adventures in

strategy

Renewing
your strategy
This is one of five Adventures in Strategy
briefings – a series looking at major choices and
challenges third sector organisations (TSOs)
face in their strategic planning. Each briefing
takes a different issue, exploring theory and
practice and offering ideas you could try when
reviewing your strategy.
We developed the content from a series of
‘hothouse seminars’ held jointly during 2005-2007
by the Performance Hub and NCVO Third Sector
Foresight. A range of third sector practitioners
and experts attended each seminar, drawing on
their own first-hand experiences to offer
insights and practical advice.
This briefing looks at how to adapt strategic
planning as your organisation grows.

What is strategic planning?

An organisation’s strategy pulls together
principles and assumptions about how it will
achieve its goals, adapt to changing
circumstances and interact with other
organisations over the next three to five years.
Strategic planning is the process of developing
realistic medium to long-term plans, identifying
clear priorities that will help the organisation
deliver its mission. Effective strategic plans
draw on input from people across the
organisation and from outside.They should be
reviewed and adapted on a regular basis.
To find out more, visit our website:
www.performancehub.org.uk/thinkahead

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Renewing
your strategy
During periods of growth, it might
be tempting to put the strategic plan
on the shelf and to rely on gut
instinct. But that may mean missing
real opportunities for positive
change and development.
With the third sector undergoing widespread
change, it has never been more important to
understand strategy and appreciate its value in
helping organisations fulfil their potential. So, how
can you keep refreshing your strategy while you
deal with change – and share your renewed
vision effectively with your users?

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 Renewing your strategy

What is organisational growth?

In the third sector the concept of growth is not limited to just
income and expenditure, as it tends to be in the public or private
sectors. An organisation’s growth is obvious when it is taking on
more staff, developing new projects or expanding its area of work;
but other kinds of growth may include an organisation having more
impact, increasing its advocacy or learning, or extending its quality
improvement.
Strategic renewal is the process of reviewing and revitalising an
organisation’s strategy when it is undergoing growth of any kind,
so it can identify and seize previously unforeseen opportunities.
The process is as important as the result. It should be a journey for
everyone in the organisation, creating a deeper sense of involvement
at the heart of what matters. Everyone needs to understand that
strategic planning is not a one-off activity but something that is
ongoing and vital. Renewing your strategy not only keeps
development on track, but can also refresh the energy, passion
and commitment of all involved.

“Strategising is not a once a year rain dance

or a once a decade consulting project; it must
be a skill deeply embedded.”
Gary Hamel, business strategy expert and author

Focus on a few big ideas

When an organisation is going through a time of great change, it
may not be a good idea to communicate the entire strategic plan
until things have stabilised. Communicating one or two clear,
compelling and big strategic ideas can be an excellent way to start
setting strategic direction in an organisation.This will provide
flexibility for more detailed strategies to emerge and be shaped by
events, trends and people at the front line.

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Improvisation and intuition

People can often lose confidence in their ability to plan strategically
if they feel previous planning has missed the mark, but they may
take heart from a study that found only 10% of strategies were
ever successfully implemented (Ahlstrand and Mintzberg, 2005).
In other words, it is the ongoing strategic planning process that can
make an organisation healthy and successful, rather than whether
things go exactly to plan. After all, organisations are constantly
evolving, so their planning must do the same.
It’s tempting to look for tools and techniques to drive the process,
but intuition and improvisation, alongside rational analysis, can be just
as effective.There is no toolkit that provides all the answers.
Sometimes an idea or instinctive response can help an organisation
work out a way forward.
Strategies often emerge gradually throughout organisations.
Capturing the particular methods or patterns that are proving
successful and replicating them throughout the organisation can be
very effective. But it can also be important to develop some key
strategies deliberately, such as the way the organisation is governed,
operates its systems or capitalises on funding opportunities.
As people in senior positions become more experienced strategic
planners, they may become set in their ways in terms of the
process and may miss new opportunities or ways of working.
Strategy renewal works best when new voices are added and new
ways of working together are explored.

