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Strategy is Who You Are
As SV@Home releases our 2025-29 Strategic Plan, I am using this month’s column to talk about what our new strategic plan says about who we are.
What the History of Chess says about Strategy
I don’t know much about chess. But, a while back, I heard an interview on some NPR show about the history of chess. This interview was so mind-blowing for me that I keep thinking about it and referring back to it all these years later, even though I no longer remember the name of the interviewee or even what NPR show it was on and even though I have no real skill or interest in playing chess.
According to the interviewee, chess strategy has changed so much in the past 100+ years that a regular but casual chess player of today would likely be able to beat a chess grandmaster of 100+ years ago. In previous centuries of chess, according to the interviewee, strategy was about sets of elegant, proscribed moves deployed against opposing sets of elegant, proscribed moves. I imagine furrowed brows and twirled mustachios. “Curses! I never expected you to respond with the Tartan Gambit to my Bavarian Pincers!” [Author’s note: These are made up names. Please refer back to the first sentence in the paragraph directly above.] In contrast, contemporary chess strategy is less about pre-set sets of movements and more about (1) how you see the board, (2) how you hold territory, (3) how you are adaptive and flexible in the context of how the board develops. According to the interviewee, contemporary chess players are better than those of olden times because they are less rigid, more able to apply a basic approach to the game to a wider variety of contexts. For me, the mind-blowing lesson of the interview is not about chess per se, but about how we should view strategy and how to deploy strategy effectively.
How this insight applies to SV@Home is that our new strategic plan is less about lists of programs and specific outputs and outcomes and more about (1) our vision for the world, (2) how we advance our vision within our corner of the world – i.e., what is our approach to the work/how we see our role in our ecosystem, (3) the values and principles in which we ground ourselves as we adapt and flex to changing conditions. So, our 2025-29 Strategic Plan is less a specific blueprint or roadmap (which implies a specific, diagramatic picture of what the future holds) and more about how we will work in our disrupted and unpredictable future. Sure, we have a number of goals/specific metrics and we intend to hold ourselves accountable to these metrics. But these metrics are less important as specific accountability measures than they are as descriptors of our various approaches/sub-strategies and as factors in future decision making in terms of what the aspirational scale of impact means for day-to-day tactical decisions.
So, boiling everything down, a nonprofit organization’s strategy should be simple and applicable to multiple real-world situations. It should be about a vision of the world, how the organization acts to further this vision, and the organization’s core operating principles which guide its responses to shifting contexts. Bottom line, a statement of strategy (like a strategic plan) should be a statement of who an organization is.
Who We Are
For SV@Home, according to our new strategic plan, we envision homes for all in equitable, thriving communities. We do this by advocating for affordable housing and housing justice in our little corner of the world (i.e., Santa Clara County). Our primary approach is to bring people together. This is who we are.
Pivots and Growth
Concurrent to our strategic planning process, in our twice-a-month DEIL meetings, SV@Home staff read and discussed The Four Pivots by Dr. Shawn Ginwright. According to Dr. Ginwright, a pivot “is a small change in direction from a single point where we are. It means that through one small change in direction, over time we can get to where we want to be. A pivot is not a complete abandonment of what we know, but it braids together what we know with how we feel and who we wish to be.”
Our new strategic plan is a pivot like Dr. Ginwright describes. Our new plan is not a radical departure from the organization that we’ve always been. Rather, it is a small, intentional shift in direction. In the near term, we will likely be indistinguishable from who we’ve always been. The 2025 version of SV@Home is probably going to look and feel a lot like 2024 SV@Home. But, over time, as we get further and further away from this point of pivot, we will likely take more and more actions which, while they will make sense in terms of our standpoint when we take the step, they will take us further and further away from where we would’ve been had we never made this pivot.
Our Pivot is about Racial Justice
This is probably not the most tactically savvy time to be making a pivot to be more explicit and intentional about race. As I write this Los Angeles is burning and there are many (including some people in high places) who are blaming the fires on DEI and there is more news about firms rolling back DEI commitments (not because of the fires, of course, but because of the general political pressure/climate). Maybe if we were smarter and more tactically savvy, we wouldn’t be talking publicly about our pivot. We would go about our DEIL work without saying anything publicly about it, without drawing a potential target on our backs.
But strategy is not about what is tactical. Strategy is who we are. And, from who we are, we can’t talk honestly and authentically about the current housing and displacement crisis in Silicon Valley without also talking about racism as a core and central reason why we are here. We believe that we won’t solve anything in any substantial or sustainable way unless and until we acknowledge this and take reparative actions. So, moving forward, we will be talking more and doing more about racial justice in the broader field of affordable housing – what we are calling housing justice.
AND, as I said earlier, we still are who we’ve always been. We still see our main role as a convenor, as an organization who brings diverse people and interests together. We still value transparency, data and research, relationship building, grabbing a drink and having a good time at Happy Housers. And with that, here’s to the new year/the “new” us and I hope to see you at the next Happy Housers!