Strategic planning for problems that matter.

You may have heard the adages: too many strategic plans sit on a shelf. Or become glossy, expensive paperweights. The entire endeavor is a slog.

We break those paradigms. You don't have to dread strategic planning.

To ensure that no strategy touches the shelf, we create graphic visualizations of each plan. Directors tell us that they hang them in their offices, and in common spaces, as sources of inspiration.

But the real work starts, together, with a process that enables your leadership and stakeholders to synthesize, assess, and prioritize challenges and opportunities.

A good strategic planning process provides a moment for organizational introspection, and practice in thinking strategically. This will become all the more important as you balance, in the years that follow, the need to stay true to a north star and inevitable and needed changes.

The resulting plan should galvanize staff, board, and stakeholders. We excel at planning engagements that meaningfully engage people across the organization.

"Brocade's approach to strategic planning seeks to engage more than the textual part of our thinking by creating graphic visualizations of the issues facing our organization. This led to a balancing of the seriousness of our mission with some humor and honesty, avoiding the drudgery often associated with strategic planning.”
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- Mark Braley, Executive Director, Virginia Legal Services Corporation

“With Brocade’s facilitation and with good input from the Board, the result was a focused and realistic, but challenging, long-range plan. The whole process was executed with efficiency, humor, and excellent insights into our long-term hopes.”
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- Jay Johnston, Jr., Board Chair, Polegreen Foundation

Strategic Planning Visualized
Each strategic planning engagement includes a visualization of the resulting plan. Directors tell us that they hang these in their offices, and in common spaces.

Strategic Issues Visualized
As part of the process of prioritizing issues and opportunities, we visually reflect back what we learned during a period of research (in addition to capturing these learnings in a document). These drawings are transformed into a series of posters that stakeholders can engage with during planning meetings - by leaving reactions, comments, and questions.

what our strategic planning engagements look like
Legal Services Corporation of Virginia
Anticipating a climate of decreased funding, and looking to reimagine its own structure, LSCV sought to craft a four-year strategic plan. The Brocade team was engaged to rethink every pillar of LSCV, from service delivery to organizational structure. Using a methodical and human-centered research process, Brocade unearthed the varying perspectives of individual stakeholders – including clients, program staff, and political actors. Before capturing anything in a glossy report, Board members were asked to roll up their sleeves and become co-designers of the plan.
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Polegreen Foundation
In 2016, the founding generation of leaders at the Historic Polegreen Church Foundation faced a modern dilemma: a need to increase their relevancy and expand their community of supporters in order to achieve long-term operational sustainability. The board engaged Brocade to lead a tactical strategic planning effort to help address these issues. Brocade facilitated planning sessions with the board, considering and weighing competing visions for the future.
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Interested in strategic planning?‍We'd love to talk.

Interested in strategic planning?
‍We'd love to talk.