I have sat in too many conference rooms with executive teams who just spent six figures on strategic plans. Beautiful documents. Clear priorities. Ambitious goals. The kind of plans that look impressive in board meetings.
And then, a few months into implementation, the calls start coming. Staff morale is tanking. Key leaders are resigning. Community partners feel blindsided by new initiatives they never heard about until implementation began.
The executive directors always sound exhausted. "We followed all the best practices," they tell me. "We did everything right."
She was not wrong. They had done everything the traditional strategic planning playbook tells you to do. They had hired experts. They had analyzed data. They had aligned on priorities.
What they had not done was ask the people most affected by those decisions what they actually needed.
Here is what we have normalized in strategic decision-making: speed over depth, clarity over complexity, alignment over authentic disagreement. We have been taught that "good strategy" means making tough calls quickly, communicating decisively, and moving forward with confidence.
And when budgets tighten or timelines compress, the first thing we cut is the messy, time-consuming work of genuine inclusion. We tell ourselves we will "circle back" with stakeholders. We will "socialize" the decisions after they are made. We skip the listening sessions because we are already behind schedule.
I get it. I have been there. When you are staring down a funding cliff or a board deadline, slowing down to build consensus feels like a luxury you cannot afford.
But here is what that urgency actually costs:
Trust erodes faster than you can rebuild it. Every decision made without input is a small withdrawal from the trust account. Staff start assuming leadership does not care what they think. Community partners begin to wonder if the partnership is real or performative. Eventually, people stop offering their insights altogether, and you are leading in an information vacuum.
Implementation stalls or fails entirely. When people do not understand why a decision was made or were not part of shaping it, they do not champion it. At best, you get compliance. At worst, you get quiet resistance. Either way, your strategy sits on a shelf while everyone waits for the next new direction.
You solve the wrong problems. The view from the executive level is never the full picture. The program staff know which initiatives are actually working. The community members know what barriers you cannot see from your desk. When you skip the listening, you risk building sophisticated solutions to problems that do not matter most.
Somewhere along the way, "being strategic" became synonymous with being detached. Objective. Unemotional. As if caring too much about people's feelings would cloud our judgment or slow us down.
We have created a false binary: either you are strategic (rational, efficient, results-driven) or you are people-focused (soft, slow, overly concerned with feelings).
This is nonsense.
The most strategic thing you can do is center people in every decision. Not because it is nice. Because it works.
When a client wanted to shift how municipal leaders approached equity work, we did not start with a framework or a training deck. We started by listening to the leaders who were already doing this work in the hardest conditions. We asked what they needed, what was getting in their way, what small shifts would actually help.
The resulting strategy was not cleaner or simpler than what we might have designed in a conference room. But it was real. And it worked because the people implementing it had shaped it.
When I work with leadership teams now, I ask them to pause before any major strategic decision and answer three questions:
Who will be most affected by this decision, and have they shaped it? Not "have we informed them" or "have we gotten their input." Have they actually helped shape the decision itself? There is a world of difference.
What are we optimizing for, and at whose expense? Every strategic choice involves tradeoffs. Speed vs. inclusion. Efficiency vs. depth. Clarity vs. complexity. Name the tradeoff explicitly. Decide consciously rather than defaulting to urgency.
What might we be missing from our vantage point? This is the hardest question because it requires admitting we do not have the full picture. But it is also the most important one. The things you cannot see from the leadership level are often the things that will determine whether your strategy succeeds or fails.
These are not soft questions. They are strategic questions. They are the questions that separate plans that sit on shelves from strategies that create lasting change.
At The Collective Good, we have spent over a decade watching organizations struggle with the gap between aspiration and implementation. We have seen brilliant strategies fail because they were built without the people who had to execute them. We have seen well-intentioned leaders lose trust because they moved too fast to include the voices that mattered most.
And we have seen what happens when organizations do the harder work of building strategy with people, not for them.
It takes longer. It is messier. It requires sitting with disagreement and complexity. It means you will not always have the clean, decisive answer right away.
But the strategies that emerge are resilient. They are owned by the people implementing them. They account for realities that the leadership team could not see on their own. They create buy-in not through persuasion but through authentic co-creation.
This is what we call Humanized Strategy. Not strategy that is soft or slow, but strategy that is grounded in the reality that every decision, every plan, every action begins and ends with people.
It is not about choosing between being strategic and being human. It is about recognizing that you cannot actually be strategic without being human first.
If you are reading this and feeling the tension between the strategy you know you should be building and the shortcuts you are taking because of pressure or timelines or resource constraints, you are not alone.
Every social impact leader I know is navigating this tension. The pressure to move fast and the knowledge that rushing past people creates more problems than it solves. The need for clarity and the reality that the most important work is complex and cannot be reduced to a simple plan.
The question is not whether to slow down and include people. The question is: can you afford not to?
Because the hidden cost of strategic decision-making that excludes humanity is not just low morale or poor implementation.
It is the loss of the very thing that makes social change possible: trust, connection, and shared purpose.
And no strategic plan, no matter how sophisticated, can rebuild that once it is gone.
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