Strategy or strategic planning is a catch-all term that we use to cover high level planning at different levels and including multiple forms of materials including:
- Vision: Aspirational, long-term picture of a desired future state.
- Mission: Specific actions organization takes to contribute to that vision.
- Theory of change: Roadmap explaining how mission activities lead to desired outcomes.
- Roadmap: Defined steps chosen to execute the theory of change effectively. (NB: often this would be termed strategy but we avoid using this term because of its potential ambiguity)
We try to use a specific term when possible. When doing work that covers several of them or the overall area we will say we are working on "strategic planning" or "strategy".
Framework with 3 dimensions
We have a 3 dimensional framework/terminology for organizing our strategy materials and the strategy itself.
- Levels: start with 3 levels macro, meso, micro
- Components: SCQA + trees. Note there are multiple methodologies (so methodology is a sub-type here): SCQA, Vision/Mission/etc, Brand Narrative etc
- How do these relate? e.g. brand narrative vs SCQA?
- Version: which version of the strategy is this e.g. v1 (2015-17), v2 (2018-2020), v3 (2021-2023) etc
Levels
Notes
- How at one level becomes what at next level down. e.g. "defeat Axis powers" has "how" of e.g. "open a second front". Next level down we have "open a second front" with "how" of "amphibious landing in france" … next level down we have "how" which is "landing in normandy" etc.
See, for example, the multiple "why" levels in https://github.com/life-itself/community/issues/36
Hierarchically structured SCQHs: Like 5 whys our why structure is hierarchical, flowing down from the top-most, most high-level, most broad level to the lowest level (concretely what we do). It is likely that we have more than one SCQH, perhaps even one SCQH for each of these levels.
- Why: X is not working (polycrisis) (e.g. X is personal wellbeing, climate crisis, capitalism etc)
- Why: it needs a paradigm shift (i.e. to address the polycrisis we need foundational transformation - rather than improvements to the existing system)
- Why: primacy of being (left quadrants) (a paradigm shift requires (primarily) inner transformation individually and collectively)
- Why: how do paradigms shifts in general and esp left quadrant ones?
- Why: conscious communities
- Why: conscious community living …
Components
These are the parts that make up a strategy.
Versions
We currently have 3 versions or iterations of our strategy:
- v1 (2015-2018): culminated in 2017 SCQH
- SCQA: …
- Name: Art / Earth / Tech
- Manifesto: …
- v2 (2018-2020): culminated in major brand refactoring in 2020 following new SCQH in 2019
- v3 (2021-2023): major rework following Life Itself reorganization and challengs with earlier strategy.
Clarifying the term strategy - Feb 2024
Situation
There are several distinct related outputs that can be produced by "strategic planning":
- Vision: Aspirational, long-term picture of a desired future state.
- Mission: Specific actions organization takes to contribute to that vision.
- Theory of change: Roadmap explaining how mission activities lead to desired outcomes.
- Strategy: Defined steps chosen to execute the theory of change effectively.
Think of it as a pyramid: vision sets the "why", mission the "what", theory of change the "how", and strategy the "how now?".
Complication
Term strategy is being used to for various of the above above which is confusing – there is even a sub-item called strategy under strategy!
Question
What term(s) should we adopt going forward in this area of "strategic planning" to increase clarity and eliminate confusion?
Hypothesis
Use these individual terms specifically whenever we are talking about an output with the proviso that we will rename "strategy" to "roadmap" to avoid confusion given multiple use of term strategy. When doing work that may cover several of them or the overall area we will say we are working on "strategic planning".
Thus, going forward if someone says "we are working on strategy" we will ask: "What part of strategic planning are you working on?"
If they say: "here is our strategy" we will say "By strategy i take it to mean the combination of vision, mission, ToC and roadmap" 😄