective appreciation of a shared common
cause. Search conferencing and appreciative inquiry are particularly
useful in the initial development of intergroup relations and the
achievement of mutuality. The use of these models in vision-based
strategic planning can lay a foundation that supports the core values of
this approach to strategy formulation: representation, participation,
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articulation of group perspective, nonhierarchical interaction and
dialogue, and the synthesis of a common vision.
The Aims of Vision-Based Strategic Planning
With this foundation in place, vision-based strategic planning
requires the explication of a preferred future, and the specification of
success criteria the nonprofit organization must fulfill to bring about the
preferred future. One principal outcome of effective vision-based
strategy is the attainment of this preferred future in a way that brings
satisfaction to the stakeholder groups who claim the nonprofit as a
vehicle for the expression of their values. The formulation and use of
vision not only enables the nonprofit organization to make its purpose
salient, but the vision itself also can serve honorific ends (Bolman &
Deal, 1997). That is, the vision enables the organization to stand for
values that can strengthen its public standing and shape external
perceptions of the organization as caring, responsive, responsible, and
innovative, important qualities in environments in which nonprofit
organizations must achieve viability and legitimacy (Lauffer, 1984).
Ultimately, the vision and progress towards its attainment enable these
organizations to argue that they are undertaking their civic duty and that
they are good if not exemplary public citizens.
While the aim of some strategic planning is to dominate opponents,
the purpose of vision-based strategic planning is to win community
support. The realization of the vision and its successful achievement can
add to the institutional standing of the nonprofit organization within the
community in which it operates. As a result of this planning, the
nonprofit organization can become a fundamental element of community
governance through the actions it takes to foster inter-group participation
and involvement in shaping and actualizing a future that advances
community life (Sarason & Lorentz, 1998). Strategic planning does not
only lead to a specific organizational product but also it can set in motion
a process of participation and involvement that is essential to the quality
of life of a given community.
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ACTION RESEARCH METHOD
This researcher employed an action research method of inquiry to
illuminate the vision-based strategic planning processes of four nonprofit
human service organizations located in the Midwestern United States and
serving people with either physical or cognitive disabilities (Stringer,
1999). The investigator selected the cases on a purposive basis from an
array of organizations he worked with as a strategic planning consultant.
The cases were selected based on the success of the organizations in
formulating their vision-based strategic plans and on their efforts to
implement these plans successfully. One year after formulating their
plans, the organizations were undertaking active implementation and
were devoting substantial energy to the achievement of their respective
visions.
All four organizations followed the investigator’s protocol for
vision-based strategic planning. The protocol required each organization
to involve at least three stakeholder groups (e.g., members of their
professional staff, representatives from recipient groups, representatives
from advocacy groups, and members of state and local public
bureaucracies involved in the purchase of services from these
organizations). Stakeholders participated in a “pre-planning process”
that involved social and group interaction in a retreat format. The retreat
activities provided participants a common frame of reference to the
organization and a common information base and resulted in the
formulation of a vision of the agency’s future as a narrative or story of
how the particular organization would perform in five years.
These narratives were based on the development of a common set of
values that supported the formulation of future-directed portraits of
organizational performance that all groups could support. The narratives
were written as stories and, in one full page of text, described how the
nonprofit organization would look in the future if it were to fulfill the
common set of aspirations and/or expectations of its stakeholders. The
requirements of the narrative required representatives of stakeholder
groups to achieve a common perspective based on dialogue about their
preferences for organizational direction, performance, and outcomes.
The agencies used these visions to formulate their strategic plans.
The formal steps of strategic planning used the visions as comprehensive
advanced organizers of organizational form and identity in a future state.
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Vision statements framed the evaluation and/or affirmation of mission,
the scanning of organizational environments to ascertain challenges to
the vision, internal auditing of core competencies that supported the
vision, the formulation and evaluation of potential strategies for bringing
the vision into reality, and the selection of strategies and their translation
into action plans.
The investigator served in three roles during the course of each
strategic planning process. He served as a facilitator of the process,
leading retreats and working with subgroups, and working with the
stakeholders to develop common narratives of the future they held for
their organizations. He served as a technical assistant to help each of the
four organizations troubleshoot their strategic planning processes. And,
he served as an observer of the planning process. The investigator
developed narratives of his participation in the process and identified
within each case those factors that facilitated or hindered the process of
vision-based strategic planning. These multiple roles enabled the
investigator to observe the strategic planning process first hand, to
interact with all key constituents and leaders, and to reflect on success
factors during the course of his participation.
