Imagine this, your community is wanting to make impactful change on an important and complex issue including:
- Preventing or delaying youth substance use
- Building more supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness
- Responding to the increasing complexity of mental health needs locally
You have completed comprehensive and inclusive consultations which may have included peer-led / youth-led interviews, community surveys, and focus groups. You have reached out to all interested parties and have reached data saturation. You have a good understanding of what your community needs.
Following consultations, your community worked collaboratively to co-design an actionable strategy that includes overarching strategic goals and objectives to guide your efforts. You feel good, you feel accomplished…and now you need to take action…where do you start??
In our work with communities, we have observed that this is one place where the work can get stuck for a variety of reasons. Lack of leadership, capacity, alignment, and resources can all be barriers to moving the good work forward.
Here are some tips and tricks to help get unstuck and take action:
- Complete a group diagnostic tool to help ensure that you have foundational elements in place to maximize your group success. Collective Results has developed an evidence based tool for this purpose – see our blog post for more info!
- Develop a list of actions to accompany your strategy. Your actions can come from a variety of sources including best/promising practices, your community consultations etc.
- Agree as a group that you cannot do everything at once. Trying to advance too many actions at once is bound to get you stuck.
- Agree as a group how many actions you have the capacity to focus on over the next year. Depending on the size of the group and the capacity, we would recommend focusing your efforts on up to 2 quick wins (projects that can be completed relatively quickly) and up to 2 long-term projects.
- Use tools to help you sift through all possible actions to help decide where to start. This can include:
- Plotting all possible actions on a difficulty vs. payoff matrix
- Exploring capacity and alignment through a “gives and gets” activity
- Selecting criteria of greatest importance for your group to evaluate and score each action
- Anonymous real-time polling/voting using tools such as Mentimeter or Slido
Finally, you have narrowed down your large action list to a few key priorities. You may not have full group consensus, but you need to start somewhere. Reassure group members that your current priorities represent your starting place, and it doesn’t mean that the other possible actions will never happen – they just won’t happen right now.
It is crucial at this point that you start moving the actions forward as this will build momentum. The complex issues you are trying to improve will not get any better if you are stuck in a cycle of continuous planning and prioritizing. Focusing your efforts as a community and moving your actions forward will be the key to getting unstuck and having the positive impact your community is working toward. Keep an eye on your KPIs as you take action. Remember to re-visit your progress and priorities at key points during the year and undertake a full review annually.
We would love to hear any tips you have to help you prioritize and make big decisions. Reach out to us if your community would benefit from priority setting support!