My Key Strategic Planning Takeaways

• You don’t need a crisis to assess your strategic plan’s alignment with the reality of your current work priorities.

• Make sure your top administrator and Board Chair have some strong team members to share the responsibility of strategic planning work.

• Don’t go it alone. Depending on your chorus’s capacity, involve a recommended consultant for the overall process or for a part of it if possible.

• Use a sub-committee or task force to do the heavy lifting of plan development, including in-depth debate about potential directions, writing, and board engagement. This group should include key staff and the consultant to the extent feasible.

• Acknowledge the danger of Board bog-down and work towards consensus, rather than seeking 100 percent agreement or “majority rules.” level goals to help illustrate our proposed action steps.

Keeping the

Planning

Process Moving Chorus America’s Board only meets as a full board three times per year, so it was especially important to make each meeting as productive as possible and to keep strategic planning work going in between meetings. The Task Force met via Zoom for in-depth discussions of the various plan elements and also worked asynchronously to comment on drafts and suggest edits via Google docs. The staff followed a similar process to provide feedback and add high

A highlight of the task force’s work was the creation of a positioning statement to introduce the plan and a strategic framework that laid out the background and intent behind each of the three strategic objectives. These provided an important foundation for the Board’s input and decision-making and gave both the Board and staff an increased understanding of the task force’s thinking that helped us all stay on the same page. Both the introduction and strategic objectives are linked to in the full plan to help to tell the story of how we’ve arrived at this point and what we intend to accomplish from here.

The task force also reached out to every Board member personally in advance of full Board meetings to gather questions and input on the latest strategic plan draft. This helped to focus discussions so we could be more productive and make the best use of the Board’s time. Thanks to this work, the task force and lead staff were well-prepared to guide the Board’s discussion of the final drafts, moving quickly through the parts of the plan with which the group was already in agreement and spending time on the most important issues and questions that needed further conversation.

Consensus Decision-Making: Our Equity Commitment in Action

I have heard more than a few frustrated choral leaders complain about their strategic plan efforts getting bogged down toward the end due to wordsmithing or an inability to reach unanimous agreement on certain details. At the 2022 October Board meeting, task force member Alysia Lee led the Board to use a consensus decision-making process, rather than a more traditional “majority rules” approach, to move the strategic plan forward. Consensus decision-making is a way of balancing power, providing time and a mechanism for everyone to give input rather than just “going along” with the majority. In general, group members agree to support a decision even if it is not their first choice or they don’t fully agree with every aspect.

The goal for the October meeting was to get consensus on the wording of the major components and agreement on the general direction of important changes so that the task force could move the process to the next phase of seeking member stakeholder input. The consensus approach worked well for our collegial Board and helped us navigate even sensitive topics to arrive successfully at our final phase.

Our planning process has helped to renew and refresh Chorus America, and we are excited about what the future holds for us and our members. Strategic plans at their best are living documents, referred regularly to by the Board and staff to guide decision-making, and we are committed to this for our new plan as well. Over the coming months and years, we look forward to sharing our progress and lessons learned with all of you regularly and enthusiastically.

Catherine Dehoney President & CEO, Chorus

“The future of our field lies in embracing the many ways we sing together to express our common humanity. By centering access, diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work and supporting the emerging leaders who will build the path forward, we ensure our field’s continued relevance.”