The case studies incorporated a purposive bias.
All four
organizations possessed strong identities about their roles in the
advancement of human and social services within the nonprofit sector
and two could be considered local leaders of service innovation and
responsiveness to people with disabilities. The agencies possessed
strong leadership, were viable within their selected service areas, and had
active boards. The organizations had been operating for over one decade
and were early adopters of emergent managerial practices.
All four agencies had used traditional strategic planning methods in
past organizational planning cycles but were converting to vision-based
planning processes as their constituencies became more vocal about the
expectations or aspirations they held for the organizations with which
they affiliated. These biases enabled the investigator to amplify the
qualitative features of the success factors he sought to illuminate through
action research. But they also may reduce the generalizability of what
was learned since the findings may pertain more to effective nonprofit
organizations than to those that are struggling with governance and
management and, as a consequence, use strategic planning as a tool to
effect basic systemic change in organizational performance.
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The investigator analyzed each case for dominant themes about the
strategic planning process and identified “success factors” that
established a favorable context for this form of strategic planning. The
investigator used the coding capacities of ETHNOGRAPH to identify
success factors and to collate these factors into higher-level conceptual
domains.
FINDINGS: SUCCESS FACTORS IN THE PROCESS OF PLANNING
The research sought to identify success factors these four nonprofit
organizations used in the process of vision-based strategic planning. The
investigator identified success factors within three discrete segments of
planning including initiation of the planning process, the formulation of
the actual plan, and the use of the actual plan as an organizational
product. In addition, the investigator identified success factors
influencing the relevance, legitimacy and viability of the four visionbased plans.
Initiation of Vision-Based Strategic Planning
The qualitative findings suggest that nonprofit organizations must
have in place extensive organizational networks with various stakeholder
groups and a history of purposeful activities designed to foster the
involvement and participation of the members of these stakeholder
groups in the organizational life of the nonprofit. All four organizations
interpreted their societal mandate on two levels. On one level they saw
their responsibility as providing an important human service. On another
level, they interpreted their mandate as requiring the development of
their organizations as participatory structures in which community
members and members of underrepresented groups had opportunities to
shape the purpose, aims, and direction of the agencies.
The leadership of these organizations operationalized such
involvement in several ways including expanding board membership,
involving members of stakeholder groups in task forces charged with
examining aspects of organizational performance, integrating
stakeholders into staff committees, and maintaining communication with
a diversity of stakeholders through newsletters, bulletins, and mail
campaigns. Other forms of involvement included marketing surveys and
follow-up interviews with stakeholders about their perceptions of the
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agencies. In one case, an agency established and monitored performance
measures for stakeholder involvement that served not only to indicate the
level of participation but also served to describe the demographic
qualities of participants to ensure that there was a diversity of
participants.
The level of commitment of these agencies to participation and
involvement of various stakeholders was very high and required basic
changes to the management structures of the organizations and staff
roles. The ability to reach out to various stakeholders and constituencies
was a core competency of senior administrators and, in one case, the
executive director was evaluated by the board based on his ability to
foster a broad scope of participation of service recipients in the
organizational life of the agency. In another case, an executive director
designed performance measures that required senior staff members to
incorporate into their roles activities to involve service recipients in
organizational development.
All four organizations attained high levels of readiness for the
involvement of external stakeholders in their new strategic planning
processes. The high level of involvement, particularly of service
recipients, helped these four agencies create planning contexts that
welcomed the input of stakeholders. With the exception of some staff
members who disagreed with the aims of participation and involvement,
most staff members were receptive to the perspectives of various external
stakeholders and ready to listen to them in order to understand their
values and aspirations or expectations for the organization.
The four agencies had dense organizational networks and had core
competencies relevant to reaching out and engaging various
stakeholders. One agency developed structures and supports to facilitate
involvement including alternative meeting hours, transportation services,
and childcare. An important enabling factor likely was the establishment
of on-going relationships characterized by dignity and respect with
members of stakeholder groups. These relationships were strengthened
through the organizational provision of pragmatic resources that
supported involvement and participation, particularly by members of
groups whose level of involvement was influenced if not determined by
the availability of these resources.
