Giovanni Strategic Planning
The TLDR version
By seizing the down-time of COVID isolation, I devised and facilitated a set of workshops that would bring the Giovanni Consort to a 5 Star Anniversary concert, hosted by committee members who now quote elements of our co-created strategic plan.
In April-2020, COVID-19 hit the arts community like flash flood. One week, my singer friends had full performing calendars for the whole year and the next, the first cancellations struck. One lead to another and another and suddenly there was no more live music in Perth. All my full-time singer friends were suddenly out of work and any who did teaching on the side turned to Zoom calls or whatever other casual work hadn’t also evaporated. Before too long, a charity I act as Treasurer for was facing the same question. In fact, it wasn’t really a question, it was a matter of how and when to send the notices to subscribers and patrons announcing the cancellation of our four concerts in 2020. Suddenly the committee had no concert series to deliver and was looking for some hope for choral music in Perth.
The Giovanni Consort make a come back at the Government House Ballroom
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This was an opportunity for us. 2020 was the 25th Anniversary year of The Giovanni Consort, Perth’s professional choir. 2020 was also the year where the committee were more capable than any time in the last decade (I’d know, I joined the committee as a publicist in 2008). It wasn’t time to stop. This was a time to envisage our future and align on what we should focus this capable committee on creating when the worst of COVID had past. It was a time for strategic planning.I write this review of our strategic planning efforts soon after our triumphal first concert for 2020. Twelve months earlier, David from The West Australian Newspaper gave us 3.5/5 stars. This time, he gave the concert a 5/5 star review. I felt proud that the write-up reflected the achievement of so many of the strategic goals that we set back in May 2020 and that were brought about by a focused and united committee. So, in an environment characterised by isolation and social distancing, how did we bring this committee together?
The strategic planning cycle was a set of exercises over two 4 hour workshops to open up committee members to what was possible then to choose the areas to focus on to bring out the most important goals for the committee to align on.
Learning how far apart we were
Survey to baseline without anchoring.
Look for areas where groups are more or less aligned on their vision for the future to guide discussion.
We started with a commitment to build a shared vision: One that would grant new members of the committee a sense of purpose and autonomy to go and create, building mastery along the way. It would also have to socially distanced, discarding many of the typical techniques used to do this in a workshop space. To align on our vision, we would need to understand how far apart we were to start with.
With my exposure to strategic development and team alignment in a corporate setting, I lead the agenda, kicking off with an exercise to bring out the diverse views of the group and avoid anchoring of members and the anchoring bias that often limits the effectiveness of a general brainstorming approach. To get broad coverage, I canvased the committee on some of the questions we could ask ourselves to uncover our preferences for the organisation’s future. The questions covered areas such as artistic vision and style, our people/performers and administration/money/commercialism. Through an online survey in Google Forms, it was possible to quickly get a view of where the committee (and later the members) were on what they expected the group to go. We included a video overview of the strategic planning from day 1 to include members in the process and to give them some context to the questions.
Workshop 1/2: In real life but apart - Divergent thought
Being in Perth, WA, we were not subject COVID restrictions for very long but we still needed to maintain social distancing for many months. We realised that post-it notes and shared whiteboards wouldn’t be acceptable so turned to an online canvas. in our first of two in-person workshops, our focus was to divergent thought to uncover the breadth of ideas embodied in our committee.
MURAL was a helpful tool for this and allowed us to get all our ideas on to an online canvas during initial brainstorming activities on brand and identity. We did this in real-time in a classroom where we could speak, remaining >2m apart at all times. For almost all participants, this was the first time they had been in a room with people they didn’t live with following a month of hard lock-down. We moved on to a basic SWOT analysis to add to that diverging palate of ideas then closed if off with the survey results from the committee members. Charted trends helped us to identify areas where the committee thought very differently so we could hash out be bases for that difference in vision. The anonymity of the survey comments really granted the space for less popular views or ideas from the more introverted committee members who might not always get their comment out during open conversation.
When combined with the opening activities around the SWOT analysis, we were quickly able to align on key areas for our future consolidation and growth. Part of the feedback from the committee survey review was a consensus that we would benefit from wider engagement with the full organisation member base in a similar survey, many of whom had deeper roots in the organisation than the current committee. We closed day one with heads full of diverse ideas about our future, some empathy for our other committee members and some time to digest ahead of the second day.
Together but physically apart. While we had the canvas and capability to go fully online, we chose to meet up in person and take in non-verbal ques while contributing to shared online canvases.
Workshop 2/2: Coming together - Distilling our vision
We came back 2 weeks later to kick off with the member survey results. Reviewing this data took us to the most divergent point of our strategic planning process. We started the workshop with some silent reflection on the key insights from the survey, flagging what surprised them and what made them happy. Discussion on member points of view helped the committee to validate whether their vision aligned with that of the members they represented and to bring a strong level of empathy in to the rest of the day. In addition, it put the committee in a good place to remind themselves where we got to in the previous workshop. After some reflection, it was time for us to switch from our divergent mode in to a converging one. This was a good opportunity to use a vote to get a pulse from the team on what the highest priority areas were for the committee’s attention over a 5 year period given all they had seen and heard so far.
