In the previous blogs, we described why cause and effect have become lost in a network, and which three assumptions underpinning the classic policy plan are beginning to crack. All well and good, that analysis of where things have gone wrong, but how do you straighten them out? What do you put in their place?
In my view, planning is replaced by navigating. A different way of working in which you know where you want to go, but dare to recalibrate at every step. You map your environment honestly, including the uncertain part. You make real choices, including about what you do not do or know. And you reassess at fixed moments, instead of holding on for five years to something that no longer makes sense.
It may sound messier, but the discipline that navigating requires is actually greater, because you no longer have a finished document to hide behind. You are in a constant iterative flow between action, result, adjustment, new action, …
How do you get started? Below are five steps. But also an immediate confession: what is written here in five paragraphs is, in practice, a process of months. So it is not a manual or how to navigate for dummies, but anyone who wants to try it themselves is still best off starting with one step.
1. State what you contribute to
What do you do yourself, and what do you contribute to? Two different questions, and it pays not to confuse them. You organize training, or theater, or community work, or home care. That is your practice. But you contribute to the broader issue, together with others. Naming that difference takes the hot air out of your plan, and immediately also takes some pressure off your team.
2. Explore your terrain
Who else is active in your theme, and what is moving along with it? Go and talk to the school’s care coordinator, the local police officer, the spatial planning official, the volunteer umbrella organization that knows your audience but not your offer. In every conversation, ask who you should visit next.
Also look for what is moving independently of people. A decree that is changing, a subsidy line that is disappearing, a technology that your audience is already using while you are still hesitating, a demographic shift in your neighborhood. Read landscape mappings, figures, sector analyses. That is just as much exploration as having a conversation.
3. Make an honest map of what is moving
Bring everything together: people, rules, relationships, habits. Ask two questions about it. How much time will it take to change this? And how much energy?
What takes a lot of time and a lot of energy is concrete. A decree, a collective bargaining agreement, the prevailing spirit of the times. What takes little time and little energy moves quickly, but also disappears quickly. Between those two extremes lies the zone where you can truly do something.
Energy, by the way, is not one single thing. There is financial energy, human energy, relational credit with your board or government, and emotional energy. The latter is the least tangible and, in our sector, usually the most expensive.
4. Choose through two lenses, and also say what you won’t do
After steps 2 and 3, you have a long list of possible actions. Far too many. Assess each action twice. First: what will this deliver if it goes the way we think? Then: what if it goes differently? Are there actions where you have a lot to lose? Or actions where a miss costs nothing and a hit changes everything?
Put those two side by side. Little to lose and a lot to gain is something you seize eagerly, even if it is messy. A lot to lose and little to gain is something you leave aside, however good it may sound in a document. And then the hardest part: say out loud what you are not doing. Put it in writing, with the reason included, and have your board help communicate it.
5. From timeline to pattern
What you are left with at the end does not look like a classic plan. No phases, no milestones per year. You get a kind of mapping, a drawing of all the findings from previous phases and how they are connected to each other. That is quite a lot of complex work, but the gain is resilience. If one link in a timeline falls away, an entire line collapses. If one thread in a web falls away, the rest still holds.
Finally, put two fixed moments per year in the calendar of your management team and board and ask these four questions: what has shifted on our map? Which actions have we taken? Which ones have we not taken, and do we drop them or try a different approach? And what has come within reach in the meantime that was not there last year?
And what about your board? And your funder?
A board wants certainty, a funder wants indicators, and an application file requires a timeline. Those expectations will not disappear. That is why this is not a matter of either/or, of planning or navigating, but of planning and navigating. Policy plans remain necessary as long as boards and governments ask for them. But you can already incorporate navigation as a way of working into the plans that exist.
Also take a look at what the field itself is already asking for. In the most recent Arts Landscape Sketch, there is a striking request: white space in policy plans. Time and budget that are not given a detailed purpose in advance, so that organizations can respond more quickly to what becomes urgent at that moment. That is what navigating does. It justifies the open space, allows inevitable uncertainty.