“What marks the mind of the strategist is an

intellectual elasticity or flexibility that enables
... [them] to come up with realistic responses to
changing conditions...”
Keniche Ohnae, international business and corporate strategist and author

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 Renewing your strategy

Hothouse versus grassroots

Metaphors can often help people understand and identify models
that could work for them. Mintzberg (1989) identifies two extreme
models – the hothouse model and the grassroots model:

The hothouse model The grassroots model

There is one strategist
Who formulates strategies through a
conscious controlled process, as
tomatoes are cultivated in a hothouse
Strategies emerge fully developed, as
ripe tomatoes are picked and sent to
market
Explicit strategies are formally
implemented
Management: appropriate data is
analysed, insightful strategies are
developed and carefully tended as
they grow, on schedule
Strategies grow like weeds in a garden
They can emerge and take root
anywhere
Strategies become organisational when
they become collective, when they
pervade the behaviour of the third
sector organisation at large
Processes are not consciously tended
and new strategies may emerge
continuously
Management: recognise emergence
and intervene when appropriate.
A destructive weed can be uprooted.
One capable of bearing fruit is worth
watching (and perhaps even worth
building a hothouse around)

How do you balance hothouse and grassroots strategy

development? Dr Ian Williams, Executive Director, Concern
Universal suggests four key principles:
➜ Commitment to renewing strategy comes from the senior
management and trustees.
➜ A participatory and engaging process is as valuable as the final plan.
➜ A strategy group drawn from across the organisation leads the
process, rather than just the management team.

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➜ Staff groups, and discussion with and between stakeholders,

help to refresh and refocus the strategy outside the strategic
planning process.
As organisations grow, strategy development can become too
formal and revolve around a fixed process, using particular tools
and methods.This risks missing the results that can come from
ideas bubbling up across the organisation. How do you get these
ideas and conversations to flourish alongside your formal strategic
planning and feed into your strategic plans?
You could try cross-organisational working groups, made up of
people from across a spectrum of responsibilities.These could be
thematic and focus on major opportunities or risks facing the
organisation.The key, according to Ian Williams, is to encourage the
commitment, abilities, skills and space needed for strategic thinking
and strategic conversations.

“And, alongside this, to nurture a passion for

the organisation ,s vision, mission and values.”
Dr Ian Williams, Concern Universal

Communicating a renewed strategy

Good communication is essential to the success of your strategy. An
organisation’s restructuring may prove unsuccessful if strategy and
policy is all decided at top level and trickled downwards, whereas
another’s will work because it engages with volunteers and local
project managers while developing strategy. Good communication
can help enthuse and motivate stakeholders around strategy
renewal, so it’s worth thinking about how best to go about it.
Think about your different audiences, such as staff, volunteers,
trustees and supporters, the key messages for them and the best
methods for reaching and engaging them.Taking the time to produce
materials or presentations to explain a strategic plan can help
everyone focus and trigger further discussion and development.

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 Renewing your strategy

“Our chief executive wanted something, like a

glorified business card, that she could use to show
what we do. Now we use it internally as well.”
Participant at NCVO Third Sector Foresight and Performance Hub ‘hothouse’ seminar,
17 October 2005

Keeping communication going is at the core of keeping your

planning relevant, especially if you can bring people who don’t
usually talk about strategy into the discussion.

“One thing is certain: if for five or six years

in a row the same 10-15 people have the same
conversations about strategy in the same way,
new insights are unlikely to emerge. For strategy
to emerge, it needs new conversations that cross
the boundaries of function, hierarchy and
geography.”
Gary Hamel, business strategy expert and author

