Learn about how to implement a strategic plan with Ricky Chilcott.

All right, welcome, everybody to our Impactful Projects and Planning Micro training Series. I'm Jami Yazdani. And today's session I'm going to be talking with Ricky Chilcott about implementation planning. So Ricky is a co founder at Mission Met, where he combines his experience in software development, business strategy, operations, marketing and project management to support mission driven, mission driven leaders globally, including in the US, Kenya and Australia. He spearheads the development of Causey, which is mission met strategic planning software. He lives in Southeast Ohio with his wife and son, and enjoys serving in media and worship at his church. So welcome, Ricky. Thanks for joining me today.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Jami. Yeah. So

tell us a little bit more about your work and your business? What impact are you hoping to create for your customers?

Yeah. So thanks, again, for having me. I'm co founder of mission, Matt. And our mission is to make strategic planning simpler and more effective for mission mission driven leaders. And that includes nonprofits, associations, libraries, strategic planning consultants, and, and those who are really just trying to make the world a better place. We started this company, or the idea for mission met. And ultimately, our software Causey grew out of meeting my business partner, Eric Ryan. And when we first met about seven years ago, he shared with me that one of the most common problems in strategic planning is people create these plans, and then they sit on the shelf. And so we started building some software to not only capture that plan, but you know, keep it alive. And, and, you know, to facilitate regularly reviewing, revising, and tracking that plan. There's not a lot of like, great data out there in the world, but only about half the nonprofits out there, do some sort of strategic planning in some meaningful way. And only about half of those regularly review, revise and track. And we've just seen so much of the power of strategic planning, you know, greater alignment across the team, working together strategically. And when you do that, you can raise funds, more easily, and you're more likely to meet your mission. So that's, that's kind of some of the impact that we're hoping to create.

Wonderful, thank you. Yeah, and you and I have talked many times about how folks don't end up doing much with their plan. And, you know, unless it's like a check the box exercise, it feels like a lot of, you know, wasted effort for folks. And so, I love that, you know, you're trying to help people get the most out of their plan. And so you may have hinted at this a little bit, but what are some mistakes that you see folks making, when it comes to implementing their strategic plans?

Yeah, there's so many we could probably talk for, you know, 150 minutes about just some of those things. We actually behind me, there is a book that my co founder, Eric wrote, by the same name mission met. And it's about some common barriers to strategic planning and how to overcome them. Certainly one of the problems that I won't touch on here, but you know, ultimately, sometimes people are too ambitious, and they lack some of the resources. So you know, the time the skill and the energy to make that happen. But if you know, if you work with a consultant, or if you're really thoughtful in your planning process, you can sort of mitigate some of those risks. And certainly, you'll learn over time, as you start to execute if you're measuring and tracking well, that maybe you were too ambitious, and you need to scale back some of those things. But some of the other mistakes that I see is, you know, it kind of starts from the beginning, you know, starting with why, you know, why are you doing planning, being really clear on that, and really involving the whole team, because people support what they helped create. And so if you're not really engaging the full team, if you're just having the board come up with a strategy, and hand passing it down, people aren't going to be bought in and they're not going to be part of that, the execution of that or the implementation of that plan. So that's a really big mistake. Oftentimes, you know, people create really, really complex plans that are really hard to digest and understand. And so if people don't really understand it, they're not going to really often raise their hand and say, I'm very confused about that, right. So you need to work really actively in the planning process to create a, you know, easier to digest or a simpler plan. And, you know, the the complexity and if you're, you know, tackling complex challenges, maybe it's not addressing all of those challenges, immediately, but you know, slowly over time, you And then two others. One is sort of a lack of championing. So there isn't, you know, somebody's role or ideally several people's roles, who would be championing the overall process and making sure that the strategic plan is accessible by everybody is used by people that are kind of on the same page. And then when you get down deeper into the goals, or the objectives, or whatever you call them, you know, not having clear champions for those sorts of things is definitely a problem. And then, and then finally, just, they don't really look at it, you know, they don't actually track the plan, right. So they, you know, they built this plan, they created a really pretty document, maybe that gets shared publicly, but then kind of forget about it for three years, five years, seven years, whenever your planning cycle starts again. And so, you know, one of the big mistakes is just not having tools and systems and processes to, you know, keep that plan alive and shared across the team. Yeah,

