In Conversation: Richard Mittenthal and Nirvani Budhram on Reimagining Strategy

A dialogue between the original author of Ten Keys to Successful Strategic Planning and the author of the latest update, Ten Keys Reimagined: Strategy as Continuous Practice, exploring the evolution of strategic planning, where the field has been, and where it’s going. 

Richard: Nirvani, you took something I wrote over twenty years ago and reimagined it for a very different world. Before we get into the specifics, tell me what drove you to take this on. What were you seeing in your work with clients that told you the original framework needed a fresh look? 

Nirvani: It started with a feeling of friction. I was walking clients through strategic planning processes that followed the playbook (the environmental scan, the stakeholder interviews, the retreat) and I kept noticing that by the time we delivered a finished plan, the ground had already shifted. The pandemic made it impossible to ignore, but the pattern was there before that. A funder would announce a new priority, or a policy change would reshape the landscape. I’ve seen strategy from every angle and what I kept coming back to was that the original Ten Keys got the fundamentals right, but the tempo of the work had changed. I didn’t want to rewrite your paper, but I wanted to ask what your keys look like when the planning horizon is no longer stable. 

Nirvani: Both. The core convictions are the same. What’s changed is the relationship between the organization and its plan. Your paper assumed a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The reimagined version assumes planning never really ends, it just becomes a continuous discipline. When I talk about real-time environmental awareness instead of an external scan, I’m not rejecting the scan. I’m saying it has to happen all the time, not just at the start of a cycle. When I talk about optionality instead of committing to a single path, I’m not saying commitment doesn’t matter. I’m saying the commitment has to include the capacity to change course.  

Richard: Some things carry through both of our papers. My second key was a realistic assessment of organizational strengths and limitations. The 2014 update kept it. You kept it too, as investing in organizational resilience and staff capacity. What’s proven non-negotiable about good strategic planning, regardless of when or how it’s done? 

Nirvani: Honesty. That’s the thread that runs through everything. Your paper called for a realistic assessment of strengths and limitations. The 2014 update asked for honesty between board and staff. I kept that and expanded it to include candor about who’s benefiting from strategy and whose voices are missing. You can’t build a good plan on comfortable fictions, whether those fictions are about your capacity, your competitive position, or the inclusiveness of your process.

The other non-negotiable is follow-through. Both of our papers say the same thing in different language: a plan without implementation is an exercise. I call it planning the plan’s evolution. You called it clear priorities and an implementation plan. 

Richard: I opened the original paper with the observation that many leaders saw strategic planning as a waste of time, with plans ending up on a shelf, gathering dust. You cite a 2026 Center for Effective Philanthropy study which found that nonprofits are being forced into rapid strategic adaptation: 71 percent of nonprofit leaders reported concern about their organization’s financial stability, and the single most common step they took in response was planning for multiple scenarios1. But boards and funders still expect a three-to-five-year plan. What do you tell a client caught in that tension? 

Nirvani: I tell them the plan is not the point. The planning is the point. A board that expects a three-to-five-year document can still get one, but it should be a living document, not a monument. I encourage clients to deliver a strategic framework with a stable core — mission, vision, values, a small number of long-term commitments — and then a set of adaptive priorities that get revisited semiannually. The board gets the document they need for governance, the staff gets a framework they can actually use, and the organization builds the muscle for continuous adjustment without losing coherence.

Richard: You use the phrase “continuous strategy.” Walk me through what that actually looks like in practice, not the theory, but changes in how leadership spends its time, in board engagement, and in decision-making? 

Nirvani: In a traditional model, the strategic plan gets approved and then the board’s job shifts to oversight. In a continuous model, the board engages with strategy at every meeting to test assumptions. Are the conditions that informed our priorities still holding? What signals are we seeing that might warrant a course correction? Leadership spends less time on the annual report-out and more time on real-time interpretation. Staff bring field intelligence to the table, not just grant updates. And there’s usually some version of what I describe in the paper as a diagnose-develop-evolve cycle, a structured rhythm where leadership assesses position, refines the narrative connecting past investments to current results, and decides where to adjust. It’s not less rigorous than the old model. It’s more frequent. 

