Imagine you head up a non-profit. Unfortunately, your strategic planning leads to little more than abandoned initiatives. You believe that strategy is important, but why does it fail to inspire the organisation in ways you see in the for-profit world?
You are familiar with the scene. Two days of retreat. A facilitator in front, or perhaps copies of last year’s template. Your agenda includes the usual SWOT analysis, stakeholder landscape, and priority setting.
Then somewhere in the afternoon of day one, the energy drops. The language you are using does not seem to fit. The mission of your not-for-profit is being lost in discussions about “market positioning” or “competitive advantage”. No competitors exist, but nobody objects because everyone is trying to make it work.
By the end, the document gets written. It is presented to the board. And then, quietly, it is filed away.
If the scene is familiar, I want to offer you a different, unsettling point of view.
Flawed For-Profit Tools
The strategy frameworks you are struggling to adapt have their roots in the way the topic is taught. Since the 1980s, more than 80 per cent of MBA cases have been drawn from competitive, for-profit industries. They assume that strategy is all about defeating an enemy as described in war or sport.
This zero-sum analogy was ideal for organisations whose survival depends on winning against competitors. It motivates.
But what if you lead a co-operative? Or a professional body? Or even a local monopoly such as JPS? That existential pressure is non-existent. Tools that require this competitive urgency as their fuel run out of steam when an executive team has to force them to fit. This explains the drop in enthusiasm.
There is a deeper problem still. Competitive tools are not temporally neutral. They are designed to produce short-cycle victories. Schools teach students to win the next quarter, exploit the next market tactic, and defeat the next rival. For organisations whose mission requires a ten, twenty or thirty-year horizon, that short-cycle bias is not a minor inconvenience.
It is a reorientation away from purpose. The document you filed not only asked the wrong questions. It is a sign that a truncated timeframe was assumed from the start.
Lessons from the Co-operative Group
The Co-operative Group in the United Kingdom learnt this the hard way. At its peak, it was one of the world’s largest member-owned organisations, operating across food retail, insurance, and legal services.
In 2013, it almost collapsed. The reasons were instructive.
The co-op had spent years trying to grow the way a for-profit competitor would. It acquired Somerfield supermarkets, merged its bank with Britannia Building Society, and expanded aggressively across several sectors.
The logic was classic: get bigger, gain ground, outpace rivals.
But the Co-op was not structured for that logic. Its board was member-elected, its accountability diffuse, its identity rooted in values rather than market share.
When the bank’s merger exposed a £1.5 billion capital hole, the deeper problem became visible. The organisation had drifted so far from its mission as a co-operative that nobody had been asking the right questions. Not “how do we win?” but “how do we stay true to our purpose across generations to come?” The tools being used rewarded short-term expansion. Nobody had built a process to protect the long-term objective.
The Co-op’s drift took decades to surface. But history offers a more extreme version of the same pattern.
The SPG Example
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) was founded in 1701 with a single stated mission: to spread Christianity throughout the English colonies.
However, within a generation, it owned a plantation in Barbados with three hundred enslaved Africans, each branded with the word “SOCIETY”.
The business tools it adopted – short-term expansion, revenue generation, asset acquisition – were rational and competitive. And they consumed the mission entirely.
A Process for a Different Purpose
The antidote is not a better adaptation of competitive tools. It is a different process intended to preserve purpose.
It begins with a rigorous snapshot of today. This involves assessing the history of mission health, stakeholder trust, and resource reality.
From there, set a target year some 15 to 30 years in the future. The horizon should be distant enough to spur creativity while encompassing existential threats.
For the chosen horizon, generate multiple scenarios. “What could the world look like, and which future best represents our purpose?”
With the selected scenario, backcast to the present to highlight what must be true at critical junctures.
Finally, lay out the details of a short-term plan.
You are no longer asking how to win. You are asking how to remain faithful to your purpose across generations, and that changes everything.
Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search his prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com.
