The strategy screen
To pick a good strategy, you need a job description
You have no idea what you’re going to say
Until you discover what you want to say
As you make the sentences that say it.
Every sentence is optional until it proves otherwise.
Writing is the work of discovery.
—Verlyn Klinkenborg, from Several Short Sentences about Writing
When you’re reviewing candidates for a job, it’s generally a bad idea to have an open and unstructured conversation with them. Without the guardrails of a clear job description, skill requirements, and an intentional approach to your evaluation, your subconscious or impulsive self will take the wheel and drive you into a ditch. Says psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman and friends (Kahneman et al 2022):
…if your goal is to determine which candidates will succeed in a job and which will fail, standard interviews (also called unstructured interviews…) are not very informative. To put it more starkly, they are often useless.
Instead, it’s best to define (before the search) the essential skills, abilities, sensabilities, and knowledge required of the work, and build your selection process on that pre-defined criteria (for more on the job search, read this post).
The same is true for choosing a strategy for your arts organization – the particular assembly of people, stuff, and money you select to move your mission forward. Without an established “strategy job description” as a guide, you and your team can be easily distracted by a shiny or same-old strategy rather than one that’s fit for purpose.
Nonprofit consultant and author David La Piana offers one approach to crafting that job description through what he calls a “strategy screen.” According to La Piana and Campos (2018):
“A Strategy Screen is a set of criteria that your organization uses to choose whether or not a particular strategy is consistent with its identity… [It is] a transition point between the organization’s expression of its identity (Who are we?) and the way in which it seeks its future (Where are we going?).
La Piana suggests that you develop this strategy screen before you start exploring the path forward but only after you’ve established your organizational identity statement (“an honest description of an organization at a moment in time” including its business model, market position, and competitive advantage). Then, whenever a strategy, opportunity, or project shows up, you “interview” it using the criteria in the strategy screen.
A strategy screen will be different for every organization, and will change over time. But La Piana and Campos suggest a few core criteria as an example:
Our strategy must …
Support/advance our mission
Enhance and leverage our competitive advantages (as detailed in the identity statement)
Be financially viable, either by generating earned revenues that cover its full cost, contributed revenues attracted by its impact, or a combination of the two
Be consistent with our culture
Support us in moving to the next stage of our organization’s development
Developing and maintaining a well-considered strategy screen offers many benefits. It can serve as a yardstick and reality check for the flood of options that may confound you. It can connect the dots between your organization’s purpose, position, and capacity and its actual work. And it can change as the world, your organization, and the conversation between the two invariably evolve.
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 Ann H via Pexels.com
Sources
Kahneman, Daniel, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. 2022. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Reprint edition. New York, NY Boston London: Little, Brown and Company.
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.