Use of vision-based strategic planning requires considerable
forethought with a purposeful organizational commitment to getting
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ready to engage in this form of planning. This purposeful commitment
comes primarily in the form of anticipating who should be involved,
fostering the involvement of members of diverse stakeholder groups, and
supporting their involvement through the provision of essential
resources. All four agencies were mindful of these readiness factors and
acted in ways to prepare themselves for a planning process the success of
which was measured by the ability to mobilize principal stakeholder
groups and obtain their input. The basic competencies supporting
involvement and a broad scope of involvement were well established
within each agency before they chose vision-based strategy formulation
as their preferred model of planning.
However, all four agencies had to address the consequences of their
commitment to participation and involvement of their various
constituencies. First, the facilitation of involvement required the
allocation of real financial resources to this aspect of organizational
performance. For example, the provision of transportation and childcare
is a real cost. Second, in its own way, each organization had to address
some of the controversy that emerged among staff members about their
responsibilities for fostering involvement and participation. Some staff
members in two of the organizations disagreed with the organizational
aims of involvement and needed to evaluate whether they felt productive
and fulfilled in the organizational cultures in which they worked.
Finally, in all four agencies, there were staff members who felt that their
perspectives about the direction of the agency should be given more
weight than the perspectives of external stakeholders.
Formulation of the Vision-Based Strategic Plan
The ability to capture the essence of organizational vision across
various stakeholder groups and to reach consensus was important within
all four agencies. In getting ready for the use of vision-based strategic
planning the four agencies were able to increase the scope of
involvement and participation. The agencies were able to build and
foster relationships with members of stakeholder groups, and obtain a
preliminary sense of the values of these various groups and the preferred
futures they held for the agencies with which they were affiliated.
Formulating vision-based plans required the agencies to move from
readiness to actual engagement of groups in the strategic planning
process. The protocol for this phase of the planning process required the
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agencies to engage their constituencies in the formulation of their grand
narratives that would become the basis of subsequent vision statements.
Basic assumptions about these narratives were put in place early in the
process including requirements that the “stories” portray the
enhancement of the quality of life of service recipients over the course of
a five-year horizon using outcomes that the stakeholders valued and
shared in common. The technical process of strategic planning began
with the formulation of these grand narratives and their conversion into
tangible outcome-driven stories of success.
Each agency used forums and small group meetings to identify these
narratives and to construct them through the involvement of various
stakeholder groups. An important theme that emerged early in the all
four planning processes was the idea that this form of planning cannot be
rushed and must be unfold over a period in which there is ample time and
generous allocation of resources for exploration, deliberation, and the
discovery of common ground. One agency, attempting to meet
regulatory requirements, and the expectations of its principal accreditor,
rushed into the formulation of its grand narrative and vision. Rushing the
process only engendered subsequent controversy and produced some
resentment among this agency’s constituency groups and set this
particular process behind.
The other three agencies invested from three to six months in this
process. One agency recognized that the entire strategic planning process
was now cyclical, and this recognition required it to move through each
discrete phase of the process, allocating ample time for the effective
accomplishment of requisite tasks. Thus, for this organization, the pace
and cyclic nature of vision-based strategic planning emerged as
important factors under-girding the successful formulation of the
agency’s strategic plan.
With adequate time to document and evaluate their grand narratives,
the three agencies were well prepared for the framing of the
organizational vision through a retreat process that brought
representatives from all major stakeholder groups together to deliberate
and finalize the vision statement. Feeding into the retreat were all of the
data, information, and perspectives the agencies obtained during the
initial forums, interviews, and focus groups they had undertaken. As
noted earlier, one agency was not well prepared for this retreat process
and it was unable to use the process effectively. However, the other
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three agencies emerged out of their retreats with strong consensus among
their participants about organizational futures and with grand narratives
that would form the visions of preferred futures. One agency’s vision
statement addressed the empowerment of people to control their own
lives while another agency incorporated into its statement the
enhancement of the quality of life of the people it served. The third
agency linked its entire statement to helping people “get and keep
housing,” and participants articulated in the narrative how the agency
and its personnel would work with recipients to bring about this
outcome.
