It was exciting to officially Introduce Groupaya to the world last week. And trust us, we know there’s still a lot more to be explained. In one of our very first comments, David Jay asked a great starting question: what groups are you planning to work with?

Great question David. Eugene summed it up well, responding:

“We want to work with groups who are doing something positive for society, preferably something hard. We will intentionally not be narrow in the groups with whom we work, as diversity leads to richer learning.”

As this comment illuminates, we’re pretty obsessed with impact and learning. Why? Because we’re in this game to save the world (to put it mildly). In fact, increasing impact is a large part of the reason Kristin and Eugene started this crazy thing.

Prior to 2010, they were both thriving in their individual work to help groups work together more skillfully. Upon meeting, the quickly realized that their breadth of experience and approaches to harnessing and bringing out collective wisdom – enabling groups to achieve the unimaginable – were complementary. And more importantly, their values were aligned as to the importance of such work in building a more sustainable future. They suspected that by combining forces, they could add value to groups (and the world) far beyond either of their individual capacity. And this strong belief and commitment to making an impact is what led me, Rebecca, to join this crazy adventure.

We’ve been trying to express this vision, this belief, the ultimate inspiration behind Why Groupaya Does What It Does, and we think we’re close in this beautiful graphic below (originally sketched by Eugene, brought to life by Amy Wu Wong). But we’d love your feedback as we continue to adapt our vision.

Do you have a sense of Why We Do What We Do from this picture? Does it inspire you to join the Groupaya movement?

Now that we’re out of the closet, you’ll notice a few posts in the coming weeks talking about Groupaya’s strategy. We’re on the tail end of our strategic planning process (defining our mission, core values, principles for how we work, and the plan for achieving our vision), and we’d love to enlist your feedback.

Of course we don’t want to presume strategy work is as fascinating to the rest of the world as it is to us, but it is important for us to share. Why you ask? Well in our first strategy session, we took a step back and asked a simple question: What is strategic planning? We agreed:

• It’s an opportunity to align our team around a vision, shared values, and goals
• It’s a path and a plan for how we’re going to achieve our goals
• Most importantly, it’s a process for activating ourselves and our larger network

Kristin, Eugene, and I all have a lot of strategy work under our belts, and we often see other strategy processes place too much emphasis on the end product (a report or a deck) and not enough on the process of developing the strategy and evolving it. Those processes too often result in little more than a nicely bound stack of paper on a shelf. Nilofer Merchant extensively explores the failure of this outcome and approach in her book, The New How.

In our experience, the most effective strategic planning is a collective inquiry process through which an organization and its network’s potential is uncovered and unleashed.  And then, once the strategy has been developed, it is continuously evolved.

But we’re a teeny, tiny, budding company with five people on a good day. Who do we need to activate besides ourselves? Who should we be sharing with? The answer hit us over the head like a ton of bricks. You! Our friends, our colleagues, the people we are excited to learn and share with over the coming years.

So, in this spirit, we’d love to invite you, our valued network, to help us define our path and bring this future into reality. In future posts, we will share some of the details of our strategy.  For now, we are curious, what are some of your “best practices” around developing or evolving strategy?  We look forward to hearing from you!