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A plan that helps you say no with clarity and conviction and confidence, not guilt. A plan that sets you up to lead with focus and strategy and purpose. Three of my very favorite things. So let's dive in. I want to start with the invisible cost of saying yes. Most of the leaders that I work with operate from a place of yes by default because it is really exciting to think about all of the different ways we can have impact. Especially because the leaders that I work with are leading teams of equally committed, passionate people. And when that happens, there is a wonderful smorgasbord of ideas and plans. And over the course of any given 12 month period, more ideas and plans get added to the table. Right? So the yes by default. Let's do it. I want to be supportive. That sounds exciting. That is often, without realizing it, the place that people are starting from. When you're under resourced, when funders and maybe donors are asking to see more impact, when you're staring down community needs that are urgent and growing, it can feel like you have to take every opportunity you can to address those community needs and solve those problems and meet the funders where they are. Right? So the yes by default comes both from a place of passion and, and commitment and a place of urgency. But there is a real cost to yes by default. So those are the benefits, right? Impact, excitement, vision, commitment. Here's the cost. Team, capacity, Brand, clarity. Money. Misspent. Every single yes costs something. I'm gonna say that again. Every Single yes costs something. And when your annual plan is built without filters, every single yes becomes a future stressor that you then have to find a way to afford. And when I say it costs something, often that something is money, right? I work with organizations that are trying to make the shift from program funding to general operating support funding. And one of the things that keeps them stuck is when you get program funding, you have to do more to get that program funding. You have to say yes to things that really you might not ordinarily say yes to. So that can be a more visible cost. But some of the invisible costs are things that lead people to say or to feel. Everything feels high stakes. Every success, right, every win somehow seems to create more work for my team. I look at my team and they're coming to me and they're saying that they're burned out, but somehow we're not actually making the kind of progress we ought to be making towards our impact goals. These are real questions, and they're the kinds of questions that if you are thinking about them or thinking of them, if they come to you, they're often a signal that this invisible cost of yes by default is at play. Because you know what those questions sound like to me? They sound like a plan that didn't create real guardrails, right? A plan of aspirations and good intentions that didn't actually protect time and money and energy in a strategic and intentional way. So this is why I say if your plan doesn't explicitly help you say no, then it's not a strategic annual plan. It's just an overwhelming to do list, in fact. So why does this happen, right? Why do even the most well intentioned, well crafted plans still leave teams feeling buried? Because most plans are task lists in disguise. They catalog everything that you could do, everything you want to do, everything you are doing, maybe rearranged a little bit on the page, everything that would be great if you had unlimited time, money and staff, right? The time, the money and the staff you in your heart wish you had. But they rarely answer the strategic question, what will we not do? Often just in how planning is set up, how it's structured, we go into it thinking, what are our goals? You absolutely have to ask that question. And for those of you who have listened to my miniseries on strategic planning or any of my podcast episodes where I talk about planning, goals are obviously critical. But if you stop there, if you don't say, what are our goals and what will we not do? Then you wind up with a list of what you could do want to do are already doing, etc. So here's what I see a lot during planning season and I absolutely do this. We romanticize this time of year as a vision season only, right? And I say only because it is in part a vision season. I very firmly believe that the priorities that we set for the year and the goals that we set and the parameters of our work should be rooted. Envisioning in dreaming about what's possible and stretching ourselves just a little bit. I think that's where the juice comes from, right? That's where the energy comes from, really revisiting that cathedral that you are all laying bricks to build together. And I think it's beautiful. But vision without constraint only leads to overreach. And when we're under pressure, our brains can skip over complexity, right? It's called cognitive simplification. We all do it. We underestimate the invisible labor, the timelines, the back and forth via email that actually span a couple weeks instead of a couple days. The human cost of executing every single idea or goal in the plan. So we make beautiful, aspirational, vision rooted plans that quietly depend on staff working nights and weekends, or on leaders being superhuman. And then we wonder why things fall apart by July. Now, I say this with love. Your plan is not too ambitious, right? I am not saying don't have ambitious, bold goals. What I'm saying is you will achieve your ambitious, bold goals if you also add filters, right? You don't need a long detailed plan for 2026. You need a sharper plan for 2026. So here are the three filters that I use with folks inside my next level nonprofit program. They're the three filters that I map out in the annual planning playbook inside of Elevate. And they're the three filters that I use in my own business planning as I sit down to think the year coming, whichever year we are planning in. These are the questions that turn what could be a bloated wish list, a catalog of to dos, into a focused strategic annual plan. So here's the first one. The first filter is strategic alignment. And this is making sure that your annual plan is rooted in and anchored by your long term plan. So the specific question here, the filter question is, does this goal or activity move us measurably closer to our 1 to 2 ist highest priorities in our strategic plan. So just because something aligns with your vision, with with your mission, doesn't necessarily mean it aligns with your current strategy, right? Your current strategic direction. And part of why, when I do strategic Planning. When I talk about strategic planning, I talk about how important long term priorities are. Part of why they are so important is because they boundaries for us. And we can ask every year, if we do this work, are we doing the kind of work that will get us to our vision? Right, that's the priorities help you answer that question. They are proxy for moving in the right direction. So you want to make sure that your goals and your activities in your plan are explicitly aligned with your current priorities. So you can do this on the front end as you're crafting goals, and then also on the back end as a gut check, look at your plan, look at your annual plan and ask how many of our goals this year explicitly line up with or align with one of the priorities? At least one of the priorities in our long term strategic plan. So you're looking for 85% at the lowest, right? 85% of what's in your annual plan needs to clearly link back up to one of your strategic priorities in your long term plan. And if it's lower than that, it's a yellow or a red light.