yeah, those are definitely mistakes. I've, I see folks making some of them I've, I've even made my myself, I'm in my former career. But I do think really, you know, it's interesting, when you look at a lot of strategic planning processes, they talk about all that engagement that you're doing at the beginning, and you're often which is a great thing, engaging your community. But then it's almost like the engagement ends, right. And then so you're not engaging them again, through communication, you're not, you know, engaging your staff or your team. And I think, yeah, that's why things don't get done. But I love the idea of a champion. I know, recently, I've, I've seen some nonprofits, um, and works with a nonprofit who did this, that, you know, for each of kind of the bigger picture goals that they had, they had a member of the board, who was a champion, partnered with sort of someone on the staff team, you know, and they kind of took those goals on, and we're really, you know, kind of keeping the message out there and making sure that things are getting done. And I think that can be a really great way to engage people, but also to make sure that, that stuff continues to happen after that, that I

mean, just for a moment, if there's, you know, a few different sort of hats that those champions, ideally two, maybe three, for a particular goal, or a planning process overall, can wear one is sort of that visioning piece, and being able to share that message and communicate that message out, I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about celebrating success, you know, that part of their role is to be vocal about when we are having the impact that we want, and being successful in that. You know, and another role is sort of the management of like, you know, who do we communicate, when we communicate with them, you know, who needs to be aware of what's happening with this, you know, kind of the, the RACI project, you know, management sort of thoughts can kind of come into that picture there. But you find that, you know, they're sort of this like, visionary leader, person, that would be really valuable, but also a kind of a manager, who would, you know, make sure that the process is being followed, and it's being documented that it's being tracked and revised.

Right. And I also think for, you know, you mentioned a little bit, the beginning that people sometimes get to maybe aspirational, and I think often I see nonprofits kind of struggle with that initial prioritization, you know, you have a whole bunch of things that you want to do. Well, what are you going to do first, what can you actually do sort of in the first year, and a lot of people, which makes sense kind of front load a lot of stuff in that first year, afterwards. But you know, I think there's often a way to kind of push some things to your to you don't have to do everything in the first six months, although it doesn't hurt to at least have a plan. Right? And,

yeah, and sometimes we, on the consulting side of our business, we say it's okay to use this year to kind of finish your planning, right? Or on a particular like, we know want to do something, you know, in this aspect of our organization, or we want you we know that we want to ship the program or something like that. But instead of saying like, this year, we're going to chip this program inside saying, like, we're going to use this year to be strategic understand what, you know, other organizations across the country are doing really start to understand, you know, our theory of change around like, what we exactly want to do here, and then start implementing that maybe in year two or year three. So absolutely. Yeah, I

do think some of those sort of because sometimes you need to assess something, and then sort of figure out what Your actual next steps are and those are great things to do, I think in the first year. Um, so we talk a little bit about this, but how can organizations better engage their teams during implementation? Yeah,

