What’s the Point of Strategy?
For the past few months, the leadership team at Aspire Indiana Health has been working hard on a new three-year strategic plan. It’s essentially a map, a guide to where we want to go, how we want to serve, and the steps we’ll take to get there.
As we get closer to rolling it out to our people, my colleagues, our partners, and the patients we serve, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to frame it. For any plan to succeed, it needs to make sense to the people it’s meant to guide, and more importantly, it needs to feel relevant to their daily work and challenges.
Too often, strategic plans can fall flat. They become a collection of corporate buzzwords and lofty goals that don’t seem to have much to do with the real work happening on the ground. It’s easy to feel like, “What’s the point of strategy?”
We’re living in uncertain times, that’s not up for debate. And with uncertainty comes the need, more than ever, to plan ahead so we can handle whatever comes next. But uncertainty also makes planning harder. How do you set your course when you don’t know what the road ahead will look like?
It reminds me of when my family and I moved from Boston to Central Indiana about 20 months ago. With two teenage daughters, my wife and I had to do a lot of planning: where we’d live, which schools our girls would attend, getting new driver’s licenses (and soon enough, a license for a new driver). We were lucky to have the resources to figure those things out.
But there were plenty of things we couldn’t plan for. What if our car broke down on the way here? What if the seller of our house backed out at the last minute? How would we handle it if our daughters struggled to adjust to new schools and social circles? And how do you even begin to plan for something like a pandemic?
Even when you can’t see every twist in the road, having a plan gives you a framework for how to respond to the unexpected.
A plan doesn’t prepare you for every possible outcome. But it gives you guideposts to keep you from getting completely lost when things go sideways. Without a plan, without a sense of where you’re heading, you’re always stuck in reactive mode, scrambling to figure out the next step. That’s exhausting and unsustainable.
A strategic plan isn’t about locking into a rigid path no matter what happens. It’s about setting clear goals and creating a flexible framework to adapt when the unexpected comes… because it will come. A good plan is a beacon, something to guide you when things get hard.
Certainly, Indiana has become that kind of beacon for my family.
So as we prepare to launch this new strategic plan, I want you to know that we’re doing so with humility and grace. We’ve put our best thinking into it, and we’re prepared to adjust as we go. We know we don’t have all the answers, but we believe this plan will help us stay grounded and focused on what matters most: the people we serve and the difference we’re here to make.
Thank you to my colleagues, our community partners, and the people who trust us with their care. You help us light the way forward.