With votes awarded to the ‘black, theme circles’ on the canvas, we saw some clear trends on the key themes that resonated with the committee. We could now start getting in to the nitty gritty of converging on the definitions of what good looked like in those thematic areas. For example, when it came to audience growth, we didn’t just stop at a 'focus on growing the audience’. Through discussion and facilitator lead questions, we got to the more objective view of number of attendees at each of our larger scale concerts. Flagging the numbers aligned the team on what constituted big and small audience size. For broader and more perception-driven areas, we could focus on what our singers and audience would say as a test for whether in 5 years we would be able to say that we achieved the goals of our 5 year strategy. These anecdotes helped us cut through the situation where committee members nodded in agreement but were really thinking completely different things. As a facilitator, having had some time with the committee preliminary survey results really helped to notice when we were at risk of settling for shallow alignment.
Once our 5 year targets were locked in, we faced the reality of capacity in our not-for-profit organisation and asked “if we were not able to deliver every strategic goal, which would be the one that we would care about achieving the most?” That helped us prioritise which goals to refine in to shorter-term targets. At a 1-year resolution, we asked “what is the most valuable and feasible component of our 5 year goal that we might be able to realise over the next year?” This where the really meaty discussion happened which enabled us to reality check based on what we had observed of our progress over the last couple of years and what our capacity as a committee would more likely allow us to pursue. For example, when it came to Experiential concerts, the 5 year goal was quite broad albeit one the committee aligned on. When diving in to what elements we would want to see materialise by the close of 2021, we were able to flag that visual and light design was an important aspect in levelling up the visual quality of our performances. Later, when we had the financial security established via ticket sales for our anniversary concert, we could swiftly align on investing some of our profits to upgrade the lighting design for the concert. Once we had worked through the top four priority areas or themes, we agreed that we had covered what we needed to focus over the next 12 months and closed our second workshop.
This one page plan became our reference point for future committee meetings and decision points.
Having built our one page strategic plan on a page, we realised that we needed a higher frequency of check-ins within the committee to deep dive and plan to achieve 3 categories of outcome around artistic planning, audience engagement and financial viability. We formed three sub-committees to enable committee members to focus on the areas they really cared about but agreed that we would use our monthly committee meetings to check in with each other to ensure we were all still heading in the same direction and weren’t falling down when it came to inter-dependencies between groups.
Deploying and testing our strategy
It wasn’t too long till we had a chance to test how invested the committee were in the realisation of our strategy. Within a COVID-19 environment where long term season planning our concerts was largely pointless, an opportunity arose to stage our 25th anniversary concert. This was originally one of the 4 concerts in our cancelled subscription series and required some reinvention. The State Government was looking for ways to re-ignite the economy after the short slumber of lockdown in Perth. Fortunately, the office of our Vice-regal patron, The Honourable Kim Beazley AC, Governor of Western Australia, reached out to offer the Government House Ballroom to us as one of the first concert venues to open in Perth. As Treasurer, I put together some cashflow scenarios and soon we knew it could be a winner, given a list of COVID related assumptions played out in our favour. When running through the concert assumptions at the next Committee meeting, the right questions started emerging: “Can we ensure that this concert reflects the level of excellence that defines the brand of The Giovanni Consort?”, “Can we develop a consistent artistic theme and story from announcement of the concert through to the repertoire and program design?”, “Will this be profitable?” and “Can we close down this concert at a weeks notice if COVID cases flare up again and audience capacity decreases?
I’m proud to say two members of the committee brought up the strategic plan one-pager to guide their decisions as we landed on the call to announce our our anniversary concert! Later in the meeting, it also helped us to choose not to pursue a distraction in the form of a composition competition, giving the committee the language to call out that such an investment was not consistent with our 1 year goals but might become relevant in the 2 year horizon once more.
Learning
The earlier 2018 season planning cycle was more tactical and an expectation of physical facilitation made it harder to explore survey results and offline data to broaden perspectives. It was easier for participants to ‘leave it in the room’ rather than be invested in a plan that they would keep referring back to.
The Giovanni Consort has continued to be a fantastic platform to test my hypotheses on topics of motivation, light-touch leadership and strategic alignment. In 2018, I had my first attempt at bringing a different form of the committee on a path of long-term visioning and growth. The committee at the time were enthusiastic and interesting in distilling learnings from our best concerts and cautions from our worst concerts. At the time, I lacked some of the techniques to take a ‘concert season planning’ through to more of a strategic view on the deeper outcomes that the concert season would deliver. I lacked the engagement approach that created the pull from committee members to align a one-year plan in to a longer term vision for the organisation - there was no appetite for long-termism.
COVID gave us a unique opportunity to pause and carve out time from an operational schedule to think of what good might look like in the next 5 years time. The learning I take away from the success of this strategic planning cycle is that if one is to plan out the future of an organisation, it needs space from the short-termism of an operational cycle. Only then can one be fully present and to uncover what really matters to the organisation and it’s future.
As physical restrictions subside in Western Australia, the opportunity to put new concerts is re-emerging. As we enter our planning phase for 2021, I look forward to how well our strategy acts as a northern star for decision making. It will continue to be a matter of making the strategy real, alive and something that is part to the day-to-day operations of the group. Without alignment to a strategy, we scatter and create divergent reasoning to describe the goals of the organisation. With this not-for-profit experience in hand, I continue to ask questions on strategic alignment in the corporate context, in particular, when we bow to projects that are favoured due to recency bias over a considered prioritisation approach. Winning projects must gain favor when nourished by discussion and alignment between stakeholders who are considerate of the strategic goals of the organisation. As I get more involved with the deployment of an emerging corporate strategy at Synergy, I look forward to forming the strategic communications that enable these sorts of conversations that will help our senior leaders align on the sort of vision our executive have for the business.
