In this excerpt from the Jump Leap Long‑Term Strategy Podcast (Episode 15), host Francis Wade addresses the dilemma faced by long‑term‑oriented professionals in nonprofits and NGOs who must persuade C‑suite peers and boards to pair ambitious, long‑term visions (often expressed as BHAGs or SDG‑style goals) with concrete, multi‑year strategic plans. Wade frames the audience as seasoned long‑term thinkers who feel out of place when colleagues favor vision‑only thinking. He narrates a case study of Miguel, a C‑suite director struggling to convince his leadership team to adopt a detailed strategy for their lofty goals, highlighting common objections such as “build it and they will come” and the lack of timelines. Wade explains why visions without plans lead to initial enthusiasm that fizzles, resulting in wasted effort, missed targets, and organizational disappointment. He critiques the original Collins & Porras BHAG concept for omitting timelines and strategic planning, noting updates needed for 2024. The episode also includes a brief exchange with guest Anthony Taylor, who points out systemic disengagement—boards and staff being too busy or mis‑incentivized—to illustrate why strategic plans often go unimplemented. Throughout, Wade emphasizes diagnostic reasoning, the importance of linking vision to actionable roadmaps, and the risks of failing to do so, while also providing promotional calls to action for the full podcast series.
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It's the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 15. You're someone who is already a long-term thinker working in perhaps a non-for-profit organization. Unlike many, you don't need to be convinced about the importance of long-term thinking. Somewhere in the past, perhaps your childhood or in your early career, you embedded the idea of long-term thinking in your character, and now balancing short and long-term planning, thinking, strategy, vision are a part of who you are. But this may be why you are now a bit confused, because others around you don't quite share all of this trait. They may believe in long-term visions, but they don't believe in long-term planning. As such, you feel a little like a fish out of water, always harping on the need for long-term planning and sometimes asking some inconvenient questions. You can't understand why others don't share your concern, and it's not that you are particularly ESG sustainable or anything like that. Nor do you come from an old school, you sense that the company would do better or make better decisions if it had more than the usual short-term plan to go with its long-term vision. But how do you convince others in the C-suite and the board to think with this additional lens? If they already like the idea of a vision of a long-term nature, they might be asking, why do we need a strategic plan to go with it. It's just more work. Tune into this episode as I tackle this wicked problem. I'm Francis Wade and welcome to the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. And if this is the first time you're joining our podcast, you may not realize that you're landing sort of in the middle of a two-part series. In the first episode in the series, I addressed the reasons for why you may want to be a better communicator of the need for long-term vision in your company and a particular kind of vision. And in this episode, I'm going to be addressing the need for long-term strategy to support that vision. And also, if you've sort of never encountered a podcast like this before, you may want to know that We conduct problem-solving, topic-oriented podcasts here at JobLeap. What does that mean? Well, it means that we find a problem and diagnose and kind of beat the heck out of it for most of the podcast and a little bit of solutions at the end, you know, following the dictum of Einstein. Einstein said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." We spend a lot of time in diagnosis. So when I have a guest on, we do the same, follow the same format, lots of diagnosis. And why do we do that? Well, the intent is to give you, uh, an idea of the thinking that goes behind some of the conclusions. So what's the logic and what are the sources of that reasoning and how can you use that in your own practice? If you understand the inner workings and the thinking that goes behind some of the conclusions, then maybe you could be better off in applying them and they'd make more sense. Okay, so let me start with a story. Miguel is a C-suite director in a successful nonprofit NGO. He was raised to think in terms of long-term projects and became bilingual over a period of 15 years thanks to his parents' encouragement. It required several immersion programs along the way. Of course, these things just don't happen overnight. They require some long-term thinking and some planning. But he's been struggling to get his colleagues to agree to this point of view at work. Recently, in a weekly leadership meeting, he tried to argue for a long-term strategy to accompany their usual visioning exercise. So they're used to setting long-term, a long-term vision. There were a number of opinions and a few seem to be nodding in agreement with his point of view, but there has been a school of thought in his NGO, "Build it and they will come," version of that, which essentially says build a long-term vision and then they will come. And there is some precedent, like the United Nations Sustainable Development They have high-level goals which represent the solutions to, in this case, 4 wicked problems. But the truth is that each of these goals are huge. None of them are small, they're massive. In fact, he suspects that you put them together and it may— they may be too big. And it could be why no one is taking much action. To realize them. There really actually isn't a detailed plan to accomplish them. Maybe if there were one, he wonders, you know, would that help? But he has a problem, you know, even if he were convinced that that were the right way to go, how does he explain his suspicion to his colleagues? He needs far more than just a hunch. So I'm gonna imagine that if you're tuning into this podcast and you're continuing to listen, that you're also someone who has a commitment to long-term strategic planning in your organization to some degree. And that who you're sort of battling against, I guess, are folks who are only committed to the short term. And you've tried to be a good advocate for long-term planning, but there is, you know, there are a few who say that that's not necessary. That we just need to be inspiring people. And when you're not able to persuade them, you're not able to move the organization in the direction. Hope you're enjoying this free excerpt from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. Interested in finding out more about getting a subscription to full episodes? Visit www.longtermstrategy.info. That you want, that you think it needs to go in. And therefore, these very lofty ambitions don't get realized. As a result, you may feel a bit guilty, you know, that