A care organization for older people. The sector’s constraint is not demand and it is not really money. It is people. There are not enough carers, there will be fewer, and the ones who stay are leaving partly because the work has become administration.
So the ambition is not growth. It is autonomy: for clients, and by extension for the people who look after them.
What to notice
The Objective is about a shift in control, not a target. “The client and their family are in control of their own care.” No revenue, no market position, no size. This is worth studying if you work somewhere that assumes an ambition has to be a number: the numbers come next, in the Goals, and the ambition is allowed to be about what kind of organization you want to be.
Profitability above 2 percent is there anyway. A non-profit still has to be solvent. Putting a modest margin in the Goals is more honest than leaving money out and discovering in year three that the ambition was never affordable.
One goal measures how employees feel about their own discretion. “Employees experiencing the freedom to do what a client needs: 4.5 out of 5.” That is an unusual and rather good measure. The ambition is client autonomy; you cannot give a client autonomy through a carer who has none. So the plan measures the thing that actually blocks it.
The fourth strategy is where the plan gets serious. Create room for improvement by reorganising processes and moving responsibility closer to the client. Everything else depends on it. The first three strategies all assume people have time and authority; this one is what creates them.
An action that says stop. Finish current IT projects before starting new ones. Not a new initiative: a decision to complete what is already in flight. In organizations where change fatigue is the real risk, this is often the highest-value line on the page, and it is almost never written down.
Where this plan could go wrong
Thirty-five team OGSMs is a programme, not a KPI. “Teams working with their own OGSM: 35” sits as a KPI under the fourth strategy with one supporting action. Getting 35 teams to write and then actually use their own plans is a substantial change effort. As written it is likely to be reported green because the plans exist, while the underlying behaviour has not changed. How connected plans stay coherent →
Marijke owns the whole regional strategy plus a piece of the fourth. Regional coordination depends on other organizations agreeing to things. One person carrying all of it is a single point of failure on the strategy with the least direct control.
The care technology strategy measures adoption, which is right, but late. Pilots and implementations are the leading measures; “clients using care technology: above 50 percent” will not move for two years. That is fine, provided the review does not treat a flat line in year one as failure.
The horizon
Five years. Long enough for a genuine shift in how care is delivered, and long enough that the plan will be wrong about something. Which is what the quarterly strategy review is for.