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In this week’s podcast episode, strategy and connection guru May Miller-Dawkins explores questions that lead to deep connection and dramatic results. That powerful combination of strategy, connection, and a focus on results is what we all wish for when we enter into strategic planning work.

But wishing doesn’t make it so. Readers of this newsletter know that we tend to be critical of the questions that strategic planning both asks and fails to ask. And in our experience, the worst offender is the failure to ask this set of questions:

• What do you want your community to be like because your organization exists?
• And what actions will you take to make that desired outcome a reality?

To make a huge, visionary impact in our communities, it will all start with the questions we ask. This single pair of questions highlights the importance of keeping the future of our communities front and center in our plans.

Traditional strategic planning, on the other hand, was developed by the military to vanquish an enemy. It was adopted by the business world for vanquishing the competition. The questions strategic planning asks are therefore reactive, battling what’s wrong in our organizations and our communities.

We may call it “solving” problems," but what we are actually doing is reacting to those problems. We then tether our plans to what's wrong in our communities by insisting that we base our plans on data about those problems.