What Good Strategy Requires Now

A Q&A with Nirvani Budhram, TCC’s new Associate Director of Strategy Services, on why effective strategy must be adaptive, grounded in community, and built to live beyond the plan.

You’ve spent over 20 years in the philanthropic and nonprofits sectors. How has your understanding of what “good strategy” looks like changed over that time? 

Early in my career, I thought good strategy was primarily about having the right plan—clear goals, strong logic models, and a credible theory of change. And those things still matter. But what I’ve come to understand is that good strategy is fundamentally about relationships and readiness. A beautifully constructed plan means very little if the organization doesn’t have the internal capacity to execute it, or if the communities it’s meant to serve weren’t genuinely part of shaping it. 

“The organizations I’ve seen succeed over time are the ones that treat strategy as a living system, not a document they dust off every five years.”

When I was at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and later at Robin Hood, I watched well-resourced initiatives fall flat because they were designed in conference rooms far removed from the schools and families they were trying to reach. And I saw scrappier initiatives succeed because they were co-created with practitioners and adapted continuously based on what was actually happening on the ground. 

My view of good strategy now is much more dynamic. It has to be data-driven and community-driven at the same time, which aren’t in tension if you design the process right. And it has to be built to evolve. The organizations I’ve seen succeed over time are the ones that treat strategy as a living system, not a document they dust off every five years. That’s really the animating idea behind TCC Group’s upcoming update to our Ten Keys framework: in a world this volatile, adaptability isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s the strategy. 

There’s been so much disruption in the last several years. What does that mean for how foundations and nonprofits should think about planning? Has the traditional long-range strategic plan run its course? 

The traditional long-range plan hasn’t run its course, but its role has fundamentally changed. It used to be the central driver of strategy. Now it’s more like a compass bearing: useful for orienting direction, but not a reliable map for navigating terrain that shifts this quickly. 

Foundations that locked in five-year strategies in 2019 found themselves in an entirely different world by 2021. That’s not a failure of those organizations; it’s a structural challenge in an operating environment that’s moving faster than any fixed plan can accommodate. 

What I think this moment demands is what we’re calling agile strategy: a durable core—mission, vision, values—anchored to a set of priorities that are regularly stress-tested against emerging realities. Not reactive, but continuously responsive. That means investing in real-time environmental awareness, building in explicit decision points where leadership asks whether the strategy still holds, and creating what I think of as an “opportunity fund” mindset—preserving the capacity to respond when something unexpected happens, rather than being so committed to the plan that you can’t move. 

AI is a particularly important variable right now. It’s not just a tool; it’s reshaping how organizations understand need, allocate resources, and measure impact. Foundations and nonprofits that treat it as a separate technology question, rather than a strategic one, are going to find themselves behind. A 2026 strategic plan has to address the organization’s technology posture as explicitly as it addresses program strategy. 

So no, the strategic plan isn’t obsolete. But it has to become a living document—openly shared, expected to change, and embedded in a rhythm of continuous learning rather than periodic review. 

Strategic planning is often treated as its own discrete project; you do the plan, then you move on. But in your experience, what has to be in place across an organization for a strategy to actually come to life? 

This is one of the most important questions in our field, and I think the answer is uncomfortable for a lot of organizations: the plan itself is rarely the problem. What’s missing is the connective tissue that turns a strategy into action.

“The plan itself is rarely the problem.”

Connect strategy to evaluation and learning from the outset. At Robin Hood, we built measurement frameworks into program design from day one, so we had real-time data to adjust course, not just end-of-cycle reports. Without that feedback loop, you’re flying blind. 

Don’t undervalue strategic communication. Organizations often do the planning work, then struggle to translate it. Internally, staff aren’t clear on how their day-to-day work connects to the bigger strategy. Externally, grantees and partners can’t see themselves in the narrative. At TCC, our work on strategic communication and narrative change addresses exactly this: strategy is only as successful as its ability to be communicated in a way that moves people to action and understanding. 

Treat stakeholder engagement as an ongoing event. The communities and grantees an organization serves often have the earliest intelligence about what’s working and what isn’t. Building in systematic ways to hear from and be accountable to them makes a strategy far more durable. 

Organizational strengthening and capacity building are strategy. Leaders often skip this because it feels like “overhead.” But if staff are overwhelmed, leadership transitions aren’t managed, and systems aren’t in place to track and share learning, the strategy will stall. At TCC,  organizational strengthening and capacity building is integrated into our strategy work; it’s what makes strategy executable. 

You’ve led some complex multi-partner, multi-funder initiatives. What do you find that it takes to get organizations to genuinely share power and credit? 

Honestly? It starts with naming the thing that everyone is afraid to say out loud: shared credit feels like less credit. Most organizations, including foundations, are under real pressure to show distinct impact. Until you surface that tension directly, it tends to undermine collaboration in ways that are hard to diagnose. 

At Robin Hood, I led blended literacy investments for the Learning + Technology Fund alongside the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Siegel Family Endowment. Three major funders, over 30 organizations, ultimately reaching five million students nationally. That kind of coordination doesn’t happen through goodwill alone. It requires explicit governance structures, clear decision-making authority, and a shared measurement framework so that everyone is looking at the same evidence. 

What I’ve found is that organizations are much more willing to share power when the mission is genuinely the center of the work, not the brand. The question I always come back to in those conversations is: who are we ultimately accountable to? If the answer is the students, the families, the communities, then credit becomes less important, because the evidence of impact belongs to all of you. 

It also matters to invest in relationships before the hard decisions arrive. The collaborations that have worked best in my experience are the ones where partners have real trust with each other built over time through regular communication, honest assessment of what’s working, and a willingness to have difficult conversations early rather than late. Shared governance has to be designed deliberately; it doesn’t emerge on its own. 

If you could get every foundation or nonprofit leader to internalize one thing about strategy that most of them aren’t thinking about, what would it be? 

Strategy is a discipline, not an event. 

Most leaders experience strategic planning as a punctuated process: a period of intensive work, followed by implementation, followed (eventually) by evaluation. But the most effective organizations I’ve worked with don’t have an “on” and “off” strategy. They’ve built the habit of continuous strategic reflection into how they operate. 

This means regularly revisiting assumptions, not just outcomes. It means investing in horizon-scanning so that shifts in the policy environment, in community needs, in funding landscapes, don’t come as surprises. It means creating psychological safety on teams so that staff can surface what’s not working without fear that it will be heard as failure. 

And it means—this is the part I think gets underweighted—connecting strategy to the everyday work of the people doing the work. One of the most common things I hear from staff at organizations I’ve worked with is that they don’t understand how their role connects to the big picture. That’s a strategy failure. If people don’t feel ownership over the direction, the plan will never fully come to life. 

The good news is that this shift is achievable. It doesn’t require more resources; it requires different rhythms and habits. At TCC, we think about this in terms of a diagnose-develop-evolve cycle; a continuous practice of assessing where you are; refining what you’re doing; and adapting as you learn. That’s not just a planning framework. It’s a way of leading. 

“One of the most common things I hear from staff at organizations I’ve worked with is that they don’t understand how their role connects to the big picture. That’s a strategy failure.”

Now that you’ve been at TCC Group for a few months, what has excited you most about the work that we’re doing? 

What excites me most is the integration, and I say that as someone who has spent over 20 years being mildly frustrated that strategy, evaluation, organizational capacity, and communications are usually treated like they’ve never met each other at a party. 

At TCC, they’re not just in the same room, they’re actually talking. That’s a reflection of how social change actually works: messy, interconnected, and definitely not solvable by any single workstream. 

And the team? Thoughtful, curious, mission-driven. That combination is rare.