When the Power Goes Out: Strategic Planning Shapes Operational Decisions

Strategy in Practice, Not Just on Paper

When I was CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden, we had a strategic plan, “Keep Growing,” that was the outcome of a robust executive team and board effort. We made a decision early in its roll-out to try to communicate the plan to every stakeholder and have it inform every action we took. We held all-staff, all-volunteer, and open-house member/donor meetings to talk about it and share our vision for the future.

We were determined not to let our work “sit on a shelf,” and therefore made sure it was present in the decisions we made every day. We even put the plan on our website as its own mini-site and offered it as an open-source tool to other organizations (something I still receive thanks for today, a decade later, from other leaders who used it as the basis of their plans).

At the heart of that plan were our values. While they may now seem to state the obvious, they felt groundbreaking for their bold attempt to put into words principles that hadn’t yet been formally articulated. Their specificity—and their willingness to speak directly about beauty, wellness, inclusivity, and the future of life on Earth—words that some people at the time might have found either problematic or too obvious—conveyed their strength.

From Chicago Botanic Garden Board-approved Plan, 2009

Our Mission and Plan Are Based on Three Core Values:

• Beautiful gardens and natural environments are fundamentally important to the mental and physical well-being of all people.

• People live better, healthier, and more satisfying lives when they can create, care for, and enjoy gardens.

• The future of life on Earth depends on the degree to which humans understand, value, and protect plants and the healthy habitats on which they depend.

We referred to these values frequently—in meetings, in program planning, and especially in uncertain situations. They, and our focus on our mission, gave us a steady reference point when we needed to move quickly and well.

One summer morning, around 5 a.m., we lost power across the 385-acre campus. It was an outage across a wide swath of the North Shore region of Chicago, in the middle of our busiest season for all visitors, on a day when temperatures were expected to rise. My vice president and I connected quickly to make a decision. Do we shut down? Do we stay open? There wasn’t an obvious answer.

We talked through our strategic plan. We asked: who is at the center of this work? Our customer. We used this word intentionally, although it’s not typically used in the nonprofit sector. And by “customer,” we meant everyone we served—families, campers, seniors, tourists, gardeners, students, researchers. If our mission was to bring people and plants together for beauty, healing, education, and refuge, then the question became: how can we still do that today, even without electricity?

We decided to stay open.

Several thousand people came through the Garden that day. It turned out that parents who needed to go to work were grateful to be able to drop their children at camp. And the residents of multiple senior centers throughout the area that had lost power bussed to the Garden for a safe, breezy day in the shade. The thank-yous poured in. People were grateful to have a place to go. Our values and strategic plan helped us decide what to do.

More Than a Statement: Tools for Daily Decision-Making

Too often, mission, vision, and values are viewed as something internal to the boardroom or a staff retreat—or are crafted by committee and read like “gobbledygook.” But when done right, they are powerful tools that guide work across the entire organization.

A mission tells everyone what the organization is trying to accomplish. It should be easily memorizable, a full sentence, and short, concrete, and direct—something your organization can actually do well. A vision gives shape to what your organization believes is a future state, if you do your work well over time. Values provide clear table stakes for the type of organization you’re trying to create and why. They also help in staff recruiting and hiring decisions. And goals—the priorities you commit to achieving in a set time frame—turn the mission, vision, and values into forward motion.

Together, these shouldn’t be conceptual or inspirational alone. They should be operational.

When your mission is clear, it becomes a tool for prioritizing. When your vision is well defined, it becomes a reminder of what progress looks like. When your values are actively used, they provide direction for how work gets done. And when your goals are known and shared, they become the bridge between your planning documents and your day-to-day work. Your mission is about who you serve and why. Your vision describes a dream state if you were 100% successful, and able to put yourself out of a job. Your values are about what you believe in, and what may make your organization unique . Your goals are what you’re actively pursuing.

When these are well understood, they deliver clarity. They help people stay focused—not by narrowing options, but by pointing the organization toward shared purpose.

