In the previous blog, I wrote about how the world moves faster than a plan can keep up with, and how the line between action and impact rarely runs straight anymore. But there is more going on. Beneath the classic policy plan lie three assumptions that we rarely name and that often no longer hold true.
1. That you know your issue before you begin
The classic route is: define your problem, get to know it in depth, look for the causes, build a strategy, plan your actions. That works excellently, on one condition: you have to know your issue before you start on it.
Now read the missions in your own sector. Contributing to a fairer society. Closing the gap between those who belong and those who are left out. Giving people in poverty a renewed sense of perspective. Accelerating the transition. Reducing loneliness. These are not organizational goals. They are societal goals. And according to your plan, you want to solve them with a handful of full-time equivalents and a half-time communications officer.
When you work on such complex objectives, you cannot possibly fully understand the ins and outs of your assignment before you begin. You only get to know and define the problem by standing right in the middle of it, and by talking to people who look at it from a completely different angle. So your plan can never be based on thorough knowledge of the problem. That knowledge only follows from action, from trying things out and investigating.
2. That the world moves at a pace a plan can keep up with
Policy planning assumes that the world moves at a speed and with a predictability that a five-year plan can withstand. For years, that assumption was reasonable. A decree lasted a generation. Subsidy lines were predictable. Your audience changed gradually.
That is not today's world. When Socius mapped the social landscape surrounding sociocultural work, it took eleven chapters: geopolitics, demographics, inequality and exclusion, changing relationships between civil society, the market, government and citizens, polarization, digitalization, environmental risks, pressure on space, well-being, association, leisure time. Eleven movements that do not stand neatly and neutrally side by side, but push against one another. Influencing, reinforcing and complicating one another. Digitalization reinforces polarization, polarization changes the relationship with government, that relationship determines your funding, your funding determines whether your volunteers have a coordinator.
Ask in healthcare, in development cooperation, in youth work or in the arts, and you hear variations of the same story. A five-year plan, today, is not ambitious, but a little naïve. Although naïve is too strong a word, because it is also a necessity, an obligation. It’s just that a policy plan can no longer be your only guide for strategy and leadership. You also need to know how you move, evolve, adjust along the way...
3. That you largely make it happen yourself
Collaboration is certainly included in the dossiers. Networks, coalitions, partnerships. But look at where it appears in most plans. At the back, in a list. As an intention in a separate objective, neatly separated from the real work. Collaboration is usually added at the end, not built into the core of your plan.
That is a fundamental difference. Because if your ambition is a societal ambition, then connecting must not be a side activity. You need to design the shape of your organization for that kind of collaboration from the start, not as an afterthought. The honest test is simple. Remove the partners from your plan. Does your entire plan still stand? Collaboration must become effective co-creation, not just for show. You need to collaborate in depth to find your way through the complexity. Based on the understanding that you can no longer do it alone.
Organizations may avoid collaborations or the influence of external partners in order to keep more control over their plan, to keep the thing predictably on track. But that is already a vain hope anyway. In a sector and a world under pressure, collaborating and being agile together is the solution, not the problem.
In the next blog: what you can put in place of the classic plan, and five concrete steps to start with tomorrow.
Webinar | Navigating complex times: strategy and leadership when the future cannot be planned
October 6, 2026
Planning five years ahead while the ground is shifting. Almost every policy plan starts from the assumption that we know the future well enough to turn it into objectives. That assumption no longer holds, and yet it continues to shape our plans. In this webinar, we look at what does work, and what navigating requires from your strategy and your leadership.
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