In June of 2008 the board of the San Diego Museum of Art adopted a strategic plan that included significant investments in art and facilities from their endowment and a major capital campaign for a new building. Two and a half months later, on September 15, came the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings and the start of the “Great Recession.”  SDMA’s endowment lost 30% of its value within the next six months and major gifts declined.  This turn of events, shall we say, was not part of the plan. Would they throw the plan out the window?

SDMA was created after the 1915 Panama Exhibition and had become a solid regional museum with a good collection and strong endowment. The board and Executive Director had bold dreams of becoming one of the best museums in the country built around an international perspective, taking full advantage of being on the border of Mexico and their strong partnerships with leading museums in Italy, France and Russia. To accomplish this vision would require investing several million dollars from the endowment in immediate upgrades, a signature art purchase and new staffing as well as the capital campaign to modernize and expand their beautiful, but old, facility.

By the end of 2008, rather than investing in growth, the board and staff agreed they needed to cut more than two million dollars from their operating budget for the next fiscal year.  Great uncertainty prevailed and projections for when the economy might turn up again ranged from 6 months to 5 years!

The board and staff created a transitional planning group to dig into the situation, assess their options and make decisions. This board-staff leadership body had an impressive level of sophistication, perseverance and general good will.  They did not look for people to blame; they sought solutions.  Remarkably, this group did not see their plan as irrelevant in light of this dramatic change in the environment - they simply realized that some of the specific planned actions as well as the time frame for their plan would need to be adjusted. Their commitment to the fundamental vision and strategy had been fire tested and came out as polished and strong as one of their ancient pieces of ceramic pottery.

In the end, rather than being made obsolete by the dramatic turn of events, the strategic plan drove these tough decisions because they had established clear priorities. An arts education program that had been losing money and audience for several years was cut. Staff and volunteer roles were carefully rebalanced. While painful, in some ways the cuts in staff and programming moved SDMA toward their vision more quickly by accelerating planned changes that would have been made more methodically.  Urgency demanded action.

Three years later in 2011, with a new Executive Director (hired from a prestigious museum in Mexico), an endowment growing again and a re-energized board, SDMA is moving full steam toward their vision of regional excellence with an international perspective. And, according to the Chairperson of the Strategic Planning Committee, the strategic plan remains as the guidebook to their future!

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Here’s an excerpt:

I am an unapologetic advocate of traditional strategic planning.

I have to admit I am not a disinterested party in this debate. As a consultant with nonprofits for the last twenty years, much of my work has been done under the umbrella of strategic planning. I continue to do this work because I believe strategic planning is both necessary and provides a unique contribution to nonprofit organization effectiveness. In this piece and from this perspective, I respond to some of the major complaints about strategic planning that were outlined in Blue Avocado‘s critique.

Strategic planning is made irrelevant by major shifts in the environment.
Funding was cut for some of my clients by 20% to 40% in 2009. In the cases where these clients had recently completed strategic plans, they had frameworks that were incredibly helpful in making a series of very difficult decisions in a short period of time. Why were these frameworks so helpful? Because they had clarity about their most important priorities and values. In some cases it accelerated planned actions, such as closing a program or organization restructuring facilitated by laying off unproductive staff. In other cases it just helped in making painful decisions that, if resources had remained constant, they would much preferred not to have made.

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Read the rest of the article here on Blue Avocado.