What Happens When They’re Absent

When mission, vision, values, and goals are vague, outdated, too aspirational to be achievable, or disconnected from daily operations, even small decisions become more difficult. Staff members can’t tell what matters most. Putting out short-term fires crowds out focusing on long-term goals. Even committed, capable staff can get stuck only dealing with daily tasks, lose momentum toward the future, or become hesitant to act for fear they might do something wrong.

And at the organizational level, the effects compound. Communications lose coherence. Donors hear mixed messages. New staff struggle to understand priorities. Eventually, the culture starts to show signs of wear and good intentions can’t carry the work alone.

But when the plan is active and those core ideas are in use, the organization becomes steadier and decision-making speeds up without becoming careless. Teams become more confident because they understand what the organization stands for and where it’s trying to go.

A Cultural Compass, Not Just a Planning One

Mission, vision, and values should not exist solely in formal planning documents. They are just as important to internal culture as they are to strategy. At their best, they help organizations act with consistency—not uniformity, but consistency. Goals, when tied to those core principles, reinforce that consistency by giving people something concrete to work toward.

At the Garden, our strategic plan was clear, agreed upon, and present in how we worked together. It showed up in the way we gave feedback, the way we recognized effort, the way we talked about everything—from program design to infrastructure, from internal policies to external partnerships.

Goals helped translate our larger direction into action. If someone asked, “What are we focused on this year?” we could point to the plan and answer with confidence.

Making It Practical

There is a misconception that mission, vision, and values are theoretical—that they belong to planning cycles, not operations. In my experience, the opposite is true. When developed carefully and used consistently, they are among the most useful tools available to an organization.

But they’re not the only tools. A good strategic plan also includes goals—clear, stated priorities that focus the work of the next few years. The mission helps prioritize broadly. The goals help prioritize specifically. Together, they keep both vision and execution in balance.

Goals should be specific enough to drive action and measured enough to know whether progress is being made. They are a small set of commitments your organization is willing to invest in and be judged by.

When your goals are linked to the mission, guided by the vision, and grounded in values, the day-to-day work becomes easier to direct. You know which opportunities to take, which ones to decline, and how to sequence the things that matter most.

When these ideas are strong and regularly used, they influence how you hire, how you train, how you respond to conflict, and how you measure success. They also make it easier to navigate the unexpected—because they give people something to rely on.

It’s worth asking: Are these tools alive in the organization, or are they just written down? Do people use them? Can they explain them? Do they recognize them in action? Are our goals still the right ones?

If the answer is no, bring them back into focus—and revisit your goals alongside them. Outdated goals can be just as limiting as vague values.

Culture and Strategy Should Not Be Separate

A strategic plan alone can’t create a healthy organizational culture. But a strong, usable plan—one that puts mission, vision, and values at the center, and that defines clear goals and objectives for everyone to drive toward—can support and reinforce the kind of culture that helps organizations thrive through change, challenge, and opportunity.

The goals don’t need to be flashy, just understood. If you’re working toward something that others in the organization aren’t even aware of, it’s a sign that the strategy hasn’t yet become operational. When staff across departments, at different levels, can name the organization’s goals and connect their own work to them, meeting your mission becomes possible.

So if you’re part of a team—at any level—here are a few good questions to ask:

• Do I know the mission, and can I apply it in my daily work?

• Can I describe the vision in terms of what we’re working to improve?

• Do I see the values in practice, and am I contributing to them?

• Do I know the goals of my organization and my role in achieving them?

If the answer is yes, the plan is likely serving its purpose. If not, that doesn’t mean failure. It means there’s work to do—a chance to bring greater alignment to how the organization functions and why the work matters.

Because the next time something unexpected happens—a power outage, a pandemic, a budget cut, a leadership transition—you won’t have time to make up your direction on the spot. But if you can lean on what’s already there, and on your team’s shared understanding of the mission, values, and goals that guide your work, you’ll know what to do.