The Most Important Idea

"Our challenge, like many small organizations, is prioritizing among the many issues we're involved with. We need some help in prioritizing goals and developing a concrete strategy and action plan for staff to follow."

This recent inquiry about strategic planning services reflects a common and timeless problem, universal to all kinds of organizations. There's usually no problem coming up with many excellent ideas, especially in a group of passionate and creative people. There usually is a problem, however, with choosing what ideas to focus on first.

An unlikely source for a similar situation is found in Vologorov's Trotsky about the notorious Russian revolutionary. Speaking of a colleague, Trotsky said "Martov has always had many ideas, brilliant and subtle ones, but he had not the one idea that was more important than any other: he did not know what to do next."

That's one of the biggest values of a strategic planning retreat: not just coming up with ideas, but coming up with what you should do next. That is the one idea that is more important than any other if you are hoping to take action that makes progress towards your goals.