Our Strategic Planning Process

The process of facilitating and developing new strategic plans varies between organizations depending on size, scope and complexity. However, Maliasili commonly follows a set process to develop strategic plans as we’ve learned from experiences that it works. Although we play a lead role in drafting the content of an organization’s strategic plan, we expect the organization to invest significant time and resources in the process as the plan is ultimately their product.

Four key components of our strategic planning process:

1. Analyzing Context

Strategic planning is about deciding what an organization wants to be, what it wants to achieve, and how it is going to do that. To make such future plans around an organization’s key goals, actions, and investments, it is critical to look backward at what an organization has done, what it has achieved, and where it may have fallen short of its goals or plans. Similarly, it is critical to understand the external context that an organization operates within - in other words, to understand how the world around it is changing and how those conditions shape its challenges and new opportunities.

This assessment of an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, achievements and shortfalls, and its external threats and opportunities, are distilled into a situational analysis that describes this context in a succinct way. This is a key step in strategic planning as it enables an organization to think clearly, soberly, and critically about what it can and should be doing going forward into the future.

2. The Journey Forward

Strategic planning can be thought of as the journey that an organization wants to take in order to bring about change in the world. A strategic plan provides the vision and clarity to direct and structure that journey, even while recognizing that the road travelled almost always changes shape somehow along the way. Through a participatory process including several workshops and many other side discussions, an organization decides the vision it wants to pursue, how to describe its mission, the interventions it believes it must take to bring about change, and the key goals and objectives that should guide its work.

3. Organizational Capacity and Implementation 

Once an organization has articulated what it wants to achieve and how it wants to change the world, it needs to match those ambitions with the internal organizational skills and resources that will enable it to deliver. A strategic plan needs to connect the evolution and development with the organization with its mission and vision of impact, by providing goals related to key organizational domains such as funding, staffing and skills, governance structure or composition, and key partnerships.

4. Communicating the Vision

Strategic plans not only provide the internal guidance for an organization’s work and its investment of resources, but can be an invaluable tool for communicating its vision and aspirations to external audiences. The design and distribution of a strategic plan is a key final step in the process that can add value and support implementation of the plan itself.

“Our strategic plan has really helped us focus as a team, communicate to all stakeholders exactly what we do, and ultimately enabled us to direct our energy to achieve the results on the ground.”

–Damian Bell, Executive Director, Honeyguide, Tanzania

“As we embarked on the development of our strategic planning for the next 5 years with the Maliasili team, it became increasingly apparent to the Lewa staff that Maliasili would ensure that, whilst acknowledging and respecting Lewa's successes and resonating with our philosophies, they would not shy away from asking the difficult questions and probing our sometimes worn responses, in an effort to help us frame a credible and achievable strategy for the future. The renewed energy, enthusiasm and focus with which we are now engaging in our conservation and development centric work in northern Kenya is a testament to Maliasili's ability to facilitate an effective process.”

–Mike Watson, CEO, Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, Kenya

"Through working with Maliasili our organization has become a lot more focused, a lot more strategic, and as a result we see ourselves achieving more with less resources and less time."

–Dickson Ole Kaelo, CEO, Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA)

“An organization and its functional units can only operate harmoniously and be effective and ultimately successful if it has a common long term perspective on its vision, mission and key focal areas, as typically embodied in a road map or strategic plan. The wonderful work that Maliasili’s team did during our 2019 Joint Annual Planning to facilitate a review of IRDNC’s ageing 2015 – 2025 strategic plan, was immensely valuable in that it on the one hand confirmed that we were still on the right track, but also that we had to make some adjustments to adapt to an ever changing environment. We are highly appreciative of Maliasili’s continued support to IRDNC.” 

–Willie Boonzaaier, Programme Director, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC), Namibia