For the first time in our 20-year history, the Traumatic Stress Institute (TSI) engaged in a formal strategic planning process, resulting in a concrete strategic plan for the next two years. After 12 months of work, and under the wise guidance of Leading Culture Solutions, our entire team worked to identify specific strategic initiatives in 4 areas:
While it's somewhat unusual for a department of a larger organization to develop a formal strategic plan – as TSI is part of Klingberg Family Centers – we believed strongly that this was a critical time in our history to reflect on our past and plan for the future. TSI has grown tremendously from a part-time staff of three in 2006 to our current staff of ten. We have become an internationally recognized leader in trauma-informed system change and trauma-informed care (TIC) measurement. We anticipated leadership transition in the near-term. Additionally, because of COVID and trends in national government policy, we were facing challenges to our long-term financial viability. We decided now was the time.
Every single staff member embraced the process, shared their perspectives, dreamed together – and, yes, endured some long meetings! A remarkable byproduct of the process – maybe more important than anything else – was that it created renewed cohesion through a vital and shared dedication, buy-in, and ownership of TSI’s mission by every member of the TSI team.
Using Leading Culture Solution’s Agile Strategic Planning Framework, one of our first goals was to identify TSI’s central challenge. Sometimes the simplest idea is the hardest to clarify. Through much deliberation, we ultimately agreed that our central challenge was to optimize internal operations and client agency service while balancing our budget.
Next, we revised our mission, vision, and values. We landed on the following:
Mission: Healing relationships for a better world.
Vision: A humane world where everyone thrives through respect, connection, and hope.
We achieve this by advancing trauma-informed systems through training, consultation, coaching, and research.
Values: Systems Change. Relationships. Community. Depth. Solutions.
Finally, we needed to prioritize from a long list what the most important strategic initiatives were, deciding what would anchor our work for the next 2 years. As a team that is usually bursting with ideas, this step of acknowledging our limitations was crucial to focusing our energy.
Here are a few examples of what we decided on:
Tremendous effort went into designing our Strategic Plan. Our next goal is to not let it collect dust on the shelf (as so often happens with planning documents) and execute these exciting initiatives. In this next month, we'll be having our semiannual staff retreat and will gauge our progress on the strategic plan so far. We are also preparing for my retirement at the end of June, as I will officially pass the mantle of Director on to my colleague, John Engel. I cannot imagine a better steward to hand my life's work over to.
With this strategic plan as our guide, we look forward to serving you all – both existing partners in our growing Risking Connection community and those who have yet to discover the transformative value of Risking Connection and trauma-informed care.