All three of these narratives contained both ends and means
statements. “Ends” identified the substantive outcomes each agency
would achieve that reflected its purpose and reason for being while the
“means” identified how an agency would go about the achievement of its
preferred outcomes whether these pertained to empowerment, quality of
life, or the fulfillment of a specific need like housing. But the vision
statements were more than a collection of idealistic statements about
outcomes and activities. They were designed to capture the hopes and
aspirations of the various constituencies and stakeholders that the
agencies involved in the pre-retreat and retreat processes. Identifying
these hopes and aspirations and capturing the enthusiasm of participants
for their preferred future figured in as important qualities of each
planning process.
In addition, in two of the cases, the aesthetics of the narrative were
important to participants. During two retreats, participants not only
amplified the technical and inspirational aspects of the narrative but also
introduced the requirements that the ends and means constituting the
vision statements of the agencies produce something that brought beauty
into existence. Participants saw aesthetics as important considerations for
advocates who sought to improve the living circumstances of people who
often experienced environmental degradation. In the case of the agency
that sought to fulfill the housing needs of its recipients, the vision
statement went into considerable detail about the aesthetic quality of the
housing the agency would help its recipients acquire, experience, and
sustain.
All four agencies articulated their strategic plans using the vision
statement as their principal points of reference. These vision statements
served as touchstones when each of the four agencies returned to their
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missions to ensure that these were compatible with the visions. All four
agencies undertook environmental scans to identify forces facilitating or
inhibiting the achievement of their visions. The agencies then undertook
internal audits to identify their core competencies relevant to their
visions and internal organizational factors that could undermine the
accomplishment of their preferred ends. The environmental scans and
internal audits fostered the formulation of strategies that each
organization saw as important to bringing its respective vision into
reality.
Conceptually, strategy in these cases involved those actions these
organizations would take to bring their visions into reality. Strategy
incorporated the aims, actions, and tactics that would enable these
organizations to realize substantive and substantial progress toward their
visions of preferred futures.
Three types of strategy emerged as
products of this segment of planning. Outcome strategies identified how
the agencies would bring about their preferred distal effects while
cultural strategies identified how the agencies would configure their
organizational cultures to support the realization of their visions.
Resource development strategies articulated how each agency would
secure the monetary, human, political, and technical resources their
visions required. Taken together these three types of strategies guided
the subsequent performance of each organization.
Use of the Vision-Based Plan as Organizational Framework
The vision statements were not merely hortatory or quixotic
statements unrelated to reality or devoid of feasibility. They served to
encode meaningful values into a comprehensive narrative of a future
state, something human groups have consistently used to make sense out
of their worlds and the environmental challenges they faced. In all four
cases, the statements served as frameworks of performance that offered
each agency direction in translating what they sought to bring about into
outcomes and performance activities and ultimately into performance
measures. The only intent of the retreat was to put in place a draft
statement of the vision.
The four agencies then moved into the next steps of strategic
planning using their vision statements as advanced organizers to frame
action. One agency took its vision statement and added other substantive
elements to support action, including a statement of best practices the
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE SUCCESSFUL USE OF VISION-BASED
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agency would adopt in order to achieve the substance and spirit of its
vision.
Another agency translated its vision into performance
expectations and measures and formulated a “report card of indicators”
that it was committed to monitoring quarterly or semi-annually. A third
agency identified the implications of its vision for organizational
performance at three levels involving (1) board and executive leadership,
(2) supervisory roles, and (3) direct service roles.
Analysis of the four cases suggested that executive leadership faced
important cultural challenges in the use of the plans to foster action
within these organizations’ domains or fields of service. The vision
statements enabled the four agencies to articulate in substantive detail
their mission integrity. And, these statements enabled them to identify
the principal means they would undertake to fulfill the aspirations and
expectations that articulated each organization’s reason for existence.
The vision statements tapped into deeply held feelings among various
organizational members and these aspirations raised important questions
about whether each agency’s organizational culture in its current form
could sustain the vision and mobilize the energy each agency needed to
bring its particular sense of the future into reality.
