I could go on a rant about this… :) Very briefly, my own impression is that:
~All organizations should do explicit strategic planning, including research organizations.
Usually these plans should be public.
A theory of change diagram would be a good example of what I’d like to see when doing strategic planning, though not exhaustive / sufficient in itself. More broadly, I’m not too fuzzed about the specific methodology used, or way in which plans are communicated.
Perhaps surprisingly given these views, I mostly agree with the adage that “plans are useless, planning is everything”. I expect that usually the main value of strategic planning will be due to improving the thinking of organizational leadership rather than for example due to enabling external feedback. (This can be different for some organizations, e.g. when buy-in by many external stakeholders is unusually important.) So for example the main reason I think plans should be public is that it incentivizes leadership to expend more effort and rigour when doing strategic planning. (I expect pushback along the lines of “but making plans public incentives plans that sound defensible rather than being actually useful”. I don’t have time to go into more detail but my response is: yes, these effects are real, but they can be mitigated to a large extent, and overall I think being public is still worth it on net).
But I’ve also found that I tend to disagree with staff at EA (research) organizations on this, including the people running the organizations or responsible for strategy. Sometimes the disagreement seemed fairly large, to the extent that it was a significant and sometimes decisive factor in my decisions between different jobs.
So after updating on the revealed and stated preferences of people with roughly similar amounts of or more experience in organizational leadership, my best guess is that the optimal policy is a bit closer to their impressions than mine.
(Of course, these disagreements are gradual rather than binary. It’s not that people say “we should never think about our strategy”. It’s more that e.g. they think they have thought about strategy organically anyway, and that there’s not sufficient value added by explicitly engaging in something labelled ‘strategic planning’ to justify the time cost.)
I could go on a rant about this… :) Very briefly, my own impression is that:
~All organizations should do explicit strategic planning, including research organizations.
Usually these plans should be public.
A theory of change diagram would be a good example of what I’d like to see when doing strategic planning, though not exhaustive / sufficient in itself. More broadly, I’m not too fuzzed about the specific methodology used, or way in which plans are communicated.
Perhaps surprisingly given these views, I mostly agree with the adage that “plans are useless, planning is everything”. I expect that usually the main value of strategic planning will be due to improving the thinking of organizational leadership rather than for example due to enabling external feedback. (This can be different for some organizations, e.g. when buy-in by many external stakeholders is unusually important.) So for example the main reason I think plans should be public is that it incentivizes leadership to expend more effort and rigour when doing strategic planning. (I expect pushback along the lines of “but making plans public incentives plans that sound defensible rather than being actually useful”. I don’t have time to go into more detail but my response is: yes, these effects are real, but they can be mitigated to a large extent, and overall I think being public is still worth it on net).
But I’ve also found that I tend to disagree with staff at EA (research) organizations on this, including the people running the organizations or responsible for strategy. Sometimes the disagreement seemed fairly large, to the extent that it was a significant and sometimes decisive factor in my decisions between different jobs.
So after updating on the revealed and stated preferences of people with roughly similar amounts of or more experience in organizational leadership, my best guess is that the optimal policy is a bit closer to their impressions than mine.
(Of course, these disagreements are gradual rather than binary. It’s not that people say “we should never think about our strategy”. It’s more that e.g. they think they have thought about strategy organically anyway, and that there’s not sufficient value added by explicitly engaging in something labelled ‘strategic planning’ to justify the time cost.)