How to Stop Planning and Start Doing

"Is your strategic plan collecting digital dust?"

That's the question every social impact leader needs to ask themselves. 

We've all been there — investing countless hours and resources into creating the perfect 3-year plan, only to have it sit unused on a shelf.

But what if there was a better way? A more agile approach that could energize your team and get your ideas into action?

Enter the Minimum Viable Strategy (MVS) framework.

In our latest episode of Designing Tomorrow, we break down this powerful tool for social impact leaders. We reveal:

• The 4 key steps to implementing MVS (and why most organizations get step 3 wrong)

• How to avoid "shiny object syndrome" when testing new ideas

• Why traditional strategic planning often fails — and how MVS can help fix that

• The #1 mistake leaders make when rolling out an experimental approach (hint: it's NOT because the ideas are bad)

Whether you're a seasoned nonprofit executive or an emerging social entrepreneur, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you move from analysis paralysis to decisive action.

Don't let fear of imperfection hold you back from making progress. Tune in now and learn how to harness the power of MVS to accelerate your impact.

Episode Highlights:

• [00:00] - Introduction to the concept of Minimum Viable Strategy (MVS), inspired by the tech world's Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach.
• [03:45] - Eric shares a personal story about overcoming "analysis paralysis" and adopting a bias toward action in his work at Cosmic.
• [06:50] - Jonathan reflects on applying a version of MVS at Seymour Center, focusing on storytelling experiments for climate resilience.
• [10:15] - Jonathan adds critical components to the MVS framework, emphasizing the importance of defining learning goals and decision-making triggers.
• [18:42] - Discussion on pitfalls like "shiny object syndrome" and the need for team capacity to iterate effectively on experimental strategies.

Notable Quotes:

• “Rather than creating one theory about how to reach a goal, embrace divergent thinking to test multiple strategies quickly.” - Eric Ressler [07:44]
• “Strategic plans often sit on a shelf getting dusty because the world has changed by the time they’re ready to be implemented.” - Jonathan Hicken [00:11]
• “We don’t know if ideas suck or succeed until we test them in the real world. It’s about action over contemplation.” - Eric Ressler [03:45]
• “Define what you’re hoping to learn upfront, and be clear about the triggers that will decide whether to kill, shelve, or fuel your idea.” - Jonathan Hicken [10:15]
• “The MVS framework energizes teams by shifting from overplanning to experimentation, making it a tool for action and iteration, not inaction.” - Eric Ressler [25:24]

Resources:

• Article - Turn Your Strategic Plan into Actionable Brand and Digital Strategies
• Video - Demystifying Strategic Planning: Insights from a Seasoned Expert
• Article - In Defense of Moonshots: True Social Innovation Requires Taking Risks
• Article - Are you Acting with Courage?

Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:00]:

This idea is called MVS or minimum viable strategy. The power of it is in its simplicity and in its ability to get you into action as quickly as possible.

Jonathan Hicken [00:11]:

First of all, I have seen on the social impact side, I've seen the big light waterfall style development of a strategic plan, and it just takes forever and there's so many assumptions, and then more often than not, I think it sits on a shelf getting dusty.

Eric Ressler [00:23]:

Rather than just trying to create one theory around how you're going to reach this goal and getting consensus around that, embodying more of a design thinking, divergent approach to thinking.

Jonathan Hicken [00:35]:

I look back on that and I realize I made a few mistakes, which I think I'll share as potential sort of pitfalls for other leaders who are considering something like this.

Eric Ressler [00:54]:

As much as our listeners probably don't know this because we've been releasing episodes weekly, it's actually been a bit since we've recorded an episode.

Jonathan Hicken [01:01]:

Yeah, it's good to be back in the studio.

Eric Ressler [01:02]:

Likewise. So let's talk about the first idea we're covering for this season. This idea is called MVS or Minimum Viable Strategy. So you've probably heard of MVP from the startup world, especially given your background in user testing. For our listeners, let me just talk about what the MVP approach to building products is briefly, and then you can share your experiences as well. So the MVP approach, it stands for minimum viable product, and the idea is rather than these large, arduous long, very entangled processes of doing research and then building a product and planning to market it and releasing it and hoping that your audience actually cares about what you're building, it's a little bit more of an iterative prototype approach where you're instead prototyping something, getting that prototype in front of your audience as quickly as you possibly can, getting real world user feedback in, and that helps you plan and prioritize features, understand what the actual needs and goals and pain points of your audience are, make sure you have product market fit, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I know you come from a user testing background before doing social impact work. How did you think about that in your work, if at all?

