Let me take you behind the scenes and show you how a strategic plan gets made. Our first major planning session took place in person during the Annual Conference, where we had one of the rarest resources in professional volunteer life: several uninterrupted hours together. Over those hours, we explored what ISSTD is doing well, where we have room to grow, what continues to challenge us, and what changes beyond the Society may shape our future.
We wanted to see the organization from multiple perspectives. We needed the view of an architect looking at the floor plans, the view of an outsider just stepping inside, and the view of someone who helped build the first wall. The architect sees how the rooms connect; the newcomer notices the door no one thought to label; and the person who built the wall remembers why it ended up there in the first place.
We left the room with a great deal of raw material. After the conference, we compiled our notes, reviewed the dreamstorming submissions from attendees, looked for patterns across what we had heard, and began the difficult work of prioritizing (Gómez, 2023). If you have ever completed a values card sort in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the process feels a little like that. Every value can be meaningful, but you have to keep painfully narrowing the pile until you identify the ones that will guide what comes next. This process left us with five goals: membership, education, partnerships, financial sustainability, and workforce sustainability. We formed one Board Working Group for each goal, with three to five Board members and a Chair in every group. Each group then had approximately four weeks between each stage before its work returned to the full Board.
A broad goal such as growing membership can mean almost anything when it is sitting alone on a page. The Working Groups had to define what meaningful progress would actually look like three years from now. Those discussions became the objectives that returned to the full Board for review. Board members asked what each one would require, who or what might be missing, whether it could realistically be accomplished, and how we would know if it had succeeded. The groups then used that feedback to refine the work further and develop strategies and tactics. Essentially, we were writing a three-year to-do list for an organization with more than 1,700 members across more than 40 countries.
The Working Group I am chairing offers one example of what this looked like. Because our schedules would not align and we wanted everyone to participate, we ran two sessions for nearly every stage. The second meeting had to continue the first conversation while leaving room for different members to change its direction. Afterward, both discussions had to be reconciled within one document. Between meetings, members read changing drafts, replied to comments, and revised language before the next deadline. I would walk into meetings thinking, “I have no idea how we are going to accomplish all of this. How are we going to find language that belongs in a strategic plan, determine whether it represents actual consensus, and decide whether the route from A to B is one the Society could reasonably follow, all within two one-hour meetings?” Then everyone would start talking, and somehow, by the end of the meetings, we had done exactly that.
All five Working Groups were doing their own versions of this at the same time, with several Board members serving on multiple groups. Members found additional meeting times, worked through one another’s drafts, and reviewed the other groups’ work when everything returned to the full Board. The Chairs have carried an additional layer of responsibility throughout this process. Elizabeth Davis has led our Membership Working Group, Coral Compagnoni has guided Education, I have chaired Partnerships, Jennifer Gómez has led Financial Sustainability, and Bethany Akudike, one of our newest Board members, has chaired Workforce Sustainability. Their work has included scheduling, agenda building, follow-up, facilitation, creating consistency across multiple drafts, and the delicate art of knowing when a conversation needs more time and when it’s simply time to make a decision
At the time of writing, we are refining the strategies and tactics before the complete plan returns to the Board for final review. The documents are now less likely to gain whole new sections and are more likely to be debated one verb at a time. This is how we take our broad intentions and gradually turn them into a commitment the Society can reasonably keep.
When members eventually see the finished strategic plan, it will be only a few pages long. Those pages will not show the duplicate meetings, the comments accumulated in the margins, the revisions made between calls, or the countless conversations about whether a well-placed adjective could better capture our intentions.
I have been genuinely awed by this particular Board. Again and again, members have been willing to offer a real point of view, let it be examined, revise it when needed, and keep working until the plan reflected more than any one person’s vision. A strategic plan represents far more than just the final document. It represents months of conversation, collaboration, and refinement by people committed to helping the world better understand the impact of chronic trauma and dissociation, promote healing, and create a future where fewer people experience it.
If you’re interested in running for the ISSTD Board, please reach out to me at abigailpercifield@gmail.com or to D. Michael Coy, our Past President and Chair of the Nominating Committee, at dmcoy@dmcoy.com to learn more.
With all my gratitude,
Abigail
References
Gómez, J. M. (2023). Is academia a dreamkiller? Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/2023/08/25/moving-liberatory-thought-liberating-action-higher-ed-opinion