Strategic Planning – Board Input Survey

If any of you brave hearts are about to embark upon your next cycle of strategic planning, I share with you, below, a Board Input Survey we co-created with the help of our strategic planning consultant, Michela Perrone of MMP Associates. The survey worked extremely well and helped us all get clear, real, and focused on exactly what we need to do over the next 3 years.

Several features of the survey, and the process itself, contributed to some very honest feedback. It helped distill the ensuing discussion down to the very essence of our purpose and mission.

The Likert scale is unique and captures movement across all attributes of the organization. The open ended quesitons encouraged thoughtful feedback. The completed surveys were submitted directly to the consultant, Dr. Perrone, who prepared a general summary in her own words of the results, without individual attribution. And the outcome was a concise strategic plan across four distinct “Critical Areas of Engagement” that captured the very essense of our work.

Click “Read more” for the entire text of the Board Input Survey.

Design Thinking for Social Innovation - Post # 3

This is the last post on an article entitled Design Thinking for Social Innovation by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, which appears in the current (Winter 2010) issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

My primary take away from the article is this: Always prototype an initiative to solicit feedback from the constituents you seek to serve. Rely on local expertise to uncover local solutions that work, then help scale up the solutions. This bottom up design model insures that you are using your constituents’ very best ideas to help design a lasting solution to meet their actual (not perceived) needs.

As a foundation leader, I see opportunities for applying design thinking to strategic plan initiatives. The design thinking described in this article has been codified by IDEO, a global innovation and design firm, into the “Human Centered Design Toolkit.” It is available as a free download from www.hcdtoolkit.com.