Having become CEO of Action Hampshire earlier this year, the most important part of my job at the moment is putting together a new strategic business plan for the organisation. Our previous strategy, put together in 2019, did not reflect the current situation post-Covid. With a new CEO, new Chair of Trustees and many new staff members, we needed to spend some time getting on the same page and working collaboratively to shape our future direction.
As this actual pile of books in my home office shows, I’ve been doing a lot of reading! As we work towards our new strategy, which will be in place by April, I wanted to share a bit about the process we’ve gone through in hopes that it helps other VCSE organisations on their own strategic journey.
Step One: Clarifying our ‘why’
The Action Hampshire team care a lot about making an impact. Like most people who work for in the VCSE sector, we are purpose-driven. So the first step to putting together a new strategy was to clarify our ‘why’. By this I mean, what is our vision, purpose and mission?
These three things are related to each other, but distinct:
Vision
Vision = what our work is ultimately aiming to achieve
Our vision should describe what the world will be like if we fulfilled our purpose.
Purpose
Purpose = why our organisation exists; our guiding star on the horizon; an enduring aim that inspires change
Our purpose should give our team, partners and funders a strong motivation to contribute to our success. It should help us know what decisions to make and what opportunities to pursue.
Mission
Mission = what our organisation does
Our mission should be short and open. It should outline what makes us distinctive without restricting us to specific projects or activities.
Looking through the Action Hampshire archives, I found we had articulated each of these in a few different ways over the years, but the wording didn’t quite reflect where we wanted to be. After gathering examples we had used in the past, I put together a ‘World Café’ session at a staff away day for the team to consider what our vision, purpose and mission should be.
In rotating small group discussions, our team brainstormed what should be reflected in our vision, purpose and mission and looked at examples from the past. One of my colleagues helpfully wrote up the notes, and then I worked on pulling the words together. It wasn’t an easy task, with lots of words coming through from the brainstorm. I couldn’t fit them all in, but tried to make sure that all of the important things that had been discussed were reflected somewhere in the drafts.
Following that, I shared the draft statements with our senior leadership team, who gave some helpful suggestions to improve the wording. The drafts will now go to the full staff team ahead of our next staff workshop in January, and then to the Board of Trustees.
It’s important to me that we get our vision, purpose and mission right, as this will help us make decisions in the future – everything we do should be in line with these. Having a mission that’s too narrow will limit what we do, while if our purpose is too vague, anything might seem like a good idea. Going forward, we will use our ‘why’ statements to help recruit new colleagues and let them know what our organisation is about, to describe what we do to partners, and to guide our decisions.
Once our ‘why’ statements are finalised, our whole team will spend time reflecting on how we put these into practice in our projects, personal objectives, communications and stakeholder relationships.
Alongside our ‘why’ statements, we are also exploring our values and the ways of working that we want to lead with, such as collaboration.
Looking at what is our ‘why’ has been a very helpful activity, and has given a really useful structure to our new strategy. The next step for us has been collecting information to help us understand the situation the strategy needs to respond to, which will be the focus of my second blog in January. Watch this space!
