Strategy the Groupaya Way

Rebecca Petzel |
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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!