By Sarah Weber, ACSO Executive Director
   
I'm so proud that the Association of California Symphony Orchestras (ACSO) has launched a new Strategic Framework to guide us forward over the next five years. Its vision articulates a strong focus on advocacy, community-building, resource-sharing, and it reaffirms our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

Having gone through the process twice now with ACSO, I have been reflecting on what I have learned about strategic planning and have come up with ten takeaways that I hope may resonate with or be helpful to others.

But first, a little strategic planning humor, courtesy of Dilbert.

Now on to the takeaways!

In the summer of 2017, I had been on staff at ACSO for about six months as the Membership & Development Manager when the Board of Directors began a new strategic planning process. The organization was going through a period of unprecedented change. ACSO's long-serving executive director, Kris Sinclair, had retired after 31 years, and the new executive director, Mitch Menchaca, had relocated the headquarters from Sacramento to Los Angeles and was establishing a new culture and team.

These big changes created a “crossroads” moment for ACSO - an opportunity to redefine our identity and impact. What better time than this to develop a new strategic plan?

The Board authorized use of reserve funds to hire an outside consultant to help facilitate the process, collect stakeholder feedback, and keep things moving forward and on-schedule.

Lesson #1: If your budget allows, consultants can bring objectivity and best practices that support an efficient process and can take on the bulk of the administrative workload, freeing everyone on your team to fully participate.

After six months of work by the consultant and our Strategic Planning Committee, including a member survey and listening sessions, a new three-year plan was born to guide the organization from 2018 to 2021. It’s three major goals and corresponding objectives focused on increasing member understanding of ACSO’s value to the field, enhancing opportunities for professional development and peer-to-peer connections, and stabilizing and growing ACSO itself.

When I succeeded Mitch as the next executive director of ACSO in 2019, I inherited this plan knowing that I would be responsible for creating annual tactics to operationalize the plan. I remember feeling frustrated as I attempted to come up with a workplan for FY19. Being the only full time staff member at the time, it felt like I was creating a very long “to-do” list just for myself. And if I’m honest, I spent much of my first year as executive director just learning how to be an executive director, so feeling like I was solely accountable for the plan’s implementation was daunting.

Lesson #2: No single person should be responsible for implementing a strategic plan. The entire organization must hold its vision and be accountable for its success.

By my second year as executive director, when I was feeling more confident about how to include my board in keeping the momentum of the plan going, the COVID pandemic arrived. All thoughts of multi-year goals and long-term outcomes vanished. For over two years, ACSO went into full crisis response mode as we worked overtime to support and advocate for our music community while also cancelling our in-person conferences and figuring out how to sustain ourselves.

Even though we were not focusing on the plan, we found that by stepping up for our music community during the pandemic, we actually achieved many of our strategic goals anyway. For example, one of our pre-pandemic strategic plan objectives was to create an advocacy agenda that would influence legislation or policies for the good of the California orchestra community. ACSO's work during the pandemic to fight for relief funding and reopening guidelines for orchestras became our de facto advocacy agenda.

Other goals in the plan seemed less important in light of the crisis at hand, such as ensuring that our services were differentiated from other arts service organizations. This seemed irrelevant during the pandemic when it was clear that arts service organizations needed to come together as a unified force for the wider arts community, rather than differentiate ourselves.

Lesson #3: Sometimes well-intentioned goals become irrelevant or must take a back seat when the environment around you changes, and that's ok.

When our strategic plan expired in 2021, we made the decision not to immediately begin working on a new one. The pandemic was still heavily upon us, although glimmers of recovery were visible on the horizon. But it felt too soon to talk about the future while we were still trying to survive the present.

Instead, as a placeholder for a strategic plan, for two years we developed annual organizational goals, prioritizing responsiveness, nimbleness, creativity, and growth in the short-term, knowing the time would eventually be right to re-focus our energies on the longer term.

Lesson #4: Short-term planning is powerful! Even if you don’t have an “official” multi-year strategic plan, your organization needs some kind of roadmap to ensure that you are fulfilling your mission and making an impact.

That time finally came in 2023. With our field in recovery mode and our own services being utilized at maximum capacity (our member engagement tripled during the pandemic!), we knew it was time to take all that we had learned about our role in the arts ecosystem and our relationship with our members and pour it into a new strategic plan.

ACSO Board President Elizabeth Shribman asked new board member and veteran orchestra leader, Paul Meecham, to lead our strategic planning committee, as he was fresh off completing a new strategic plan for his own organization, the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. He assembled a motivated committee that included me, Elizabeth, and board members Ellen Armour Stein, Chelsea Chambers, Jamei Haswell, and Dean McVay.

The first thing the committee determined was that we would not hire an outside consultant this time around. We would develop the plan ourselves. ACSO was in an entirely different place in 2023 than in 2017. We had stable leadership, and because of our hundreds of Virtual Peer Forums over the pandemic, our relationship with our community was stronger than ever. We already had much of the information and insight we needed to design a path forward. We just needed to analyze and apply it.

Lesson #5: If you are going to DIY your strategic plan, an experienced Strategic Planning Committee Chair and strong Committee are vital, as everyone must be disciplined and committed to stay on track to get it done.

We got to work in October 2023 with a full board and staff strategic planning session. We assessed the outcomes of our prior 2018-21 plan, conducted a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of ACSO, and brainstormed blue-sky possibilities as if there were no limits. 