Richard: Let me name a few shifts that caught my attention. My paper talked about patience as a key, which you replaced with “designing for optionality,” including what you call an “opportunity fund” for rapid deployment. I talked about learning from best practices and building a culture of disciplined experimentation and evaluation, and you draw on developmental evaluation and lean startup methodology. And my emphasis on commitment to change became treating strategy as a living system with adaptive priorities reviewed semiannually. Walk me through your thinking. Are these natural progressions from what I started, or are you saying something fundamentally different? 

In terms of experimentation, what I’m adding is that learning from others has to be paired with learning from yourself. Developmental evaluation, rapid-cycle learning, and structured pilots generate evidence specific to your context. And on the living system, your call for commitment to change was aspirational, and I wanted to make it structural. Sunset clauses, revision triggers, or strategy sprints make change routine rather than heroic. 

Richard: One of the biggest shifts in your paper is the argument that strategic planning isn’t a standalone exercise. You connect it to evaluation, organizational learning, and capacity building, and the idea that data must be translated into storytelling to actually drive decisions. How did you come to see strategic planning as part of this larger system, and what does that look like when you’re working with a client? 

Nirvani: It came from watching what happens after the plan is delivered. Early in my career, I saw well-crafted plans fail because the organization didn’t have the capacity to execute them. The strategy wasn’t wrong, but the people, the systems, and the learning infrastructure weren’t there. At Robin Hood, I designed a blended literacy strategy that required grantees to integrate technology into their teaching, and the organizations that succeeded were the ones that also invested in staff development, feedback loops, and the willingness to surface what wasn’t working. A strategic plan that doesn’t account for those factors is built on sand. 

Richard: And when a client pushes back and says “we just need a strategic plan, not a whole organizational transformation,” how do you handle that? 

Nirvani: I hear them. Sometimes a client really does just need a plan. They need to satisfy a board mandate, meet a funder requirement, or create alignment after a leadership transition. I don’t force the conversation, I build the connective tissue in quietly. A good planning process already surfaces capacity issues. It already generates data about what’s working and what isn’t. It already reveals whether staff feel safe telling leadership the truth. So rather than pitching a whole organizational transformation, I let the process itself make the case. By the end, clients almost always see that the plan is connected to a larger set of questions. I didn’t have to argue for it. The work did. 

Richard: Neither my paper nor the 2014 update centered equity the way yours does. My key three was “an inclusive approach,” making sure the right people were at the table. You went much further: equity as a lens applied to every strategic choice, drawing on the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy’s Power Moves framework and trust-based philanthropy principles. Tell me about that shift: what are you seeing that made you treat equity not as a program area but as a way of thinking about every decision? 

Nirvani: Organizations are recognizing that you can’t design a strategy for a community you haven’t genuinely listened to. That sounds simple, but the implications are profound. It means your grantmaking practices (application requirements, reporting burdens, funding timelines) are themselves strategic choices with equity consequences. The composition of your planning committee isn’t just about inclusion in the process but about power in the outcome. The earlier papers treated inclusion as a feature of good process, and the reimagined version treats equity as a feature of good judgment. Every allocation decision, programmatic priority, and partnership structure carries messages about who matters. Equity as a lens means making those assumptions visible and testable. 

When it’s performative, you see language without structure: an equity statement in the plan but no equity indicators in the measurement framework, a diverse advisory committee that was consulted but not empowered, a commitment to trust-based philanthropy without a change to the application process. The tell is whether equity changes decisions or just decorates them. 

Richard: You also added technology as an entirely new dimension, something we didn’t address in 2004 or 2014. You argue that AI and data infrastructure are now strategic assets, not back-office tools. I’ll be honest, I worry that the push toward technology can come at the expense of relationships, which are still at the heart of this work. How do you think about that tension, and what does it look like when an organization gets the balance right? 

