Strategy and Planning During Times of Change
March 13 , 2025 | By Heather Bates, MSW, and Sonia Donnelly, MBA
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Strategy and planning activities can serve as an important piece of the constantly shifting puzzle we navigate through times of change.
Change is an organizing catalyst that helps us identify gaps, and while change presents challenges, it may also create space for opportunity. Change can be the grounding component to evolve programming and meet the moment. Change is a path to engage staff and partners and align together on process rigor to result in time-tested, sustainable programming.
Creating facilitated, structured conversations in times of change provides a safe harbor to bring others together and allow creative thinking to flow. This is true whether change is driven by external factors such as market changes, industry trends, policies, or politics, or internal factors like staffing or new technology adoption. Either way, strategy and planning activities that both assess your current landscape and inform your direction help to proactively navigate uncertainty during transitions.
Strategic planning activities may seem time consuming, but they are reliable tools to unleash new ideas and help with problem solving to move forward. Transform Health recommends the following activities to review strategy and planning efforts during times of change:
Landscape Assessments: Know the environment
Inventory the landscape in multiple directions, such as the political environment, geographical environment, industry progression, relevant markets, resources, and/or policies. What is changing in the landscape and how does it impact what you are doing?
Examples include SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, PESTEL (political, environmental, socioeconomical, technological, educational, legal) analysis, or a facilitated debrief discussion about what worked and what did not in the prior landscape.
Strategic planning activities are particularly impactful when paired with qualified coaching approaches such as strategic inquiry and powerful questioning, following the International Coaching Federation’s code of ethics.
Goal Setting: Articulate where you want to go
Clearly define your goals. Where do you want to go and what does it look like when you get there? Use phrases and words that convey your direction clearly and represent the people you are serving and those who support your work. If you are adjusting your goals, ensure that they continue to align with your organization’s missions, vision, and values.
Plan for pivots. Use decision trees and workflow visuals to demonstrate your progress and identify potential pitfalls. Set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) goals that describe and document your progress toward a successful end result. Track your activities to the goal with milestones, benchmarks, and indicators.
Agile Work Planning: Identify opportunities and build in flexibility
Your ability to plan ahead, anticipate change, and innovate will influence your ability to bear risk. Create contingency scenarios — “if this, then that” — to incorporate adaptability into your work plans. What new skills or information do you need, and when do you need them?
Start building a foundation to weather ongoing change by encouraging a culture of learning and innovation, alongside productivity. Creating a safe space for experimentation through team building, beta test approaches, and workshopping ideas will produce the resolve, resiliency, and flexibility needed to be proactive about change.
Stakeholder Analysis: Align resources with new priorities
Identify who is affected by the change, to what extent, and over what period, and document their concerns. These concerns can be woven into a frequently asked questions document or a guided discussion checklist to engage stakeholders in tough conversations while keeping you on track toward your goal.
If you are not familiar with the stakeholders, conduct power mapping activities or stakeholder mapping efforts to identify gaps and alignment. Who are the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences for what you aim to do?
Communications Planning: Prepare frequent, tailored messaging
Communicate what is taking place in brief, concise points to meet your internal and external stakeholders where they are. What is important to you may not be as important to someone else, so you need to repeat messaging in a variety of ways. Use different communication methods to effectively reach auditory learners, visual learners, and kinetic learners. Transparency in messaging, when appropriate, also helps to foster trust in teams and with external stakeholders. For more insights, see our recent blog on communicating in times of uncertainty.
Trend Monitoring: Track changes in the landscape
Assign people to monitor and share changes in policies and politics that may influence your and your stakeholders’ decision-making and strategic direction. What shifts are on the horizon? How do you get the information you need to monitor these issues?
Create an internal change log for updates to processes, policies, language and terminology, instructional documents, and rules. Tracking the before and after ensures that you can document legacy information, quickly diagnose the root cause of mistakes, and maintain the rationale for changes and improvements.
Facilitator’s List of Strategic Questions
- What is changing in the landscape and how does it impact what you are doing?
- Where do you want to go and what does it look like when you get there?
- What new skills or information do you need? When do you need them?
- Who are the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences for what you aim to do?
- What shifts are on the horizon? How do you get the information you need to monitor these issues? What will you use to track information gathered?
These are just a few examples of strategy and planning conversations that can inform your direction. Balancing short-term actions with long-term implementation requires vision, organization, and constant calibration for forward movement.
Overplanning can lead to analysis paralysis. Focus on building flexible learning environments while piloting new ways of being to create resilience, curiosity, and fortitude. For help facilitating your strategic planning conversations, please email Heather Bates, COO and vice president, at heather@transformhc.com.
Transform Health is an Inc. 5000-ranked national private health care consulting firm with a mission to drive systems change to build healthy communities. Reach out to us today if you would like to work together. Contact Heather Bates, COO and vice president, at heather@transformhc.com. We would love to hear from you!