Nathan Bussard, Associate Director of Consulting Services, on how strategic and operation planning processes strengthen teams and cures founder’s loneliness syndrome
Without a road map, it is easy to lose your way on the journey of accomplishing your goals. In this sense, an operations or strategic plan can be an organization’s greatest internal and external asset in providing realistic and actionable steps toward your goals.
A detailed, action-based plan made in tandem with staff and community members can take many different shapes and forms. This may include a big-picture strategic plan (which is not always the right option for many groups), an operations plan, a fundraising plan, an event plan, or a programming plan, depending on your needs.
This March alone, I have had the privilege to partner with three of our clients on big planning projects – two operations plans and a strategic plan kick-off. When partnering with these clients, I was surprised that three results of their process were just as important as the road map itself.
Nathan Bussard
Associate Director of Consulting Services
1. Planning gives soil to everyone’s ideas
Imagine a garden bed in comparison to soil just scattered around your backyard. The planning process is the garden bed to bring up your team’s ideas in a structured, concentrated way. Even if your organizational culture is built so that everyone is free to express their voice (which, in my opinion, it should be), another important thing can be missing in the day-to-day – putting those voices in the same room, at the same time, answering the same questions with the future of the organization as the “garden bed” for those ideas.
Strategic or operations planning that engages staff removes the illusion that defining the organization’s future is solely the founder’s responsibility (or prerogative) and helps alleviate the loneliness so many founders and executive leaders can experience.
This is what I saw in the operations planning process with Black Trans Femme Artists (BTFA) in April 2026. The BTFA team members present noted that they enjoyed the planning process, and it gave them a structured, tactile environment to share their ideas for the organization that they had such a passion for. During the planning exercises and discussions, BTFA staff worked together as a team to figure out the precise steps to bring the collective ideas to fruition, rather than only developing one person’s idea. It was a truly collective effort that everyone was involved in. While everyone had the soil to place their individual ideas, the collective team worked together to cultivate, prune, and water the ideas that moved the organization toward their mission and shared vision.
2. Planning gives staff a chance to take greater ownership
For me, the way that we at Benvenuti Arts approach planning not only sheds light on individual ideas (which already strengthens the team), but also allows staff members to take ownership in the process of executing the collective goals. Creating such an environment naturally leads to team members taking greater ownership and leadership, ultimately ensuring that the founder or executive director has a team of support in bringing the plan to life. It is not that the teams did not want to actualize their ideas before, but that the right conditions were created for them to propose an initiative, to elaborate the steps according to their needs and capacity, to alter systems, and more.
Strategic or operations planning that engages staff also lets the founder see where the organization is going beyond their vision. It removes the illusion that defining the organization’s future is solely the founder’s responsibility (or prerogative) and helps alleviate the loneliness so many founders and executive leaders can experience when leading a smaller organization heavily reliant on them. It shifts the dynamic from the founder being a planner of every part of the organization’s life to being a guide with their team to achieve these goals.
The day-to-day of a small nonprofit can feel wrought with the pressure to say yes to everything that yields financial support. For many executive leaders, it can feel like operating alone or without clear direction to make those decisions. Proper planning tools help organizations have centered goals that act as guardrails in this decision-making process.
While working with the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media to kick off their strategic planning, it became really clear how important it would be to solidify the shift in ownership of the organization’s goals from solely the Executive Director to other staff members. This shift not only naturally feels right for the organization in its life cycle, but also begins to create the space that the executive leader needs to evolve the organization through collaborative decision-making.
As we see how much it actually takes to execute one small idea by discussing the budgeting and the way we tie the goals to their financial weight, importance, or impact, the whole team better understands the founder’s and leadership team’s thinking and day-to-day concerns. It helps the team to take ownership of all the parts of executing the goals from the start, rather than just a small, compartmentalized component of it. They get to see the bigger picture, which creates not only a deeper sense of collaboration but also a sense of responsibility for implementing an idea that a person brought forth and that was included in the final plan.
3. Planning creates a tool to prepare for change
The world is chaotic, and so many things can happen within days in an organization – funding shifts, people leave, opportunities open up. Planning as a tool allows organizations to have a foundation to make decisions during the next 3-5 years grounded in a clear understanding of mid and long-term goals rather than out of panic, intuition, or ephemeral trends. Benvenuti Arts supports our clients in executing plans that build a road map that clients regularly review and adjust as the scenery changes on their journey to the end goal. The planning tool we create allows organizations to have flexible budget documents and goals to make an optimal choice and navigate next steps and challenges as they appear.
For Omnium Circus, which is at the end of an operations planning process, a flexible planning tool is essential given the way the circus world works. Omnium regularly has new opportunities appear or has artists who need to shift schedules. The key part of our planning process was to help establish the tools to assess these shifts, adjust budgets, shift goals, and make the choices that best align with where they want to go.
The day-to-day of a small nonprofit can feel wrought with the pressure to say yes to everything that yields financial support (especially in our current environment), and for many executive leaders, it can feel like you are operating alone or without clear direction to make those decisions. Proper planning tools help organizations have centered goals that act as guardrails in this decision-making process. Even if the road to the goal ends up completely blocked (and it often does), our clients have used the planning tools Benvenuti Arts developed with them to find the next route and adjust accordingly in a far less painful way.
Overall, my main takeaway from working with groups on this process is how the goals themselves are not the most important part. The process is most beneficial in my eyes. It creates stronger teams, gives founders a support structure, shifts the roles of executive leadership doing everything to leading their team, and supports planning inside an organization in all forms. It is always surprising that the process of “how will we plan” is more impactful than the “plan” itself.