Jonathan Hicken [02:14]:

Yeah, so when I was in tech, I was on the customer success side of a SaaS business, software as a service, and my company shipped minimum viable products regularly. And so my experience with it was hearing from customers about their reaction to these minimum viable products as they were coming down the pipe, sometimes working great, sometimes not working great, which was the intent. I mean, a lot of the assumption of a minimum viable product approach is that you have a lot of assumptions when you're building something new or ideating something new, and maybe the best way to test those assumptions is getting in front of real people. So yeah, I've seen minimum viable product in the tech world, and I'm fascinated to hear how you're going to apply that to social impact work.

Eric Ressler [03:01]:

So I mean really the main inspiration or tie into the MVP is just the naming approach of MVS for minimal viable strategy. Where this really comes from at the end of the day is two things. One is a little bit more personal and one is a little bit more reflective of the work that I do with social impact organizations. I'll start with the more personal story and then get into the client story. On the personal side of things, I have a lot of ideas all the time about new things that I want to do with cosmic running the business, working with clients, doing media work like this. And what I've found over the years, especially as cosmic has grown and I have more and more responsibilities as a founder, that I have a lot of ideas that don't ever get to see the light of day.

[03:45]:

And maybe that's good because a lot of my ideas probably suck, but also I don't know if they suck or not if I don't ever test them out. And so this comes at some level from a bit of a frustration and a reflection of my own work where I'm realizing I have this huge backlog of ideas and I'm not executing on enough of them, and I'm getting into a place sometimes of almost over analysis or analysis paralysis. And so I've been trying recently to instead of overthinking things because I can easily overthink things and just continue to spin and spin and spin of developing more of a bias towards action over contemplation. And it's been working really well. I've been having a lot of fun taking this approach into in some of my own work. And it got me thinking about some of the similar issues that I see our social impact clients and leaders struggle with.

[04:40]:

And to tie it in there, as you are well aware of, largely strategic work in the social impact space happens through strategic planning processes and these processes can be long and arduous. And they kind of remind me a little bit of the traditional approach to building products before the MVP framework really started to take off in Silicon Valley. And what I've seen in terms of some of the downsides of strategic planning processes is that by the time they are decided built and acted and put into action if they ever are, because that's also not always true, at least sometimes in my experience, the world has changed a lot and the strategies might not be right anymore or maybe the strategies were never right in the first place. So what has your experience been with just strategy at large in the social impact space and maybe specifically strategic planning processes

Jonathan Hicken [05:35]:

As you're describing this, I'm like, oh, I've done some minimal viable strategies, so I want to talk that through with you. But first of all, I have seen on the social impact side, I've seen the big waterfall style development of a strategic plan, and it just takes forever and there's so many assumptions, and then more often than not, I think it sits on a shelf getting dusty. When I started at the Seymour Marine Discovery about three years ago, granted, look, the circumstances were right for this because it had been closed for two years for Covid, it was still closed when I took over. We were kind of in this rebirth moment as an organization, so there was a lot of room for some experimentation, but we knew that, or I knew we saw this opportunity to tell a different kind of story in our space. We didn't have the funding to go world class with the delivery of that storytelling, but we thought that there was going to be a niche for us in telling stories around climate resilience. And so we did that in a minimum viable way just to see if our audience was going to respond positively receptively to this new kind of storytelling, which was new for our space. And so as you're describing minimum viable strategy, I'm like, we're kind of doing that and we're actually in the middle of it right now.

Eric Ressler [06:50]:

Yeah. Well, I just want to plant one seed here, which is that hopefully if you are a strategic planning consultant or agency owner or listener, you don't hate us yet. I promise we'll have some redemption for you later in the episode, but I do think it'd be worth it, let's define my framework or in more detail what I mean by the minimal viable strategy or MBS framework. So it's really comprised of four key steps, and step one is goal setting, which is pretty obvious. You have to understand what are you trying to actually achieve? What's that end state? What's the goal you're working towards? And we wanted to define that in a way that is clear, measurable, something that makes sense. It's not vague. If your goal is too vague, then this will never work, especially for an MBS framework. So goal setting is key. The second thing I think where this really immediately starts to diverge from traditional strategic planning, at least in my experience, is step two, which is forming theories.

[07:44]:

And rather than just trying to create one theory around how you're going to reach this goal and getting consensus around that, embodying more of a design thinking, divergent approach to thinking. So what I would recommend is if you're doing this on your own, do this. If you're doing it as a group, have everyone do this time box an hour or a day at the most, and come up with as many ideas and as many theories around how you might reach that goal as possible and do that in a way that is open. Don't be judgmental. The goal here is to get as many ideas as possible. So it's really about quantity over quality at this point. And then you have a huge list you can work off of and as a group or as an individual, you can then reflect, maybe you take a day to reflect on those or a week even depending on how urgent this is for you, and you go through and figure out, okay, I think these top three or top five theories or ideas are bets are the most likely ones to pay off.

