Last week I ran an Intro to Strategic Planning for a group of emerging cultural leaders.

As always, I left with so many thoughts buzzing around and I'm still processing many of the brilliant reflections. Questions and conversations that lit me up included:

✨ I get the meaning of and difference between purpose, vision and mission now, but struggling to see why I should care :)

✨ How do we apply more creativity into how we create and present our strategies? Can we use poetry?

✨ How do I factor climate emergency into my plans? Feels too big to just pop into 'Threats' in my SWOT analysis!

✨ How do we introduce more emergent ways of working in orgs that tend to have top down and more deliberate, fixed strategies in place?

✨ What kind of interuptions can we be scenario planning for, while staying focussed on what's positive and going well?

What really struck me about making strategy in this particular moment is not just how to move to more emergent approaches to navigate uncertainty. Which we def need to do and practice.

But how do we acknowledge collapse in ways that are nurturing, generative and helpful.

It also felt important to acknowledge upfront that much of the language, concepts, and frameworks we use in strategic planning have been inherited from military strategy, and that we can choose to adopt as much or as little of this legacy as we like.

Strategy, at its core, is an act of imagination and creativity.

The process of envisioning possibilities that do not yet exist and working collectively toward them.

But we touched on the fact that imagination is also a privilege. It requires time, space, and the freedom to think beyond immediate survival and pressures, conditions that are not equally available to everyone.

This creates both a tension and an opportuity for arts, culture, heritage. To continue creating the spaces, experiences, and shared languages that make imagination and imagining brighter futures more possible for more people.

I feel particularly overwhelmed by everything going on in the world just now. Spending time with these emerging leaders definitely keeps me optimistic. So much to be hopeful for :)