Strategic Planning Facilitation

Most people would agree that it is good to plan, but often not familiar with a good process, especially when planning with a team.  Yet a planning process is incredibly helpful as you determine the steps that your church will take to move toward your mission and vision.  There is a limited amount of time, money, people, and energy.  How do you determine where those four entities are allocated?  Not all plans for this kind of allocation are created equal.  It is so easy to get caught up doing good things at the expense of having the time, resources, and energy to focus on the best things.  This is where planning becomes incredibly meaningful.  What I offer is an outside presence to facilitate a planning process where you end with a manageable number of initiatives that move your church toward stated, realistic, and measurable goals.  This planning process always starts with perspective before planning initiatives.  My planning process typically involves two six-sessions no more than two weeks apart.  Good planning as a team takes time, but will go a long way in moving things forward in a church.  The best scenario is that these two planning sessions happen in consecutive days, but that is a challenge for most churches because many key leaders are volunteers who work.  However, my experience tells me that if you wait longer than two weeks for the second session, you lose too much planning momentum.  You end up spending valuable time rehashing what was already done so that everyone is back on track from the previous planning session.  Here is how those sessions work.

Session 1: The first session focuses on clarifying the church's mission and vision.  I call this Point B.  The mission explains why you exist, while the vision paints a picture of where you want to be in 5 years.  I always hesitate to plan more than a 5 year vision for this type of facilitation because at the end of the day we want a viable plan to be implemented for a 12-18 month step toward the vision.  Once the mission, vision has been clarified, I will walk your team through a perspective discussion determining where you are now compared to where you want to end up.  As you think about moving toward your desired vision for your church, I will ask you four questions.  What's presently right about your church relative to your vision?  What is presently wrong about your church relative to the vision?  What is confused in your ministries relative to the vision? What is missing presently from your church in order for you to meet your vision?  This discussion typically takes a few hours, but what will happen is that certain patterns will emerge that help you identify major areas that you will need to focus on.   This perspective exercise will also help you identify where the church is now.  I call this Point A .  At the end of session one, we want a clear Point A and Point B having identified four major areas of focus to get us from Point A to Point B.  It seems simple, but having a good facilitator to draw out the team is important.  The value of an outsider, like me, coming in for such a process is that I have no agenda.  I can put on my facilitator hat and ask good and sometimes hard questions.  

Session 2: The second session will focus on breaking down those four major areas of focus (I call them WINS) into manageable initiatives that each have a key deliverables, timelines, and accountability measures.  Ideally, we will end up with no more than 3 to 4 initiatives for each one of the WINS.  Once these initiatives have been established, I will walk through an action initiative plan.  This is a tool to help move a particular initiative forward with actionable steps.  This process will take every bit of the six hours allocated for this session.  

After both sessions, I will take all the information and put it into a book, which I will refer to as the playbook.  This will be a notebook that will contain each aspect of the planning process as well as each initiative identified as a team.  This will make it easier to manage progress and maintain focus.  This is a process that churches can invest in every year or two.  Can churches do this on their own?  Yes, but consider the time and expertise it involves.  I am confident you will find it well worth your both the time you spend on it and the money you invested in it.

Cost:  $700 plus travel and materials.  The $700 is really for my time... 12 hours of facilitation and the time I will spend putting the playbook together.  Travel includes gas, hotel, food, etc.  We can work that out on a case by case basis.

If I can help facilitate your next planning session for your church, just let me know.