[08:42]:

So winnow it down and converge into the highest probable ideas that you think are going to work. So that's step two is forming those theories and really winning 'em down to the top three to five theories. Step three, and probably the most important step of this entire framework is to act and to act swiftly and decisively. And the real beauty of this is that we are not talking about years or months to get to this point of action. This approach works because of your ability to act quickly and to get real world reactions to your ideas as quickly as possible. So if you don't act quickly, then you're basically just doing kind of like a half-assed strategic plan at this point. So that's not helpful either. So act swiftly. So get your ideas into the world, test them, get them into the market, get customer feedback or client feedback or support or feedback depending on the type of idea it is.

[09:31]:

So that's step three. And then step four is to evaluate and iterate. So of course, if you're testing those ideas, you have to have some kind of way to tell if the idea is working, if it's working to the extent that you hoped it would, to even score these different ideas amongst each other or against each other to figure out should we continue our three of these five ideas? Good are none of them, good is one obviously the best. These are all outcomes that can happen. So goal setting, forming theories, acting, evaluating, and iterating based on that data. That's a pretty simple framework, but the power of it is in its simplicity and in its ability to get you into action as quickly as possible. I'm going to add two

Jonathan Hicken [10:15]:

Ingredients to your framework there too. Go for it. Yeah, I think in your goal setting, you need to define what you are hoping to learn, right? You're going into an MVS process knowing that you're going in to learn something, right? So define exactly what it is that you want to learn. And then in your evaluation and iteration section, I would say define one of three outcomes of your experiment, which is basically we kill it, we're never doing this, it's gone forever. It failed. B, we nailed it. Let's keep adding to it. And I think there's this third category, which is like C, which is actually let's shelve this. It's not right right now, but it has potential, but it has potential. We may come back to it. We're not ready for it yet for one reason or the other. And then so you need to define those boundaries for yourself. How do I know I'm going to kill that thing? Or how do I know I'm going to pour more fuel on it?

Eric Ressler [11:08]:

Yeah, I love those additions and to me, those kind of fit into how you might accomplish the evaluation and iteration step of this framework. So yeah, I think you're right on there. Let's talk a little bit about some caveats to this, because I don't think this approach is right for everything, although I do think it can be used for a lot of things. So let's talk about what isn't another Silicon Valley adage of move fast and break things coming out of Zuckerberg and Facebook. That is not an appropriate culture for a lot of social impact work. Let's just be clear, especially when we're talking about causes and issues where people's lives might literally be on the line. You don't want to move fast and break things when the things that are breaking are people's lives, and we would never suggest using this approach for something as critical as that kind of critical support or infrastructure or whatever that might be, but it could be used for a new communications plan or an iterative improvement to one of your programs or a new section that you want to build into your overall marketing strategy. So some of these more smaller scoped still strategic, but part strategy, part tactical, that might even be in support of a broader strategic plan. So I just want to acknowledge that we have to be careful about this MVS framework or this applying just more broadly like Silicon Valley or startup or lean startup methodology to social impact in general or even design thinking to social impact

Jonathan Hicken [12:45]:

When the iterative process moves fast, break things mantra. I don't know what is that like 2008 when Mark Zuckerberg said that or something

Eric Ressler [12:52]:

Feels about right all the time's weird right

Jonathan Hicken [12:54]:

Now, who knows? Look, the internet was a different place in 2008, right? Sure. Especially as early adopters of the internet and social media and stuff, we were ready. We were hungry to work with products and use products that weren't perfect,

[13:10]:

And we were ready and willing to give Zuckerberg feedback on what we liked and what we didn't like. I think it's different now, even in the tech space, you may have noticed that for all these, for your iPhone and for different software you use, there are these beta programs, but they're always opt-in like, do you want to be a participant in this version of our product? That's not done yet. It's still buggy, and you're basically signing up to say, I'm willing to give you feedback. I think that exists for a reason because you can't just ship unfinished products to the masses anymore. If you put an app on the app store tomorrow, that's not complete. You're going to get crushed with bad reviews and your product, your service or your company's dead. So it needs to be ready and be valuable when you launch it.

