Strategy for Now

Jara Dean-Coffey, jdcPARTNERSHIPSFollow
Jill Casey, jdcPARTNERSHIPS

DOI

10.9707/1944-5660.1711

Key Points

We are in a profound period of understanding who we are as a people, past and present. This applies to practices held as core to how society operates. If we are to thrive as a species, the present and future necessitate reimagining the structures, systems, and conventions that limit some and thus us all. This includes not defaulting to control, competition, and certainty as we navigate circumstances we created.

Amid growing desires to integrate and embody practices aligned with equity, emergence, and complexity, concepts and points of view that dominate business continue to lead conversations about strategy formation in philanthropy and nonprofits. These are frequently coupled with approaches to learning, defined as an organizational function, which insufficiently acknowledges that we, the humans, are what changes.

For the last three decades in the U.S. philanthropic ecosystem, the authors have experimented with an approach that fosters conditions and individual and collective curiosities that can become capacities and competencies. When we approach strategy differently, there is an opportunity for meaningful evaluative inquiry and sense-making that acknowledges learning is an ongoing responsibility that supports how we understand and move within complex systems.

This article reintroduces a multifaceted definition of strategy, summarizes an approach in which strategy and evaluative inquiry are integrated, shares experiences of those who engaged in the approach, and offers considerations for strategy grounded in the now and the future.