If you’re old enough to know what the title references, great. If not and you’d like a nice diversion, check out this comedy routine, Abbott & Costello Who’s On First. 
The reference for this Insight is what to do first if you’re starting a strategic planning process and have a leadership transition underway. If the leadership is a planned turnover in the chair, then you should be “good to go” in planning as long as the incoming chair is deeply involved in the process. However, if the chief paid officer (CEO or executive director) is leaving, then while it may be tempting to push through with an already scheduled planning process, that is a good time to step back and reevaluate.
I’ve been in the situation of coming in as CEO of a nonprofit shortly after a new strategic plan had been completed. On the first day it was handed to me as the “roadmap to our success”. Being new – and a bit skeptical – I wasn’t willing to accept that without understanding it better. The short answer is that if it was a roadmap, it was certainly leading to a very bumpy trip.
The plan was theoretical and not structured to be operationalized. The assumptions were not data-based, but aspirational (not a good starting point for any plan) and was not setting the organization up for success. I’m sure the previous CEO had clear steps to take in mind when the plan was developed and would have been able to move the organization forward in that theoretical direction with their organizational history. That wasn’t going to work for me and fortunately, I was able to convince board leadership that we needed to make changes.
As we rebooted a scaled down version of the planning process we discovered an added bonus – it was a tremendous learning/on-boarding process for me. I had to dig deep into various financial, relational and programmatic aspects of the organization to be prepared to provide meaningful input into the plan. The huge advantage of revising the plan was that I had input into the new plan since I was going to be the primary person responsible for implementation. That paved the way for me to be successful early.
The lesson learned is that if an organization has both a new leader coming in and scheduled planning process, get the new leader first. This does necessitate a bit of “pre-planning” in that before starting the CEO search the board needs to be clear what they need in their leader – and that can help crystallize the board’s priorities going into the planning process.
