I’ll start with an admission. I tire myself at times with house and car analogies. For some reason, in the context of technology change, they come in handy, if often painfully overused.

So in these times of Covid-19 restrictions and upholding our resilience in the face of much social concern, let’s step out into the garden for this one.

Indeed, my apologies, let’s get the “pulling up the weeds” and “sowing seeds” clichés out of the way quickly.

Some organisations’ strategies go to seed or become disastrously overgrown and intractable. They just do over time if neglected. Other organisations’ strategies are quite bald, scant on detail.

The metaphor of the garden for strategy is a helpful one.

Both gardens and strategies:

  • are all about growth, development, and survival over time
  • are by their nature cyclical and evolving
  • require foundation setting and a degree of groundwork
  • require planning and focus within several parts of one whole
  • must respond to sudden or creeping changes related to external or internal pressures.

The bigger the garden or strategy, the greater number of people required to keep the vision of the future or the blossoming present alive and in good condition.

Hart Square has always understood strategy within our work with clients.

It is fair to say we have been modest in the past concentrating on the allotment we share with our clients during projects.

After all, charities and non-profits have always had strategies, many doing fine in delivering the future.

The past two years have represented a period of change for Hart Square.

More and more, we are invited to engage at greater levels of detail at a strategic level with our clients. This is best exemplified through the growing number of programmes we help deliver.

In simple terms, our clients are more prepared to engage with us about a three-to-five-year transformation. They understand technology better and how it evolves over longer timeframes.

The discourse on technology strategy in the charity and non-profit space has become sophisticated.

A few further examples of our renewed work if you’ll permit me continuing with the metaphor:

We help more clients plan the future garden in full now – strategy development, setting and maintaining a vision for change, transformation planning and benefits realisation.

We work more and more on themes of cross germination now – how the erstwhile patches of people, processes, systems, and data are understood as a single interdependent ecosystem.

We work differently with our clients now on how they keep the garden tended after the flower show has come and gone – helping set up post launch stabilisation plans and future capability planning.

And a new wealth of exotic flowers and plant life have emerged, all needing new levels of understanding, with our guidance:

  • planning large scale transition from on-premise to cloud services
  • understanding how to embed AI in charity and non-profit surroundings
  • coping with an acceleration in the pace of digital change
  • harnessing the recent abundance of online collaborative ways of working.

So if the metaphor is familiar and you find your organisation seeking to grow and nurture a strategy in better ways and with a greater likelihood of long-term change and success, get in touch with us!

It is an exciting time to be a gardener / strategist!