This interview featured in The Bind, published by Osch.
We’re joined by Peter Rimmer, a strategy and organisational development and design consultant with more than 20 years’ experience supporting charities and public bodies through change. We talk about why charity strategies fall short, and how organisations can get better at aligning ambition with reality.
Key takeaways:
- Strategy should live in everyday conversations, not sit on a shelf.
- The default three-year plan isn’t always the right answer.
- Ambition must match culture, skills and operating model.
- Good strategy needs time, reflection and diverse voices.
- Storytelling helps people see themselves in the direction of travel.
Writing a strategy can be daunting for any organisation. Where should charities begin?
There’s a tendency to see strategy as a fixed thing. But if you treat it as a process rather than an output, it becomes part of how you operate; this is where I’ve seen strategic capabilities improve significantly. It means having strategic conversations throughout the year, checking on progress, and treating strategy as something living. I’d always recommend revisiting your charitable objects and vision. Remember to ask: What are we here to do? What type of organisation do we need to be in order to deliver that? And it’s worth looking at your theory of change too. Ultimately the key question is: What type of strategy do we need right now?
How much has the external environment changed the way charities approach strategy?
Although Covid brought huge challenges, it also created an opportunity for charities to rethink strategy. It now feels like the world is moving faster than organisations can keep up with. That means charities need to ask questions like: How long should a strategy realistically run for? And how do you manage it in a shifting context? Many charities default to a three-year strategy, but my biggest advice is to challenge that. Why three years? Starting with ‘we need a three- or five-year strategy’ is usually the wrong place to begin.
So do strategies always need a timeframe or timeline?
I don’t think so, but timeframes can be useful. We should frame the conversation with: What challenges are we facing at this moment? Take the rise of emergent strategies for example. More organisations are saying, “We need something short-term to address where we are now, with a clear direction of travel, while checking regularly that we’re still on track.” So a timeline isn’t always needed, but for some organisations it’s helpful. How far you move away from that often comes down to your confidence in holding ongoing strategic conversations throughout the year.
Should charities revisit their strategy more often instead of treating it as fixed?
You obviously don’t want to swing from one direction to another, but if the strategy says ‘we’re going this way’ and the context has clearly shifted, it’s right to pause and ask if it’s still the right path. If revisiting your strategy in this scenario feels difficult, the issue may point to broader questions that need answering around culture, ways of working, risk appetite, and skills within the senior team and board. These things are all connected, and that’s where many charities get stuck – treating strategy in isolation when it’s actually part of a much wider system.
What other pitfalls do charities face when shaping their strategies?
Organisations often don’t link strategy to how it will actually be delivered. Sometimes an ambitious direction is set without considering whether there’s the structure or skills to achieve it, or the time it takes to acquire them. Another common pitfall is not creating space for strategic thinking. Without time to reflect – or space for different voices and lived experience – discussions become rushed and the loudest person in the room ends up shaping the strategy.
So how can charities structure those conversations so they’re genuinely strategic?
In a nutshell: better facilitation of the process. Some charities have organisational development teams with strong facilitation skills, but those skills aren’t always brought into senior strategic conversations. Sometimes it’s assumed the senior team can handle it themselves, but even experienced teams may need a facilitator to bring the discipline and structure those conversations require.
How realistic are charities about the time needed for strategic change?
I often see people thinking in, say, three-year windows, when in reality they’re facing a five- to ten-year change journey. They may not even be in post when the full benefits arrive, but the point is to lay the groundwork for the organisation to become stronger long term. Take the England football team. After decades without a final following 1966, we’ve seen two recently. But that journey started back in 2008 when they recognised they didn’t have the right talent pipeline.
What would you say to charities in firefighting mode trying to stay afloat?
Is a traditional fixed strategy always right? Smaller charities often work on a three- to six-month cycle, constantly on the treadmill of securing funding. In those situations, they need to ask: Does the strategy need to be more iterative because things keep changing? The key is being structured to have the right, timely conversations, balancing the short-term work needed for survival with a clear long-term sense of direction, and checking in every six or twelve months.
Does approach to strategy need to shift depending on the size or scale of a charity?
Small, community-based organisations can be just as well run as large charities, and the strategic process is just as important. However, smaller charities do need to be realistic about what can be achieved with the workforce and budget they have. I worked with a community organisation whose frontline staff rejected the idea of strategy altogether, seeing it as business-speak. So they created monthly listening circles to share what they were hearing from families and how the community was changing. As a result, they became really effective at iterative strategy without realising it: gathering insight each month, interpreting it together, and agreeing actions that still aligned with the overall direction. It reduced ad hoc decisions on the frontline and created a shared strategic process.
How does storytelling influence organisational development?
In my opinion, storytelling works best when it’s linked to strategy and organisational development. It helps people talk in a way that reflects the essence of the strategy, and that’s something really valuable. I worked with one charity that kept repeating the internal story: “We’re no good at change.” Someone challenged that, saying change was actually in their DNA. They mapped moments from their history where they had driven change and displayed them in the entrance of the building. Suddenly staff could see: “This is who we are.” That small intervention unlocked their confidence and helped them deliver the strategy and changed their story. At its core, culture is the stories we tell ourselves about how we do things. That’s why a beautifully written strategy on a shelf is useless. A reasonable strategy, communicated well and that people see themselves in, will take you much further.
There’s a lot of restructuring happening across the sector. Is it the right answer?
Restructuring can be the right answer, but only if you’re asking the right questions. The difficulty comes when it’s the only option left. Some of that’s environmental, but it’s also worth asking whether the right questions were raised early enough, and focus on building that skill set. If strategy is only reviewed every few years – or when the numbers stop working – decisions tend to be driven by crisis rather than intention. Not all restructures are avoidable, but building resilience matters. That means using organisational development not just for learning and development, but to improve how charities actually work.
What can charities do to set themselves up to work more effectively with each other?
There are many areas where charities already collaborate brilliantly, like with policy change and advocacy, but when it comes to organisational design and more technical areas like data, collaboration is thinner. Part of the issue is what charities consider their IP, when much of it is already public and not that sensitive anyway. Ultimately, it comes back to purpose. In the charity sector, success doesn’t have to come at the expense of others. More open collaboration on org design and strategic capability would strengthen the whole sector.
What practical steps help charities tell whether their strategy is working?
Break your strategy into simple, easy-to-understand areas and set measures that link back to them. KPIs alone are rarely helpful, so it’s a good idea to include qualitative approaches – listening practices, reflective spaces and structured conversations that bring real stories into the picture. One animal-welfare charity we worked with had a deep divide between volunteers in local branches and staff in adoption centres. They changed both their culture and the insights they could gather by creating shared decision-making boards that brought volunteers and staff together. That one change shifted the dynamic to deliver the strategy completely.
If the sector changed one thing about its approach to strategy, what should it be?
For me, it comes down to the skill sets of senior leaders. It’s really about organisational development – looking at strategy, the operating model and culture as one system. Leaders need to draw much more on the OD talent they have in their organisations, and also look more widely at the approaches and practices available to them.
If you’d like to know more about taking an OD led approach to developing strategy, get in touch.