Can We Do Strategy Planning Ourselves?

Yes, you can - the better question is whether your organization is actually set up to do it well.

For many nonprofit and social service organizations, the decision to DIY strategy planning comes down to money. Consultants cost money, your leadership team knows the organization, and AI has made it easier to brainstorm, organize ideas and draft a decent-looking strategic plan.

The bigger question is what happens once you have it.

Everyone wants the actual plan: the document, the slide deck, the priorities, the nice visual with the strategic pillars. Once those things exist, there can be a sense that the planning is finished.

I would argue that you have probably completed about the first 10% of the work. Now you have to make the strategy live inside the organization.

When DIY strategy planning can work

Some organizations are well positioned to build their own strategy, but most already have a strong strategic culture.

At the leadership level, that means people can challenge one another, ask hard questions, hold each other accountable and disagree without everything becoming personal. They understand what it takes to move toward a common goal and make choices that involve trade-offs.

That culture also needs to extend beyond the leadership team. If I asked an employee several levels down what your strategy means for their department, would they know? Do they understand the outcomes they are working toward and how their day-to-day decisions contribute to them?

Organizations that can answer those questions well are better positioned to DIY because their people already know how to think and choose strategically.

Most organizations I work with are trying to build the plan and the strategic culture at the same time.

Where DIY strategy planning tends to fall apart

One of the biggest problems I see is that organizations create plans that sound good but do not provide enough direction to actually change anything.

In social services, I see strategic goals like “delivering excellence of care,” “meeting clients where they’re at,” “fostering meaningful collaboration” or “deepening community engagement.”

There is nothing wrong with those aspirations, but if every organization in your sector could use the same strategic pillar, what exactly is strategic about it?

Good strategy should clarify what your organization is choosing to prioritize, what that means in practice and how those choices should influence decisions. Attaching a KPI afterward does not automatically solve the problem.

The planning process can create another issue. Leaders are often anxious to get the plan finished, so they bring a small group into a room and then communicate the strategy out to everybody else.

Front-line employees may see barriers, client realities or staffing pressures that leadership cannot see from where they sit. When those people push back later, it is easy to call it resistance to change instead of asking, “What are they seeing that we missed?” If the instinct is to explain away dissenters rather than learn from them, outside help may be useful.

Creating the plan is not the same as activating it

This is the part of strategy work I think we talk about far too little.

Making something work is not the same as designing it to work.

You can have a clear task list, assign somebody’s name to every item and tick every box, and still not create the organizational change your strategy was supposed to produce.

Execution asks whether the work is getting done. Activation asks whether the strategy is changing how people behave, decide, prioritize and work.

If your five-year strategy requires your organization to operate differently five years from now, leadership needs to be prepared to manage change for those five years. That means communication, feedback, capability building, accountability, measurement and adjusting as you learn.

There can be an assumption that once the task list exists, the rest will somehow happen because everybody knows what they are responsible for. That is where many strategies stall.

Who is actually going to own this work?

Before deciding to DIY, I would ask who is going to lead the strategy once the planning sessions are over.

If the answer is essentially “the leadership team,” I would dig deeper. Who is keeping it moving, noticing when progress stalls and making sure the conversations continue when operations get busy?

If nobody has that responsibility, strategy usually becomes something leaders manage off the side of their desks, and urgent operational work always wins.

I would also look at your previous strategy. If you created it internally and did not achieve the goals, do you understand why? If you completed a three-year strategy in 18 months, you may have underestimated what your organization was capable of.

What does professional help actually add?

The value of bringing in an outside person is not that they know your organization better than you do. What they bring is distance.

I can ask the question someone inside the organization may be nervous to ask, challenge an assumption without worrying about pissing off my boss, and keep asking for clarity when a team is using vague language. Sometimes those questions surface something everyone inside the organization has taken for granted for years.

Outside support can also help determine who needs to be involved in which conversations, so you are not discovering major implementation barriers after the strategy has been approved.

For me, the most important work starts when we ask what needs to change behaviourally across the organization. What do leaders need to do differently? What capabilities do teams need to build? What decisions should employees now make differently because this strategy exists?

That turns the planning process into an opportunity to build strategic capability across the organization, rather than simply produce a document.

DIY and professional help are not your only two options

There is plenty of middle ground.

Your team could create an initial draft internally, using AI to help structure the thinking, and then bring someone in to pressure-test it, facilitate the harder conversations or help turn the strategy into measurable behaviour change.

Or perhaps you already have a perfectly good strategic plan sitting on a shelf. In that case, I would think carefully before paying someone to build you another one.

I will help clients build strategic plans when that is what they need, but I am far more interested in helping organizations take the strategy they already have and get it off the page.

So, can you do strategy planning yourselves? Absolutely. Just make sure you are not evaluating your readiness based on whether you can create the document. The harder question is whether your organization has the culture, capacity and capability to make that strategy change how people actually work.