The vision-based strategic planning process led two agencies into the
assessment of their organizational cultures. These assessments required
organizational members to reconsider their most deeply held assumptions
and perspectives about their day-to-day work lives, the tempo and pace
of work, their use of language and concepts, and the measures of
performance that they held up as important.
In one case, agency personnel examined their language and the
“grammar of their performance” using their vision statement as an
assessment tool (Bethanis, 1995). They differentiated housing outcomes
framed as the number of people placed into some form of housing from
those outcomes that pertained to helping their recipients “acquire a
psychological sense of home.” The personnel were well aware that their
external funding sources only wanted to know quantitative results
expressed as the number of people the agency was able to house
successfully and sustain during a time period and were not interested in
information about the resulting quality of life of recipients. Agency
personnel wanted richer portrayals of performance—ones that reflected
their visions and the values that composed these visions. If they were to
be true to their vision, agency personnel realized that their outcome
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vocabulary needed to include “the psychological sense of home.” And
they realized that the introduction of this concept reframed performance
within the agency and required the development of a new kind of
outcome instrument and a new service logic linking service provision to
preferred outcomes. In this case, the introduction of the vision led to
new ends and means and to new measures of performance that taken
together could change the culture of this particular nonprofit
organization.
For another agency the translation of the strategy into action required
it to look critically at how a powerful funding source introduced a
“culture of negativity” into the organization. The external funder wanted
the agency to identify the deficits of its adolescent service recipients and
to be accountable for performance measures that focused on decreasing
negative behavior. The vision statement, however, spoke to the
development of positive outcomes in major domains of living and the
development of the strengths of the adolescents the agency served.
Agency personnel decided to adopt two performance measurement
systems to guide their work: the deficit-oriented framework of the
agency’s principal purchaser and their own “framework of success” that
measured the life assets the agency personnel helped adolescent service
recipients to develop. The introduction of the life asset model
strengthened the organizational culture substantially and introduced a
new way of assessing the extent to which vision guided service
performance in the life of each child the agency served.
Perhaps one of the most fundamental changes agencies can make is
to their systems of performance measurement (Schein, 1998). Two
agencies, in particular, used the strategic plan to reframe their basic
conceptions of success and effectiveness thereby inducing some
fundamental changes to their organizational cultures. The agencies
approached this measurement by using their visions and strategies to
articulate new measures of outcome, measures that incorporated the
aspirations they held for the people they served. These agencies
illuminated the important connection between strategy and action. This
nexus involved substantive changes to organizational culture reflected in
artifacts like measurement, reporting, and evaluation systems that were
consistent with the value base and future direction of the organization.
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Sustaining the Relevance, Legitimacy, and Viability of the Plan
It is one thing to invest considerable energy in the initiation,
formulation, and use of a strategic plan. It is another thing for an
organization to sustain the plan mindful of the need to ensure its
relevance, legitimacy, and viability. Follow-up with all four agencies
enabled the investigator to examine what appeared to work in strategy
implementation. A common theme that emerged across all four
organizations was that senior and mid-level leadership shared a strong
consensus on the relevance of the agencies’ visions and the necessity to
maintain vigilance in the implementation and use of the core strategies
that the vision-based strategic plans encompassed.
Schein (1998) underscores the importance of leadership in sustaining
organizational culture or in steering an organization toward a new
cultural form. What emerged as important in two agencies was that the
leadership invested considerable energy in interpreting the vision and
strategies to personnel, keeping the vision at the forefront of the
consciousness of personnel, and using strategies to interpret
organizational direction and action. One leader established his own
routines for explicating the organization’s vision and strategies and
invested considerable energy in “teaching the vision and strategies” to
agency personnel.
At a more technical level of performance, two organizational leaders
identified the importance of transforming the vision-based planning into
actual tools. Thus, one leader used the vision and strategy of her agency
to evaluate mid-line leadership. She would ask these individuals to
prepare statements periodically on how their actions contributed to the
advancement of the agency’s vision. In another agency, the leader used
new procedures to monitor performance that was relevant to the
implementation of the vision. In both of these cases, the vision was
amplified and orchestrated. Performance was reframed from getting
work done to getting the right work done—that is, work that was relevant
to the implementation and use of strategy.