you're not doing the right things, that you're not doing enough, and ultimately disappointed that, you know, the organization promises so much. People join just for the opportunity to realize a difference-making opportunity, a difference-making chance that they can move the needle and have the planet be a better place. And it doesn't happen, in spite of their very hard work. You're thinking, "Why? If people believe in a long-term vision, shouldn't it be easier to convince them of the need to do long-term planning?" Well, it's— look to the future and say, what happens if you're not able to persuade your colleagues? Well, you may see some of that initial— sorry, that, that already existing lack of action and inspiration continue. And a lot of time what happens in any organization, but let's say NGOs, when someone announces a great big vision, a big hairy audacious goal, a BHAG according to Collins and Porras, is that there's a strong initial start. There's a burst of energy. There's like a big kickoff. A lot of people get very excited. Your stakeholders, maybe in larger society, the group that you're trying to impact, employees, if you have an advisory board, probably have some other colleague organizations. If you're a part of a government, maybe, or, well, if you're an NGO, you wouldn't be part of a government, but you could be a governmental organization. They all get very, very excited and turned on. And then there are no results. And if you're not able to persuade your colleagues that the lack of detailed planning is producing these producing this problem of no results and very little momentum. And you may, of course, be seeing some accidental achievements, which is that things that were on train are happening anyway, that trends that were already started are continuing in the right direction, or you may have had a serendipitous, you know, a windfall, something outside of the range of the project happened and it made a difference because of it happening, but it didn't come about as a result of a programmatic intervention driven by the vision. That's a different business. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you really don't want the worst to happen, which is that you reach your target year your BHAGs, and hopefully your BHAGs actually do have a target year, which would make them real, like the SDGs have for 2030. And many national visions have, like Saudi Arabia has one for 2030, for example. You don't want 2031 to come and there to be no accomplishment to speak of, which would then lead critics to say that these programs to set these goals, which are so grand and which are supposed to change humanity and rescue us all and fulfill our ambitions and meet our dreams and our fondest wishes, that these things are all a waste of time. And in 2031, leave your organization unable to set new BHAGs, set a new vision, set new targets and new goals, new aspirations. So that's, let's just say, the worst that could happen. And people in your position, from my research, I understand that they, you know, they try harder. They were extremely motivated. They, you know, give more speeches and try harder to persuade people over lunch tables. They set up meetings. They They join task forces, they find resources and they share them, and they work really hard to point out the upside when it happens, and the downside if it doesn't happen. And they try to activate a lot of activity. And unfortunately, sometimes what happens is that lots of small efforts start in the organization or in society, but they don't add up to anything. They are under-resourced, under-capitalized, they don't have capacity, skills are missing, they don't achieve a critical mass. And we'll talk about why that is, but a lot of effort gets frittered away and people start to get disappointed, they leave, they move on to a different project. And that initial burst of enthusiasm is squandered. So that doesn't work, obviously. But why? Why doesn't that work? Well, I would say what makes it hard to solve— this problem is difficult— is that there is agreement around the vision, and it feels very powerful in the beginning. Bhags have that, you know, effect. But the word bhag comes from the book Built to Last, and I'll put a mention of that in the show notes. That in that book, there's almost no reference to some things that we would assume today in the modern practice of long-term strategy. And well, here's a few examples of why the Collins and Porras book, as awesome as it is, needs to be updated for 2024. So one of the things it's missing out on is that the BHAGs sometimes have a target year and sometimes don't. So in the modern world, I would argue that, okay, that's an issue. Second is that Baha'is need strategic plans. Again, modern world, things are different. We'll talk about why. But the lack of them is an issue. And maybe those two, let's focus on those two. Those aren't mentioned in the original book on Baha'i Audacious Goals. Now, the year— the, the— as a matter of fact, in, in the initial book, the authors don't even mention a timeline. They don't use the term long term, and they definitely don't tell you what long term means. That actually came later. So they wrote an article for Harvard Business Review 3 years after the book was published, and they said, oh, By the way, a bihag means 10 to 30 years out, and they actually specified that. And in so doing, they brought us a step closer to where we are today, where visions have dates. Big visions, especially in the NGO world. In private sector, well, Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But in the NGO world, in the world of nonprofits, setting goals very often, not every time, but means that there's a year that goes with it. And that's a big difference than what was in the book, original book. Huge difference. So you don't want to be on the wrong side of this in the sense that you're a part of the vision for organizations and even for the planet which don't get realized. None of us want to be on the wrong side of it. The planet can't afford it. You've reached the end of a complimentary clip from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. To hear the full episode, go over to www.longtermstrategy.info and grab a subscription or a free trial. See you there. So here's an excerpt from our next show with Anthony Taylor.
You know, the fact that either there's no interest in Joanne's organization, you know, projects in the past strategic plans are not implemented. So I just say, why is that? There's no interest in the plan.
Why is that?
They're too busy. Why is that? Maybe they're incentivized wrong. But say, hey, why is that? And then, why is the board not engaged? So Holistic disengagement like that is a major, major problem.
And if you like the work we're doing, feel free to follow us at our website, strategyconf.fwconsulting.com, or like or leave a comment on one of the popular podcast apps such as Stitcher or iTunes. This is Francis Wade, and I'm signing out from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategic Planning Podcast. See you later.
