Visual Dashboard for Strategic Planning

A free facilitation tool for a visual plan on a page

There’s not one way to create a strategic plan, but you know what helps? A visual. Try a strategic planning visual dashboard to get people more aligned. 

There’s not one way to create a strategic plan, but some approaches are definitely more effective than others. And you know what helps? A visual. Try a strategic planning visual dashboard to get people more aligned.  Facilitation guru Suzanne Hawkes and I teamed up recently for strategic planning, and we created this new, free tool to help communicate the interconnected parts of strategic planning. Here’s an overview. Remember, gatherings can leave us better than when we started – including strategic planning. Enjoy! 

Vision: What success looks like. Describing the ideal state. Illustrated here with butterflies that symbolize transformation and hope. 

Mission: The purpose and big why of your organization. Illustrated here with geese flying in an effective formation. 

Goals: What you’re going to do in the next 3-5 years, and how you’ll know if you do it. Make the terminology meaningful for you, and keep it consistent throughout the process. It’s not mandatory to call it “goals”, for example; an Indigenous midwifery clinic named this “our bundles of work”. In this graphic, goals are made up of three connected things. 

A Key Results Area: Written in a way that’s memorable, short and easy to communicate. Illustrated here with a target. Think of it as a big bucket. (Sometimes called a burning platform or pillar, but I find that jargon less compelling.) For example, Membership might be written as “An Engaged Membership”. 

• Goals for each: 3-5 tangible action items to achieve each Key Results Area
• Success Measures for each: How you’ll know that you are successful. These are often called KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. You can have qualitative or quantitative metrics. 
• Strategy Screens: Organizations often balance complex decision-making choices. What are the decision-making criteria for choosing priorities? 

Unique Niche: What sets you apart. In business, this is often called a competitive advantage, or unique selling proposition. 

Values ( not pictured). Principles and behaviours. Not just a list, but something evergreen that needs tending and renewal regularly. 

Ideas for how graphics fit into the strategic planning process

• Support brainstorming and decision-making: live graphic recording can capture ideas, themes, and distill information into visuals that help the room see what they mean 
• After, create a polished, visual summary to inspire and align: once all the text is finalized, illustrate a visual strategic plan, or a visual executive summary. This is often called a SOAP, Strategy On A Page – but it’s usually a lot of boxes in Excel. Instead, make it visual – because a picture says a thousand words. 

 Other tips for your success

• Invest in creating a good plan, with the right resources, time, relationships and facilitation support 
• Bite off smaller, manageable chunks when planning. Create separate Operational-level plans/work plans to support the strategic plan and don’t try to solve it all at once.

You’re welcome to download this two tools, and it is licensed for use without changing it, for non-commercial use (you can’t sell it), and keeping the names/credit intact.