so I have three bigger ideas. One is, you know, having this cadence of review and measurement, and that's one of the one of the mistakes so that people often make, because they don't really have this this cadence of review measurement. So, you know, every organization should be different. But we often say that, you know, those who are responsible in some way, shape or form for being strategic and accomplishing strategic goals, which probably is almost everybody in the entire organization in some way, shape, or form. You know, even even the janitorial staff or that kind of frontline staff are still very, very critical to the success of the organization. So there's, they're still contributing to that strategic success, should at least be aware and have access and be reminded about it maybe as part of their annual performance evaluation, that could be thinking about, you know, how is maybe one of my own personal goals in this next year is to contribute to this bigger thing. So one is just kind of setting that culture. But the other is for actual goals or objectives that you're actually, you know, trying to make progress on this next year, scoring those monthly and, and then quarterly, perhaps looking with your board and giving them a status update on where we are on various things, what's off track, what we're not making progress on what we've already done. And then, you know, as a as a staff to, you know, quarterly reviewing, and maybe revising, and based on what you've learned in the past quarter. So one is just sort of this this cadence of review, and measurement, specifically on measurement, though, you know, when you have kind of more qualitative goals, you know, sort of like smart goals, we want to, you know, achieve this certain thing, and this this next quarter, we said, to measure it monthly, but what does that really look like? Well, you know, you can kind of get into the details and start to get into project management of what are the tasks and are we on track and we accomplishing, those are the critical paths by but at a higher level, you know, ask just answering three simple questions, you know, what's working well, what's not working well, and what based on those two things are we going to do differently, and if you're on track, and everything's coming along, great, you can say, just keep doing what we're doing. But oftentimes, it's that that prompt, or that reminder to kind of stop introspect, and, you know, identify resources or things that you need. And then on more, you know, quantitative measures, you know, metrics or KPIs or whatever, you know, every, every KPI is going to be, you know, some will change daily, some will change weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. But having having some sort of cadence of measurement, in addition to that review, and then my third sort of big idea is having one place where your board and your staff, and you know, and team members can can really go and see where you are strategically right now, and have a single place, certainly, you can do that with a spreadsheet, and can get, you know, a lot of the basics done, but if you want to save time, and you want to have different ways of visualizing things, then certainly looking at some sort of software to facilitate that make that a lot easier, and give you a lot of, you know, ability to, you know, say remind your team to measure their goals. So you don't have to do that, you know, to produce, you know, presentations or, or other things. So those are the three big ideas, but kind of one of the most fun ones, and I'll just kind of slip this in there is, is celebrating success. It's really easy for us as humans to be like, our goal is here, and we want to achieve X and Y and Z and we haven't quite, you know, reached that. So let's keep pushing, keep pushing. And people get burned out. You know, Jami, you and I are talking a little bit about that, that run up here. And so having a culture of, you know, shouting up successes, you know, and making sure that team members are recognized when they're doing really good work, even if they you know, fell short or whatever, or, you know, you know, stories have impact that you know, you're working on this goal and you're and you're working on this program and just sharing those things. So just kind of kind of celebrating success is really a critical thing. And I know that I can always do more of that. I encourage other teams to do that as well.

Wonderful, thank you. Yeah, and to celebrate a little bit of your own success, obviously kasi as a as a software that can help people do many of those things that that you were just talking about. But I do love the idea of celebrating success. And I do think sometimes strategic plans can feel like, you know, it's just the the board or the executive team that's responsible. But if we acknowledge the fact that folks throughout, you know, kind of at every level of the organization are participating, and helping and sort of making that clear, I think you'll get more engagement, you'll get more buy in and things might get done. You know, what, why do this extra add on project if you're not going to be recognized for it? And also, if you can't make the connection, if you don't know why you've been asked to do it, right. And I think sometimes our staff are asked to do things, and they have no idea that it's connected to that, you know, kind of bigger strategic objective. But um, so what's the best way for folks to reach out to you to get a hold of you to learn more about Mission Met and Causey?

Yeah, so two simple ways one, on LinkedIn, I haven't been posting lately, but I'm on LinkedIn, under Ricky Chilcott. And if you're interested at all in getting a demo of Causey website is called the dot app. ca au s t y dot a PP. And if you schedule a demo, it'll be with me. So I'd love to meet. And we also have a way of starting a trial if you just want to scope it on your own.

Awesome, wonderful. Well, thank you. I really appreciate your time. It's been a fun conversation. And thanks, everybody for participating in another impactful projects and planning session. Thanks. Thank you, Jami.