CTFK Case Study: Visual Strategic Planning
In 2024, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids reached out to Lizard Brain for help. They had never developed an organization-wide strategic plan. In their experience, strategic plans were “long documents a few people write and nobody reads.” Strategic plans were “shelfware:” expensive to produce and of questionable usefulness.
But CTFK also knew it needed coordination. They had experienced changes in leadership. Their US and global campaigns were growing in size and complexity, but they were growing separately from each other without coordination, reinventing many of the same policies, programs, and processes from scratch rather than sharing knowledge.
Lizard Brain had previously provided facilitation training to a few small groups and individuals within CTFK. Central to our work was the use of graphic facilitation and strategy templates: collaborative, visual tools to capture and organize the ideas of many people at once. So when CTFK decided it wanted a collaborative strategic planning process that brought in as many ideas as possible, Lizard Brain was a natural choice to facilitate the work.
During our initial design call, we established a three-part approach:
Agree on current context
Open to a shared vision
Plan to implement change
We also decided on the basic logistics of the facilitation: there would be approximately 24 participants from across the organization, and it would take place in Washington, DC over the course of two days. We also decided that the tone for the facilitation should be one of collaboration and participation; for that reason, we decided not to use PowerPoint, but instead employed graphic facilitation for its high engagement and interactivity.
CTFK’s outcomes, agenda, agreements, and roles.
We began the two-day offsite by sharing the meeting’s outcomes, agenda, agreements, and roles.
We conducted a brief round of introductions using a method called a “team portrait,” gathering outcomes and visions of success from each participant.
The work began with agreeing on the current context. First in small groups then as one large group, participants completed a SWOT analysis, capturing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Using a Context Map, participants then shared their thoughts about the trends and factors from the external environment affecting their work.
In small groups, participants imagined a successful future state by designing headlines from the future: a news story featuring their own wildly successful vision and strategies fully implemented and benefiting their key constituents.
CTFK US Global Vision Mandala
As a large group, the participants reflected on what they had heard from the headlines from the future and derived attributes of their single, shared future vision.
CTFK US Global Bold Steps
As a large group, the participants reflected on what they had heard from the headlines from the future and derived attributes of their single, shared future vision.
Finally, participants joined breakout groups of their choosing to develop a plan to achieve each of those six bold steps. The individual tasks and milestones of those plans became the work breakdown structure of CTFK’s strategic plan.
CTFK’s strategic plan was approved by the board and published in the fall of 2024 and reflected the hard work of the leadership during the two-day offsite. Their new shared purpose: The Power Of Advocacy To Save Lives.