1. Know who you want to train. This might sound like a “duh,” but you’d be surprised at the number of trainings we’ve helped organize where that simple question wasn’t answered.  A training can be organized to teach 10 new staffers a new skill, or to help instruct 1,000 activists to do what you need them to do.  Regardless of the audience, knowing who you want to train is the first step to planning a successful event that will help you reach your goals.  Having this answer will help everything else fall into place:  curriculum, recruitment, etc.

(Quick Tip:  if you need to recruit several new organizers for open positions, a great way to find and identify potential talent is to organize a field training around your issue.  Work with partner organizations to recruit attendees and identify trainers, then sit back and watch the participation with a special eye toward the super-stars you may want to hire.)

2. Know what you what to teach. A vital second step for any training program is to identify the ultimate knowledge goal of the training and target curriculum and trainers that best achieve those goals.  If you’re training a group of new staffers, the answer to that might be:  a) a better understanding of our issue; b) who our grasstops supporters, opponents and targets are; c) the best way to convey our issue (messaging) to new people.  If it’s a group of new volunteers it might be:  a) how to knock on doors; b) how to conduct a 1-1 meeting with a potential new ally; c) how to enter data into our database.

Work backwards by asking the question:  “what do we need participants to know when they walk out of the training?”

3. Recruit strong trainers and let them lead the way on curriculum developmentMany people don’t know that if you organize a training and identify industry or subject leaders to actually teach the subject matter, most of these professionals will be willing to create their own curriculum (in fact, many already have power points and materials they’ve created for other trainings they’ve done in the past). What you’ll need to provide is clear direction and learning goals (see above).  Aside from taking something off your plate, you’ll actually get better materials – your trainers are the experts after all…

I start the first class with a question: what is strategy? The consensus answer is generally something like, “a road map.” I suspect that would be the consensus answer in most rooms.

I’ll posit here what I argue to the class: a plan is a roadmap, the turn-by-turn directions to get from point A to point B. Strategy is bigger than that; strategy determines what the roadmap will look like. To beat the metaphor to death, will the map include highways or sidestreets? Will it include stops along the way, or take you straight through? Without a strategy, the answers are haphazard.

Through the course of the semester, I will work with my students through a series of exercises to demonstrate that strategy is the set of guiding principles against which planning and implementation decisions should be made. Strategy takes into account the context – internal and external, micro and macro – to shed a directional light on decision-making so planning and implementation can be deliberate, transparent, and effective.

Are you convinced? Disagree? What does “strategy” mean to you?

This semester, we’ll work through four models of strategic thinking: step-by-step, scenario, games, and values-based. I’ll blog about the experience along the way, and look forward to hearing what you think.

The Dean of the program, the inimitable Denise Keyes, describes the class as the one where we teach students how to think.

That’s overstating the case, of course: the students in the program are uniformly impressive, and already know how to think. But, even super smart people with loads of experience need help learning how to think strategically. That’s my passion, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to help students and clients be strategic.

-Shayna