You’re running in more directions than you’d like.

More plates than you can comfortably spin. A team pulling at you from five sides. A board asking about a sixth.

And somewhere behind all of it sits a strategic plan. One you wrote, or inherited, or are about to pay a lot of money for.

That plan is supposed to be the thing that ends the spinning.

But most plans never do.

Not because they’re badly written — most are written well. They don’t do it because of what we believe a plan is for.

We treat it as the place where priorities get written down.

Its real power is that it’s the only place things get taken off.

I believe strategic planning is the single most powerful thing a nonprofit leader can do. Here’s why. A hire changes one seat. A grant changes one year. A plan changes what every person in your organization says yes to. It’s the only decision you make that changes what everyone else decides.

But it only works if it’s built to answer the right question.

Most executive directors can tell me everything their organization does. In detail, with real conviction.

Almost none can tell me the three or four things it absolutely must do for the mission to succeed.

Those are different questions. The first is a list of activities. The second is a claim about leverage — and it’s the one that changes your calendar on Monday.

I don’t mean the goal. Most leaders can name that. Policy change. Better funding. Families who can cover their bills.

I mean the layer underneath. You gave them what you offer. What still keeps them from getting the life outcomes they’re looking for?

Almost no one can answer that with confidence if they haven’t used the right process, but the answer is what decides whether the plan works.

I was recently on a call with the executive director of a national criminal justice organization, closing in on forty years old. Her team had just spent a year on internal culture, trust, and transparency. They’d written their first values and vision statements. They’d hired a consultant to survey the funder landscape. Real work, all of it.

Then she said what was missing.

“We haven’t come together to talk about what we, as an organization, truly want to do.”

I suggested envisioning the future instead of documenting the present — a powerful exercise we call current state, end state.

“That’s literally what the strategic process for the last 40 years has been,” she said. “Writing down what we’re already doing. And then we just put a new year on it.”

Forty years. A dozen planning cycles, give or take. And no answer to the only question that matters.

Later in that same call, she named the reason more precisely.

“I don’t think we have a problem implementing,” she said. “I think we’ve just been so comfortable doing what we’ve always done — and we excel at it.”

That’s the trap. Not incompetence but excellence. You can be very good at something that stopped moving the thing you exist to change. And the better you are at it, the less likely anyone is to ask whether it still works.

Here’s where this gets hard.

A real plan asks you to put your longest-standing work on the table. The program that made your name. The approach nobody has questioned since before you arrived.

You don’t have to cut them. You do have to be willing to.

Because if the answer is decided before you start, you’re not planning. You’re repackaging. And you’ll pay five or six figures for a box-checking exercise — beautifully designed, board-approved, and functionally identical to the plan it replaced.

The honest question isn’t what are we doing?

It’s what must we do next to produce the change we got into this work to do?

Three phases, in order.

Then write the plan. Pillars, objectives, metrics. And the part most plans skip: what you’re going to stop.

Naming three or four things is only half a decision. The other half is looking at what you’ve been doing that no longer fits. Some of it ends. Some of it shrinks. Some of it isn’t about stopping at all — it’s about realigning your role in it. But that conversation has to happen, or the new priorities just get stacked on top of the old ones. Which is how you ended up spinning plates in the first place.

Most strategic planning starts where this ends.

It isn’t a capability problem. It’s a position problem.

You can’t run a neutral process on a question that touches your own programs. Not because you lack integrity — because everyone in the room knows what you’d prefer.

There’s also no version of this that doesn’t take some bravery. You’re inviting people to tell you the truth about work you may have built.

The bravery isn’t in promising. It’s in being willing to hear something that changes your mind.

List everything you’re doing. Ask which three or four actually produce the outcome. Then go find out if you’re right.

You’re probably half right. Knowing which half is the whole job.

Because the reward here isn’t a document.

It’s focus. The kind where five directions become three. Where your team stops guessing. Where a good opportunity that doesn’t fit can be declined in one sentence, without guilt.

That’s available to you. It’s just on the other side of some hard questions.

— Durell

More next month.