[13:55]:

In some cases. I think the same thing goes for a minimum viable strategy. You need to know is the audience I'm testing with this with ready to work with an unfinished strategy? Maybe I'm shopping this with stakeholders who know me really well or understand where I'm trying to go, but are willing to think creatively with me and operate with this less than perfect outcome or this less than perfect product. So I think that you really do need to be honest with yourself if you are employing the minimum viable strategy, who is actually seeing this and are they ready for it?

Eric Ressler [14:30]:

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I do think there's been a shift to some degree around how this shows up in culture at large, and there's been, I think a lot, somewhat recently, some criticisms around design thinking applied to social impact. I think some of that's justified. I think some of it's not. And also the idea that you wouldn't want to take this approach to a cohort of supporters or beneficiaries or whatever and have them feel like it's a finished product. So some kind of communication if it's something bigger that like, Hey, do you want to be part of a test or a beta or whatever you want to call it. I do think though, that there are some situations where you don't need to do that. So let's apply the MVS framework to a communications or a marketing application. So let's say one of your goals is to increase engagement on your social media posts.

[15:24]:

You might start an MVS framework and identify that goal, come up with a huge variety of options around how you might do that, and one of your ideas might be, well, we're going to test more polarizing hooks in our content, for example, or maybe not polarizing hooks, but more just enticing curiosity driven hooks in our content. I don't think you need to tell people you're doing that in this case because also what's the downside? If a post flops or whatever the implications are so minimal, there's no need. You're likely not going to create any bad taste in your user's mouth or your supporter's mouth by doing this. So I think you kind of have to size this and determine like, Hey, if this doesn't go well, so maybe it's a size of the risk thing.

Jonathan Hicken [16:07]:

I think what you're describing, at least the way I internalize what you're describing is more of an experimentation on a tactic as opposed to a strategic experiment. So just to use your metaphor and just to try a different version of it, what if your organization was like, Hey, we think that there's a strategy here, and actually it's something that I think my organization, Seymour Center should consider. We've talked about this. We want to become content producers. Part of our marketing strategy, part of our outreach strategy is going to be producing high quality content. How do I test the production of a unique piece of content that I'm distributing via email in a way that doesn't set the expectation with my audience necessarily that this is what we're doing now? Maybe I'm like, Hey, I'm going to release this piece of content to a subset of my audience who I know is willing to consume it with this open mind and give me feedback on it that's going to validate whether or not a content production role is the right strategy for my organization as opposed to I think what you described, which is like AB testing on an email campaign, which is also valuable, don't get me wrong, not poo-pooing that idea,

Eric Ressler [17:19]:

But it's a much smaller, more tactical, tightly scoped, low downside, that kind of thing. That's right. Yeah, I think that's a good point. So let's talk about other caveats to this framework and maybe some near enemies or traps to avoid, and this is something I can speak about from experience, which is shiny object syndrome. I think a lot of founders and executives especially have this. I'm the type that gets really excited by new things and new programs and new ideas and sometimes to the detriment of other really important activities and attention that I should be spending my time on. And so this is something that I have to keep in check, and it almost maybe sounds a little contradictory to the MVS framework and the origin story of it because it is weird because I have this shiny object syndrome that I can come into play for me, and then I also don't test a lot of my shiny object ideas out. So this is something that I'm keeping in check, but I think it's also something we have to be careful about with this framework is especially when you see it in use and see what the potential power of it can be, you might be tempted to just start to apply it to everything and then all of a sudden you're losing track of what you really should be focusing on some of your core responsibilities as a leader or even as an organization.

Jonathan Hicken [18:42]:

I think that that's a real pitfall. It's something that I suffer from too. I actually, looking back on this as I'm realizing that what I did at the Seymour Center was a version of minimum viable strategy. I look back on that and I realize I made a few mistakes, which I think I'll share as potential pitfalls for other leaders who are considering something like this, which is a, I don't think I communicated clearly enough to my whole team some of these things like the learning outcomes or the decision-making triggers. And so there was a little bit of an inability of my team to be able to communicate what these exhibits were to visitors in a way that was positive and uplifting. I needed to do more communicating about the reason for this experiment. The other piece was that I did not evaluate well enough my team's ability to do the iterating, our capacity to actually do the iterating once they were up. And so what ended up happening with some of these things was that we shipped a beta product but didn't have the capacity to iterate. So what ended up happening is that we had this less than ideal product up for too long,

Eric Ressler [19:58]:

And it just sat stagnant

Jonathan Hicken [19:59]:

And it sat stagnant when it was intended to be iterated on. So a pitfall is if you're going to take this approach, you got to be sure that you have the team capacity to do the iterating that you've promised to do.

