Seven indicators of strategy
How to know if you're crafting strategy or just drafting plans
“Having a strategy suggests an ability to look up from the short term and the trivial to view the long term and the essential, to address causes rather than symptoms, to see woods rather than trees.”
—Sir Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (2013)
The distinction between operational and strategic thinking can be hard to define. Often, boards, leadership, staff, and funders assume they will “know it when they see it.” But just as often, they disagree.
Operational and strategic thinking – represented in documents, communications, or directed action – are essential and deeply intertwined. But they are different in ways that matter. Operational thinking asks “are we doing things right?” Strategic thinking asks “are we doing the right things?” Operational thinking optimizes the current organization. Strategic thinking reshapes capacity, identity, process, or position.
Based on my teaching, reading, and professional practice (see sources below), I suggest the following seven indicators of strategic thinking, planning, and action. They’re also offered as diagnostic criteria: Any proposal, priority, or plan that claims to be “strategic” should meet them all, or meaningfully move you toward meeting them.
Lather, rinse, repeat until you satisfy all seven.
Note that this is a first attempt at these indicators, so please comment with criticism, corrections, connections, or additions.
In short, I suggest that a proposal or plan is strategic if you can answer “yes” about it, or at least “almost yes,” to all the following questions:
1. Is it rooted in the change for those you serve?
For purpose-driven organizations, strategy produces a positive change in the lives of the people and communities you serve. Everything else — positioning, capacity building, ecosystem awareness, disciplined choices — is in service of that external change. Strategy must name, specifically, what will be different for particular constituents as a result of this work — who they are, and what they will experience, access, or be able to do that they could not before.
2. Is it grounded in an honest account of where you stand?
Strategy starts with a clear, evidence-based description of your organization’s current position — strengths, assets, and capacities, but also gaps, limitations, and areas of unproven capacity — specific enough to support real choices. Initiatives proposed in areas of existing strength should name those strengths. Initiatives proposed in areas of weakness or inexperience must acknowledge the gap and describe how you travel from here to there — what investment, learning, partnership, or capacity-building is required and why it’s worth the cost.
3. Is it organized around a named challenge?
Strategy identifies what the organization or initiative is responding to — external conditions, internal tensions, field-level shifts, emerging threats and opportunities that demand a response. Without a named challenge, activities lack justification. The real question is “what are we facing that requires us to act differently than we have been?” If the answer is “nothing — we just need to do more of what we’re already doing, or just incrementally improve,” that is itself a strategic claim and should be argued, not assumed.
4. Is it situated within the larger ecosystem?
A strategy locates the organization or initiative among other actors — peers, allies, competitors, funders, the communities you serve, and the broader conditions you are trying to influence. What is your particular role in that ecosystem? How do your strategic choices respond to or reshape your relationships? A document that describes only internal activities without reference to external actors, field dynamics, or the landscape of need is managing inward (which is necessary but not sufficient).
5. Is it coherent across individual initiatives?
Individual actions in a strategy should serve a coherent directional logic — each initiative explained in terms of its role in the larger whole. The proposal, priority, or plan should reveal how the pieces add up, reinforce each other, and move you toward the identity and position described in indicators 4 and 7. A list of individually worthy initiatives without a connecting thread is a work plan.
6. Is it disciplined about what it excludes?
A strategy names what the organization or initiative is choosing not to do, and why. Prioritization means some things that could be done will not be — not because they are bad ideas, but because they are not the most essential use of limited attention, resources, and energy. If everything is included and nothing is deprioritized, no strategic choice has been made. The choices against reveal the logic of the strategy as much as the choices for.
7. Is it oriented toward who you are becoming?
A strategy offers a theory of organizational trajectory — your direction and intention. That trajectory might mean becoming something different — taking on a new role, building new capacities, shifting your position in the field. But it might also mean reworking how you express an identity that is already sound: changing where you put your attention and resources, which relationships you invest in, or what you stop doing. The strategic question is not always “are we becoming something new?” but “how are we moving and why?” If a document describes essentially the same organization doing essentially the same work with incremental additions — without direction or intention — it is operational, not strategic.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Governance
Governance involves structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization's purposes, resources, and goals (often through boards or trustees).
Framework of the Week: The Adjacent Possible
The Adjacent Possible is a concept by Stuart Kauffman that suggests organisms, including humans, explore and expand their world by probing the immediate possibilities around them. This idea is useful in dynamic environments, advocating for exploring nearby opportunities rather than rigidly planning for a distant future.
Photo by Dipesh Shrestha on Unsplash
Sources
Caprino, Kathy. 2024. “Seth Godin: What Is Strategy And Why We So Often Get It Wrong.” Careers. Forbes, October 16.
Ellis, Adrian. 2002. Planning in a Cold Climate. Getty Leadership Institute.
Freedman, Sir Lawrence. 2013. Strategy: A History. 1st edition. Oxford University Press.
Kilpi, Esko. 2017. “The Future of Management.” NewCo Shift, November 19.
La Piana, David, and Melissa Mendes Campos. 2018. The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution: Real-Time Strategic Planning in a Rapid-Response World. 2nd Edition. Fieldstone Alliance.
Mintzberg, Henry, Joseph Lampel, and Bruce Ahlstrand. 2005. Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management. Paperback Edition. Free Press.
Taylor, E. Andrew. 2023. “Strategy.” In Graduate Standards in Arts Administration Education, edited by Ximena Varela. Association of Arts Administration Educators.