The Strategic Planning Committee also benchmarked with strategic plans from other arts service organizations and arts organizations for ideas and inspiration.

The Committee then collaborated with our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Committee to update our Mission, Vision, and Values, embedding equity principles within.

Lesson #6: Equity should not be a siloed component of your values and vision. It should be woven into everything you do and become part of the fabric of your organization.

The two committees also worked together to develop questions for a member survey, which we sent out in January 2024. From the survey, we learned that nothing was "broken" with ACSO and member satisfaction was quite high. Here are some of my favorite responses from the survey.

• "ACSO is our most important industry resource."
• "ACSO changed my life by introducing me to a career I Iove and lifelong friendships I cherish!"
• "We found out about grants via ACSO newsletters and received them. That made a huge impact."
• "ACSO has provided the vocabulary for me to articulate to our staff, Board, and community the value of what we do and why it's important in our community and in our state."

Even with all that encouragement and praise, we also learned that there were specific ways members were asking for more support. For example, we heard that our members want more opportunities to connect with one another and they want more information around fundraising and audience development trends.

In addition to the member survey, we were planning to bring in an outside facilitator to conduct stakeholder interviews or focus groups to get even more input from the field, but unfortunately we ran out of time and resources. This was disappointing but something that we still hope to do as a way to hold ourselves accountable to the impact of our strategic framework.

Lesson #7: Stakeholder feedback in the form of a survey was vitally important to our planning process. The more that can be elicited in a variety of ways, the better. Build enough room in your timeline to do as much as possible.

The committee distilled all this information and presented to the full board for review a streamlined, two-page Strategic Framework with five focus areas and corresponding objectives. We made an intentional decision to call it a “framework” rather than a “plan” to keep it flexible and responsive. The pandemic taught us that we didn’t want to be locked into irrelevant goals if the environment around us changes significantly.

Lesson #8: The best strategic plans are designed to be changed. We can’t predict the future, so plans need to be adaptable.

The final step was for the ACSO staff to take the framework developed by the committee and approved by the board, and come up with annual initiatives that would operationalize it over five years. This proved to be a challenging exercise at first and a big learning moment for me as a leader.

My first inclination was to gather my team and take all our ideas, plus suggestions from our board and members, and, in just one planning session, create a comprehensive five-year workplan, complete with innovative new programs and increased capacity. No big deal, right?

Turns out, no. This was not the right approach. It was completely overwhelming to all of us, especially since we were doing this work shortly before the ACSO conference, our busiest time of year. It just created anxiety and confusion and we all felt like our plates were a billion times more full. The result was that the work ground to a halt for a short time.

Lesson #9: It can be difficult for staff to both manage day-to-day organizational operations while also carving out the requisite time and space to engage in strategic work.

After consulting with my Strategic Planning Chair, I narrowed the staff’s focus to work on each of the five years one at a time. What work could the staff do in 2024-25 that would support the strategic framework? Then next year, we will develop the 2025-26 initiatives, and so on.

Using this new approach, and breaking it up over several staff discussions, we much more effectively put together a list of proposed Year 1 Initiatives and presented them to the Strategic Planning Committee. Twice they sent us back to whittle them down. They encouraged us to resist the urge to do too much and to consider eliminating things we are already doing if they are not impactful to our community. For example, we had to force ourselves to focus on implementing one new program, instead of series of programs, and to save things in "idea parking lots" to revisit for Years 2 - 5 of the plan, rather than putting them all in Year 1.

Lesson #10: Even if you have created a very motivating and exciting strategic plan, don’t over-promise and under-deliver on its initiatives. Even small changes can have big impacts.

Having now gone through strategic planning twice with ACSO in two different ways, I see the merits in both bringing in outside help as well as doing it all internally. But if you choose the DIY route, be prepared that you will need a lot of self-discipline to stay on track and someone (likely the executive director) will need to take on the administrative workload. There were many moments along the way where it was a struggle for me to balance daily operational demands with the time needed to think deeply and write thoughtfully for strategic planning. Fortunately I had a very engaged and understanding Committee that was willing to push back the timeline and lift out less critical elements (like focus groups) so we could complete the job at hand.

Regardless of how you develop your plan, make it inspirational but do-able, and hold yourself accountable to it on a regular basis. A plan is only as good as its execution. Paul Meecham suggests keeping a Strategic Planning Committee (or some kind of oversight group) intact after the plan is complete to periodically evaluate progress and report on deliverables.

And if your plan changes along the way, it is not a failure – it’s a win! It means that you are monitoring your plan and care enough about it to adapt it when necessary.

Plans exist to help us realize our missions…to make the most impact possible on those we serve. That is my hope for ACSO’s new framework, which you can read here. I welcome your thoughts and would love to see YOUR strategic plans - send me an email!

Thank you to the entire ACSO Board and Staff, and especially the following individuals, for your thoughtful contributions to ACSO’s new Strategic Framework:

ACSO 2023-24 Strategic Planning Committee

• Paul Meecham, Chair
• Ellen Armour Stein
• Chelsea Chambers
• Jamei Haswell
• Dean McVay
• Elizabeth Shribman, Board President

ACSO 2023-24 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Committee

• Nora Brady, Co-Chair
• John Wineglass, Co-Chair
• Jessica Bejarano
• Connor Bogenreif