What We Learned: Strategic Planning with Cohesion Network
After a nine-month process, we've crossed the finish line with new goals, strategies, and hope for the future with an amazing community engagement non-profit, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
As one of the first completed projects with the Scuppernong Group, we're reflecting on the process and what we learned along the way.
Holding Space Together: Through all the Zooms, emails, and texts from a collection of stakeholders, we listened to stories of hope and devotion, passionate about the work being done in the Lehigh Valley. The narratives were often focused on collective perseverance, pushing through challenges of funding, support, and societal ills. It's honoring and amazing to see what people will say when you let them have the floor for a moment, to talk about their life's work, and why they're doing what they do. Moreso than planning, this work was holding space and engaging with stakeholders to share hope, despair, and direction together.
All The Possibilities: While we only spent three days in Allentown, witnessing Cohesion Network's place and progress in the city, I found myself daydreaming and ideating daily about their work, admitedly sometimes more than my own. While anything could happen to an organization like theirs, subjective to grant funding, contracts, etc., it was critical to see their recent history, present context, and desires for the future, to determine a new trajectory going forward. I learned that our work meant eliminating options (even great ones) and narrowing down the dream through the process, to make it real for the plan.
Mutual Trust: One of my favorite lessons from my time at Fuller Theological Seminary with Dr. Scott Cormode, was to treat every meeting like table talk. That is, we should pretend we're together at the dinner table of someone's house and the ultimate point of every meeting is to improve the relationships. If any of those relationships were damaged from the meeting, then it should be considered a failure. As we did this project (mostly) remote because of the physical distance, full of Zooms, emails, and texts, today's version of the dinner table is often manifest through screens, a lot like the one you're reading this on. Mutual trust is built through the careful social nuance of how we approach relationships and table talk via all of our devices.
To be inspired, check out more of what Cohesion Network does in the Lehigh Valley at https://cohesionnetwork.org.
To see more of how we help out mission-driven organizations with strategy and fractional leadership, check out The Scuppernong Group at https://scuppernong.group