Several years ago I took part in a strategic planning process. It was an energized discussion, though the presence of senior leadership in the room shaped what people were willing to say out loud. By the end of the first day we had four tables full of sticky notes, note paper, a whiteboard of words and values, and everyone felt good about getting thoughts on paper. The full process took about six months to create a new strategic plan with a new mission, vision, and values statement. Three months after the plan was delivered the spark had left, team members had moved into new roles, new urgencies captured the attention of senior leadership, and the resulting documents sat unopened in the shared drive.

Has this ever happened at your organization?

This plan failed not because of the organization, but because the momentum of the room didn't survive contact with reality. We felt like we knew a lot about the organization internally, but the external factors were still nebulous.

This final plan added to the work of the group instead of reducing it. The organization was already stretched thin. Most people in the room held two or three responsibilities beyond their primary role. With no one designated to champion the new vision, and no reduction in existing demands, the plan had nowhere to land.

The plan also generated new program ideas with no realistic path to funding. What was available had limited eligibility, and the new efforts would have required donor commitments the organization had no foundation to build.

How could this plan have been better?

A strategic plan is only as good as the capacity of the team executing it. That means the planning process itself must be built around what an organization can actually do today, not what it aspires to do someday. Rural organizations face this at a disproportionate rate, precisely because the staff capacity that a strategic plan demands is the same capacity already stretched across three other jobs.

A capacity-aware strategic plan is led by a team of champions with a clear path to execute within 90 days. The plan starts with what exists, not what is wished for, and builds a path that the existing team can actually walk.

That starts with knowing what actually exists in your community, who you can call, what resources are within reach, and where your people can turn. A community asset inventory is not a luxury in this process. It is the foundation. This inventory enables you to start from what you know, not what you assume.

The Strategic Navigator is designed for a 90-day deployment sprint, so the plan becomes embedded before the momentum fades. Start by reviewing every item in the plan and removing anything that requires new staff or expanded capacity in the next year. If it cannot be done with the staff today, it must exit the plan. It can still be used, but it goes into a long-term document outside of the strategic plan.

Most strategic plans overwhelm the organizations tasked with executing them. Research points to three to five strategic objectives as the threshold where focus holds.[^1] The Strategic Navigator approach I developed cuts through the noise to two or three core strategic objectives and three to five key results for each. This takes effort. It requires letting go of pet ideas, and that can be uncomfortable. A Strategic Navigator plan focuses on what is realistic, fundable, and survivable. It also surfaces where capacity gaps exist, so you have a realistic picture of what growth would actually require.

Leadership transition hits rural organizations harder than most. Rural superintendents stay an average of three to four years.[^2] City and county administrators average seven.[^3] Nonprofit leaders run slightly longer, but rural nonprofits still face significant turnover.[^4] A plan bound to the people in the room, rather than the organization itself, doesn't survive that churn. It must address succession and long-term vitality.

I build each Strategic Navigator engagement around a working dashboard that tracks execution in real time, not a document that collects dust.

The sticky notes were not the problem. The process that had nowhere to land was.

Footnotes

[^1]: Speculand, Robin. “The Optimal Number of Strategic Goals for Your Organization.” Duke Corporate Education, September 6, 2017. (https://www.dukece.com/insights/optimal-number-strategic-goals-your-organization/).

[^2]: DeMatthews, David E., Alexandra Aylward, Torri D. Hart, and Pedro Reyes. “Superintendent Turnover and Retention: A Mixed-Methods Study Of Leavers and Stayers In Rural Districts.” AERA Open 11 (July 2025): 23328584251357253. (https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584251357253).

[^3]: “Why A NextGen Initiative?” February 13, 2026. (https://icma.org/why-nextgen-initiative).

[^4]: Walters, Jayme, and Dorothy Wallis. “Characteristics and Organizational Capacity of Nonprofits in Rural, Persistently Poor Southern Counties in the United States.” Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs 7, no. 3 (2021): 390–416. (https://doi.org/10.20899/jpna.7.3.390-416).