Eric Ressler [20:11]:

Yes, step four is evaluate and iterate. There we go. Not just evaluate. So yeah, I completely agree, and I think you have to embody and plan for this being an iterative process that the first experiment is not the last, it's the first of potentially many, and this does start to become, I think, a bit of a shift in culture at some point, ideally about how you run programs and how you do strategic planning to tie it back into that promise earlier to strategic planners, I don't think this is an instead of strategic plan approach. I think this is a complimentary approach to planning. I do wonder though, sometimes if our strategic plans can be simpler, and then the MVS framework can be how you action those strategic plans. Because what I've seen is that sometimes we've literally watched clients invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years of planning into strategic plans, and they don't always have the ROI, just to be blunt about it.

[21:13]:

And I think sometimes the team doesn't feel energized by them because by the time the plan's done, they're just like, God, I'm so glad the plan's done, and they don't have the energy to actually execute it. So can we find a more nimble way to do strategic planning? I think there's plenty of people out there doing this. By the way, I think the big institutional strategic plan approach is not the only way, and not even, I would say the most common way to do this at this point, but I do think there is some synergy between broader strategic planning, quarterly yearly planning, and then using an MVS framework to action that plan or opportunistic ideas that come in outside of the plan, which happens all the time and shouldn't be just ignored.

Jonathan Hicken [21:57]:

I think MVS is a great tool when you don't know what you don't know when you're developing my niche or my strategy or my position or whatever, and it's like I just don't know enough to put years into creating a strategic plan. I need to go out and figure out what I don't know yet. Then I do think you're right. There is a time and a place for a traditional strategic plan. I think that's the best fit. When you are just so sure of your impact and your tactics and your team and your funding model, you are so sure about that. You're going to put the pieces in place and you're going to execute. I think that's a great time to go through a formal strategic planning process. Have you seen that? I don't see

Eric Ressler [22:41]:

That very much.

Jonathan Hicken [22:44]:

It's kind of two sides to that coin, right?

Eric Ressler [22:45]:

So what I mean by that is usually what I see when people are handing me a strategic plan is that they think the plan is going to help them solve those problems. And I think a plan can do that. But the scenario you just described, I don't think I've ever seen once. Are you talking

Jonathan Hicken [23:04]:

About having a good strategic plan because the clarity's there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're right. I mean, there's kind of two sides to this coin. If you know, have a clear sense of where you're going and what your strategy is and what your tactics are and all that stuff, why are you going to go do a big old strategic plan? Exactly.

Eric Ressler [23:22]:

They're kind of like by necessity working towards some kind of growth, right? Or some kind of pivot or yeah, why are you doing such a big plan? I mean, okay, counterpoint. I do think sometimes it just becomes muscle memory. Oh, the three year plan's up time to do the new three year plan, or in worst cases even I've seen 10 year plans before, which is crazy to me. But I think, again, there's a balance here, and I do this at cosmic, I have vision for where I want the organization to go, and I do think about that in different timeframes where I'd like to be in 10 years, in five years, in three years, but I'm not going to do super arduous, super expensive, super time consuming three-year plan when I know that I have shorter term goals that are also really important and trying to figure out how to reconcile all of that.

[24:17]:

And I've done it before and hey, you could say this is just a lack of leadership on my side and that there's, and I think that's maybe possibly true. This could work for some people, but I've found that looking at things in shorter timeframes, distilling things down into core things. I mean, we talked about this in one of the episodes last season around, I think it was values, distilling values down to things that are repeatable, things that are memorable, things that people will actually say. I think the plan needs and the strategy should be the same because as soon as it starts to get so big, it needs a report. That's where it starts to collect digital dust in my experience.

Jonathan Hicken [24:54]:

Yeah, we should have another episode on Red Alert. Your board is recommending another strategic plan. It's time to implement MVS. No, it really is true. I mean, I think there's so many applications. I'd be delighted to hear questions and thoughts from the audience on this one, because this is one that every social impact leader is going to have the opportunity to make a decision on that you're going to need to do strategic planning of some kind. The question is to you, what kind are you going to do?

Eric Ressler [25:24]:

Yeah, and I think that the MVS framework should be a tool. I think it's a really exciting tool. I think it can energize your team and motivate your team to just do things in a more active and participatory way. I think that always helps. So in summary, let's go back through the four points of the plan. So the MVS framework. Step one, goal setting, define a clear end state. Step two, form your theories, rough strategies, test them quickly. Step three, act swiftly and decisively. And step four is evaluate and iterate. So that's the MBS framework. Jonathan, thanks for teasing out with me.

Jonathan Hicken [25:59]:

Thank you, Eric.