Three Questions for the Six-Month Mark

Strategic plans don't fail in dramatic ways. No board votes to abandon one. What happens instead is quieter: the plan gets approved in January with genuine commitment, the binder goes on the shelf, and by August nobody has asked about it in months. The plan isn't dead. It's just not alive.

The six-month mark is where that trajectory gets set — which makes a mid-year check-in the highest-leverage twenty minutes on a board's fall agenda. Not a retreat, not a re-planning exercise. Three questions.

First: what did the plan say we'd have done by now — and did we? Not “how do we feel about progress.” The actual commitments, against the actual calendar. If the plan didn't include six-month markers, that's a finding in itself, and worth fixing before asking anything else.

Second: what's changed since January that the plan doesn't account for? A funding shift, a staff departure, a new opportunity that didn't exist at the retreat. Plans lose credibility when they ignore reality everyone in the room can see. Naming the change and adjusting on purpose keeps the plan a living document instead of a historical one.

Third: who is responsible for each priority — a name, not a committee? This is the question boards most reliably skip, because the answer in January was often “the organization” or “staff leadership,” which in practice means no one. Every priority that matters has a person whose job it is to move it. If you can't name that person, you've found why it hasn't moved.

None of this requires a consultant. It requires a board chair willing to put twenty uncomfortable minutes on the September agenda. The plans that deliver aren't the smartest ones I've seen. They're the ones somebody kept asking about.