OUR APPROACH

Strategic Planning that Generates Strategic FUEL

Services

Thrive Street supports nonprofits and businesses with several offerings to generate Strategic FUEL

GETTING STARTED

Strategic Planning Accelerator

Get the most important 50% of strategic planning done in one day.

Nonprofits often spend 6-24 months on strategic planning. When they finish, the plan is already out of date. Rather than signing up for a time-consuming and expensive process, this Strategic Planning Accelerator helps you identify what is vital.

We’ll help you:

• Identify your current strategic situation, which will help you know what kind of planning process you need—or not

• Identify and prioritize strategic opportunities and issues in a way that brings clarity and alignment to the team

• Create agreements about success criteria for strategic planning, which is a critical ingredient of success

• Get to impact faster by identifying the things you can start to do now rather than at the end of a long process

Ultimately, this approach helps you design a planning process that works for what you need—right-sizing the effort, timing, and expense.

DESIGNING ROUTINES

Strategic Management System Design

You can have a great strategy but won’t be great at strategy unless you have routines and culture to support it.

We’ll help you design a strategic management system that brings strategy into organizational routines, enabling the organization to learn and keep the strategy fresh.

We’ll do the following:

1. Identify the right questions, which, if asked and answered on a regular basis will drive performance and strategic progress

2. Assess the current state of your organizational routines and identify the highest leverage opportunities to improve

3. Identify the data that will power robust, objective strategy and performance discussions

This work may also include supporting the team with goal setting and implementing systems like Objectives & Key Results (OKRs).

BUILDING STRATEGIC MUSCLES

Strategy Coaching & Support

The only way to make change is to do the work. Thrive Street will help you do it.

Creating a more strategic team and culture requires building new “muscles” and ways of working together. That process can start in a workshop but only comes together through deliberate practice. Thrive Street will give you critical support as you go through that process.

We’ll work over 12-18 months on the following:

• Facilitation for important strategy meetings or team retreats. Tactically, we’ll help you plan the agenda and provide structure around these important meetings. This service is designed to support you across multiple meetings to improve step by step.

• Coaching support for the team leader. As the team works in different ways, it is often helpful for the team leader to have support in navigating the changes and problem-solving challenges that arise.

• Real-time meeting observation and feedback. It is relatively easy to adopt strategic thinking in formal strategy meetings and step-backs. However, the test of Adaptive, Integrated Strategy is whether strategic thinking happens in “normal,” day-to-day meetings that power your team’s performance. We’ll observe several of these meetings to help you bring the team's intention to them.

THE GOOD NEWS

When You Have Strategic FUEL, Leading Your Organization Is Easier

Strategic FUEL is about helping the entire organization be great at learning and strategy, which lightens the load on senior leaders.

As you implement this approach, you’ll likely find that it:

• Helps you create greater ongoing alignment in the organization (and spend less time dealing with the consequences of misalignment)

• Helps you build a culture in which more people understand the need for change and willingly pursue it

• Helps junior leaders develop strategic skills, which puts them in a position to take on more senior roles

• Helps you not have to carry strategy alone

Industry Experience

Thrive Street serves clients from across the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, which means you’ll gain access to leadership and management approaches outside your current context.

In the nonprofit sector, we have done strategy engagements in the following spaces:

• Education

• Social Justice

• Housing

• Advocacy

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