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Ten practical approaches
to renewing your strategy
1. Flexibility
Keep a broad and flexible
organisational strategy that
allows for refinements at key
team (or local) levels.
2. Risks
Adopt a balanced approach
to risk management so it
doesn’t smother strategic
development.
3. New initiatives 9. Models
Nurture new developments and
leave behind what doesn’t work.
4. Improvisation
Seize opportunities and turn
challenges to advantage. If
necessary reinvent and realign
your organisation.
5. People
Identify, retain and, where
practical, rotate key people for
positions of leadership. It aids
learning and develops the spirit
and culture of an organisation
as it grows.
6. Structure
Let structure respond to
strategy, rather than vice versa.
adventures in
strategy
7. Operations
Strike an appropriate balance
between strategy and
operational needs. Remain
pragmatic over the detail of
making things happen.
8. Systems
Make sure your systems keep
up with strategy and internal
and external demands.
Keep re-stating what your core
business and approach is all
about; one can spur the other.
Develop models for sound
working in key areas such as
leadership and management.
10. Vision,
mission
and values
These are essential for
strategy renewal, providing the
spur and the reason for being.
Keep them in mind and don’t
lose sight of what matters.
Source: Concern Universal
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Case study
Concern Universal
Concern Universal (CU) is a British-based, medium-sized
international development organisation. It has annual
expenditure of around £8 million and concentrates its
practical and advocacy activities in a dozen or more
countries, mainly in Africa and Asia. It has an important
and well-established strategic partnership with an Irish
NGO, Children in Crossfire.
CU launched in 1976 and had no formal strategy cycles until the
early 1990s. It relied on conviction to the cause, proposals and
debate. In its first decade it laid its governance foundations and
formed relationships with a range of partners while gaining
experience in a number of developing countries. It then became
highly entrepreneurial and began to grow, with more employees.
One of its core principles was that it would shape its response
locally, based on the needs and opportunities in the countries
where it worked.
In the early 1990s a country strategy began to emerge in Malawi,
where CU had been particularly successful. It was reasoned that
a largely autonomous team would have more impact than relying
on remote management from the UK. In its first formal three-
year strategy cycle, CU set out to build similar in-country
programmes, with a target of ten nations. Each distinctive
strategy would be driven and shaped by the stakeholders.
It articulated a mission and values statement in 1997 and set out
partnership and leadership guides in 2005. Its scale, scope, impact
and influence generally increased. However, it recognised a major
weakness: its need for a higher proportion of unrestricted funds. It
developed a strategic funding vision, aimed at achieving a greater
scale, balance and diversity in funding types. Its most recent
strategy renewal exercise began in mid 2005 for completion in
2006 and its current formal three-year strategy cycle runs to 2009.

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Recommended reading
Kotler P and Andreasan A Strategic Marketing for non-profit
organisations (London, Prentice Hall, 1995)
Ahlstrand B and Mintzberg H ‘Are Strategies Real Things?’ in
Strategy Bites Back: It is far more and far less than you ever imagined
(Harlow, Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2005)
Copeman C and others Tools for Tomorrow (London, NCVO, 2004)
For further details of all these publications, please visit
www.performancehub.org.uk/publications

How we developed this briefing

In October 2005 the Performance Hub and NCVO Third Sector
Foresight brought together 30 senior managers, trustees, chief
executives and consultants to explore strategic renewal during
periods of growth. Dr Ian Williams, Executive Director of Concern
Universal and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Charity
Effectiveness, Cass Business School, presented, using Concern
Universal as a case study. Participants then discussed the issue,
drawing on their own experiences.The learning from the seminar
has been summarised to create this guide.

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adventures in
strategy

Published by the Performance Hub

The Performance Hub works to help third
sector organisations achieve more.
For more information see our website at
www.performancehub.org.uk
Charities Evaluation Services (CES) is the
accountable body for the Performance Hub.
CES is a company limited by guarantee.
Registered in England and Wales no. 2510318.
Registered office: 4 Coldbath Square, London,
EC1R 5HL. Registered charity no. 803602.
Published December 2007
© NCVO 2007
NCVO, Regent’s Wharf,
8 All Saints Street, London N1 9RL
Registered Charity Number: 225922
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying
or otherwise, without the prior permission
of NCVO.
Adapted by Diana Quay based on contributions
by Dr Ian Williams
Edited by Julie Pottinger
Design by Sign
Printed by Fox Print Services Ltd
British Library Cataloguing in Public Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-7199-1742-4
ISBN: 978-0-7199-1747-9 (full set 1-5)
Every effort has been made to ensure the
accuracy of the information contained within
this publication. However, NCVO cannot be
held responsible for any action an individual or
organisation takes, or fails to take, as a result
of this information.
Price: £2.50 (or £9.50 for the full set of five)
To order further copies of this briefing
or other titles in the series, visit
www.performancehub.org.uk/adventures