Here’s a key exercise you should do as a CEO or Executive Director before starting a strategic planning
process: turn your organizational chart upside down.

Take it into your next leadership team meeting. At the new top of the chart, focus on your frontline staff
— the people closest to the everyday work of your organization. Alongside them, write the names of the
communities and people you serve and the partners you work with.

Draw the connections between them.

These are the people who often know the most about how your organization actually works in the
world. They experience the barriers, relationships, opportunities, and consequences of your decisions
differently than those of us sitting farther away from the work.

Now ask yourselves: If the knowledge and experience of these people had much greater influence over
the decisions we make, what would change?

• What core assumptions about the world would they question?
• What problem or barrier would they seek to solve first?
• What does it really take to do this work?
• What would they make the number one priority?
• What do they know that we don’t?

But then stop speculating.

Ask your leadership team:

• How will we bring the knowledge and experience of frontline staff, the people we serve, and our
  partners into this planning process?
• How will we make sure we don’t simply listen to them, but actually collaborate with them?
• How will we create an experience where their knowledge can shape the questions we ask, the
  choices we consider, and the direction we ultimately take?
• How will we make their participation meaningful because we genuinely believe the plan will be
  better because they helped create it?

And, perhaps most importantly: How will we strengthen our own knowledge and experience by trusting
theirs?

Too often, organizations think about engagement as a way to gather information. We interview frontline
staff. Hold focus groups with people we serve. Ask partners for feedback. Send out surveys. Then the
people with formal authority go back into a room and make the decisions. Turning the org chart upside
down asks us to do something different. It asks us to reconsider whose knowledge carries weight.

Frontline staff know what happens when strategy meets reality. People who experience our programs
and services know what it feels like to encounter the systems we have created. Partners see how our
work connects or fails to connect with the larger community and ecosystem around us.

Each sees something different. And each knows something leadership can’t know on its own. Of course
none of this makes leadership less important — it makes leadership more demanding. Because the job is no longer simply to gather perspectives and then decide; it’s to create the conditions in which these different forms of knowledge can come together and influence what the organization sees, what it
chooses, and what it does next.

It means we stop assuming that formal authority determines whose knowledge matters most.

Image: Kingfiser, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons