We help organizations plan their futures for a living. Here's what it looks like when we do it for ourselves.
There's a saying that the cobbler's kids have no shoes. It's a nod to the irony that professionals who give everything to their clients often neglect the very work at home that they champion abroad. At Event Garde, we've made a deliberate choice to be the exception. Strategic planning is at the heart of what we do — and we practice what we preach.
This past January, our full team gathered for a half-day strategic planning retreat to do something we hadn't done in several years: genuinely reconsider our strategic foundation. Not start over. Not blow it up. But look honestly at where we are, what's changed, and whether the pillars guiding our work still reflect the organization we are — and the one we want to become.
Here's a peek behind the curtain.
For about the last five years, Event Garde has been guided by four strategic directions:
These pillars have served us well. But good strategy isn't a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. The world changes. Our clients change. We change. And our strategic directions should reflect that reality — not just the one that existed when we first wrote them down.
So rather than convene to draft something brand new, we came into this retreat with a clear intention: start from an honest assessment of where we are, honor what's working, and have the courage to change what isn't.
Before any good strategic conversation can happen, a group needs a shared understanding of current reality. That's why we began our afternoon with back-to-back landscape reviews.
Our internal landscape review asked us to take stock of ourselves: client load, financial health, team capacity, workflows, culture. What's working? What's feeling strained? Using a modified SWOT-style reflection focused entirely on internal dynamics, we surfaced patterns that don't always get airtime in the daily flow of client work.
Then we turned the lens outward. Our external landscape review examined the forces shaping our environment: industry trends, shifting client needs, market signals, partnerships, political climate. The world our clients are navigating is increasingly complex — funding uncertainty, government volatility, mental health as a growing area of need, and a marketplace crowded with voices all competing for attention. We named these forces plainly, because you can't plan around what you're not willing to see.
Here's the part that takes a little courage: looking at your own strategic directions and asking whether they're actually doing what you hoped they would.
We reflected on each of our four pillars — where we'd made genuine progress, where we'd fallen short, and what we'd learned. Some of it was affirming. Our client outcomes work has been strong. Business development has happened in real, tangible ways.
Other parts were more humbling. Our DEIB pillar, originally intended to shape both our internal team culture and our external work with clients, had largely become an internal-facing effort. Our professional development pillar had the right intent but the wrong infrastructure — accountability mechanisms weren't keeping pace with aspiration.
We called these things what they were: not failures, but lessons. And lessons are exactly the raw material good strategy is built from.
Armed with that honest assessment, we moved into a whole-group conversation about what our pillars needed to look like going forward. What should stay? What should shift? What needed to be merged, clarified, or reimagined?
Originally, I didn't think they would change much. But after rich discussion, we landed on four updated pillars that better reflect our current reality and future aspirations:
These aren't entirely new ideas. They're a thoughtful evolution — a recognition that some things were working so well they'd become part of the Event Garde fabric, while others needed a new container to thrive.
Once our pillars were set, we moved into the generative work: imagining what success actually looks like for each one.
We used a Victory Circle — a large, four-quadrant visual divided by strategic direction — for a structured brainstorm. Each team member silently reflected on a simple prompt: If this pillar were truly successful, what accomplishments would we be pointing to? Then we shared, clustered, and discussed.
The sticky notes that filled each quadrant painted a vivid picture.
Looking at all four quadrants together, we asked ourselves: what patterns do you see? What feels most energizing? What feels most daunting? What would be noticeably different about how we operate if these accomplishments were real?
That last question always does something to a room. It moves the conversation from abstract to visceral.
This is the step most strategic planning processes skip — and the one we believe matters most.
After visioning comes the harder work: naming the blocks and barriers that could prevent us from getting there. In the Technology of Participation (ToP) methodology that underpins our practice, we call these underlying contradictions. And the key to this work is looking for what's present, not what's missing.
Think of it like a garden hose that suddenly stops flowing. You don't shout "there's no water!" You look for the kink. You find the block.
Our group surfaced a rich list. On the block side: the volume of competing content in our market, an ever-changing political climate, unknown client budgets, client reluctance to provide feedback, and the very real tension of team members balancing internal and external demands.
On the impact side, what those blocks are actually preventing: our ability to stand out in the marketplace, our ability to predict and plan for the future, our ability to verify and document the client experience, and our capacity to do the work we most want to do.
Naming these tensions doesn't demoralize a team. Done well, it liberates one. Because now we're planning with our eyes open.
We closed our afternoon by beginning to build out high-level metrics and SMART goals for each pillar — early thinking on how we'll know whether we're making progress. This work isn't finished in a single afternoon; it continues in the weeks and months that follow. Our team has finalized the language and explainer text for each pillar and is now completing a draft of our Focused Implementation plan, before conducting a final cross-walk of our practical vision and underlying contradictions to ensure nothing was omitted.
That's the thing about strategic planning done well: the session itself is just the beginning. The real work is what happens after the flip charts and sticky walls come down.
We share all of this not to showcase our process (though we're proud of it), but to model something we believe in deeply: that strategic planning should be honest, participatory, and adaptive. It should reflect real tensions, not just aspirational ones. It should be revisited — and revised — as the world and your organization evolve.
If you've been putting off your own planning work because it feels too big, too uncertain, or too far removed from the day-to-day, we hope this offers a different frame. You don't have to start from scratch. You don't have to know all the answers before you begin. You just have to be willing to look honestly at where you are — and bold enough to imagine where you could go.
That's what we did this January. And we're already better for it.
Interested in how Event Garde could facilitate your organization's strategic planning process? We'd love to talk. Learn more about our approach or reach out to start a conversation.