Viability of the plans appeared to be linked to a willingness of the
leadership of at least three agencies to modify the strategy as the agency
moved forward. None of the four agencies modified their grand
narratives and visions since this was tantamount to undermining the
process of governance that led to the formulation of these statements.
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However, three of the agencies experimented and modified their
strategies, that is, their vehicles for accomplishing their visions. The
plans were somewhat tentative and one leader, in particular, was
reluctant to “freeze the plan in place” since everyone, he said, needed
room to modify their thinking, behavior, and actions in relationship to
the vision. This leader noted that resource development strategies were
frequently recycled as new thinking emerged about how to best pursue
promising avenues that were unknown at the time the original visionbased strategic plan was formulated.
Relevance and viability are linked to organizational learning, a
theme that emerged in the experience of all four agencies.
Organizational learning, in this context, meant that these agencies were
not capricious in the modification of their strategic plans (Argyris, 1994)
but invested considerable energy in appraising what they were learning
about strategy during the course of implementation. They invested
considerable thought in examining and re-examining the means that they
selected, but they also were very respectful of the visions to which they
were committed. In this sense, the vision was the template that was to be
modified through a process of governance that brought stakeholder
groups together to reconsider the distal outcomes they sought.
CONCLUSION
Vision-based strategic planning does not appear relevant to those
organizations that seek to protect their own interests independent of the
public good. It does not appear to be relevant to those nonprofits that
isolate themselves from those stakeholders who seek to influence
organizational identity and aims. And, it does not appear to be relevant to
those nonprofit organizations that want a comfortable and unchallenging
level of performance.
This form of strategic planning appears to favor those organizations
that see themselves as holding important roles in the advancement of the
public or common good and are willing to modify their conceptions of
performance to meet the challenges emanating from visions that they
synthesize from multiple value sets. It appears to favor those
organizations that have enough stability that they can commit
considerable energy to organizing for a preferred future. And it appears
to favor those organizations whose leadership can translate a future state
FACTORS INFLUENCING THE SUCCESSFUL USE OF VISION-BASED
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into current performance and into real outcomes that contribute to the
realization of vision.
Leadership figures into successful use of vision-based strategic
planning in important ways. But the form of leadership proving to be
most important is transformational as opposed to task-centered or
transactional. Leadership in this context is effective if it can mobilize
various stakeholder groups, induce their involvement, and surface the
aspirations and expectations diverse constituencies introduce into
planning forums. Effective leadership seeks to produce a shared way of
thinking about what is conceived to be the common good (Senge, 1995).
Effective leaders of this form of strategic planning have the competence
to sustain the involvement of a diverse range of groups and individuals in
formulating the substance and direction of organizational strategy.
Transformational
leadership
involves
mobilizing
diverse
constituencies, building a common sense of purpose, and setting in
motion discrete transformational processes (e.g. structural re-alignment
of the organization, changing roles) to make substantive progress toward
the fulfillment of vision. It possesses a moral dimension in which the
purpose of the leader is to facilitate among followers the identification of
what is valued (Carlson, 1996). But such leadership also is pragmatic
since it is mindful of the intimate connection between the
accomplishment of vision and organizational performance. An important
mediating variable appears to lie in the willingness of organizations and
their memberships to examine their cultures and to engage in behaviors
that bring about new ways of thinking and performing to attain a
preferred future. The transformational leader links the fulfillment of
vision and the use of strategy to changes in the actual fabric and texture
of organizational culture.
So, vision-based strategic planning is not relevant to all nonprofit
agencies, and the investigator does not prescribe its broad scale use. It is
one form of strategic planning among many. Such diversity itself
suggests that each organization select that form of planning that best fits
its identity, its particular aims, and its conception of purpose and role in a
given domain of human service. Vision-based strategic planning appears
to be compatible with those nonprofit organizations that seek to develop
a common sense of purpose in partnership with those groups that want to
work collaboratively to bring about a mutually shared conception of a
future end state.
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An important enabling condition of this form of planning appears to
reside in the extent to which the organization’s identity is grounded in a
conception of the public or common good that enables it to achieve an
appreciable level of legitimacy across a number of different stakeholder
groups. It must be willing and prepared to invest consider energy in
formulating a conception of a public good that unites rather than divides
key constituencies, an essential requirement of effective vision-based
strategic planning.
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