Nirvani: I share that concern, and I think the answer is that technology should serve relationships, not replace them. The best use of AI and data infrastructure I’ve seen in this space isn’t replacing human judgment, it’s freeing people to exercise it better. A dashboard that surfaces grantee outcomes in real time means a program officer spends less time compiling reports and more time in conversation with the organizations they support. A data system that identifies patterns across a portfolio means leadership can ask sharper questions, not fewer. The risk is real. I’ve seen organizations invest in platforms and lose the relational texture that made their grantmaking effective. The paper calls for governing technology responsibly, and that includes governing it relationally. The question should never be “how do we automate this relationship”, it should be “how do we use these tools to deepen it?” 

Richard: I’ll put myself on the spot first and name one of your reimagined keys I’d push back on, and why. Earlier, we discussed the shift to prioritizing equity as a lens. I agree that it’s important, and I also think that you need to emphasize that equity paired with clarity is essential at the outset of the process. Stakeholders need to understand early on what their role is, and what their voices are actually shaping. Organizations have different ways of including stakeholders, whether through board/staff planning committees or the inclusion of community members, and these voices make for richer discussion. But this inclusion only works when it’s clear to everyone that participating in the process doesn’t mean authority over final decisions; those lie with the Board of Directors. Over the years, I have seen well-organized planning processes go south when it was not clear until the end what body had final signoff on the plan. 

Now let me turn it around on you. Which of my original keys do you think should be deemphasized, or has run its course? 

Nirvani: I’d say the empowered planning committee (your key 4). Not because committees are wrong, but because the concept is too contained for where the field has moved. Empowering a specific group to drive the plan assumes a bounded process with a defined endpoint, but in a continuous model, strategic thinking has to be distributed across the organization. It’s about building a culture where strategic judgment is part of everyone’s job. The 2014 update moved in this direction by emphasizing all the tools in the toolbox, and the updated version goes further with experimentation, network partnerships, and real-time sensing. These aren’t committee activities, they’re organizational capacities. 

Richard: The arc of this series has been clear: process in 2004, substance in 2014, adaptability now. So where does it go from here? If someone writes another paper in 2036, what will it focus on?  

Nirvani: I think the next paper will be about integration. We’ve moved from how to plan, to what to plan for, to how to stay adaptive. The next frontier is how to weave strategy into the way an organization operates every day, not as a separate function but as a habit. I also think power will be a bigger part of the conversation. Who gets to set the strategic agenda? Whose definition of success matters? The equity lens in the reimagined paper opens that door, but the next iteration will walk through it more fully. If I could add one more key today, it would be something about courage and the willingness to name what isn’t working and act on it, even when the politics are difficult. That’s the hardest part of strategy, and no framework can substitute for it. 

Richard: Your paper closes by saying that for too long, strategic plans have been latchkey kids, handed a set of instructions and expected to manage on their own. That image stuck with me. For a nonprofit or foundation leader reading this conversation who hasn’t started their next strategic plan yet — what is the one thing you would tell them? 

Nirvani: Start before you’re ready. The biggest mistake I see is leaders waiting for the perfect moment: until the board is aligned, a leadership transition is complete, or the funding picture is clearer. But the world won’t pause for your planning timeline. You don’t need a finished plan to start planning. Begin with an honest conversation about where you are, what you know, and what you don’t. Build from there. The plan will come. But the discipline of strategic thinking, the habit of asking hard questions and making choices, that starts now. 

Richard: There’s no shortage of debate about strategic planning including why to do it, why not to, how to do it cheaply or quickly, how it differs from business planning. And yet the beat goes on. Most organizations feel it essential to think in an organized way about the future. Sometimes the demand comes from inside the organization and sometimes it is driven externally. 

It is important to endorse changes in the process that are driven by changes in the field. It is also heartening to note that many concepts and practices employed in the past are still relevant and essential many years later. 

Strategy doesn’t end when the plan is approved. Read Ten Keys Reimagined for the whole framework, and connect with us to talk through what continuous planning can look like for your organization.