I suppose I don’t need ANOTHER reason to dislike strategic plans, but I was reminded of one the other day. I heard a volunteer of an association dutifully reporting to a chapter on how the national organization was making progress on it’s strategic goals. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but she eventually got to that fourth strategic goal: financial sustainability.

Nearly every association I know throws this one in to their strategic plan. Universities like it too, according to my google search. And don’t get me wrong–financial sustainability is a good idea, but folks, it is NOT a strategy.

A strategy, at the most basic level, is a choice. A strategy always represents a choice you made over other alternatives. That’s why strategy is so important. It’s up to us to make good choices in order to be successful, right?

Financial sustainability is not a choice. It’s not a path to success, it is a metric of success. My fear is that we include it in our plans because historically there were time periods where financial sustainability was ignored, so we add it in to make sure it gets our attention. That’s even more depressing than the popularity of strategic plans, actually. But that shouldn’t be an excuse to be undisciplined about what strategy is and what it isn’t.

We need to make clear choices. Everyone in the system needs to know what choices you’ve made, so you need to write them down in documents, and go ahead and call those documents strategic plans if you like, but for the love of Mike, please let those documents reflect clear strategic choices. There are better ways to get people to pay attention to financial sustainability than confusing it with strategy.

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