And did that change when the book became a thing that was real and you could actually share it with people? Did that shift in your mind what you thought of as success for the book?

Yeah, it's so interesting.

I mean, I think there's a range.

Honestly, I had a range of success metrics.

Honestly, just publishing the book felt like, oh my gosh, I got it out of my brain and on paper and all the drafts and all the typos and everything like that.

Beyond that, it's been out for six months.

And so what I'm working on now is getting a thousand copies out into the world with the idea that if I could get a thousand copies... that it can start to create a recommendation loop.

Like, how do you juggle all that?

Where do you see the kinda problems start when a nonprofit leader's trying to get a strategic process going?

Thank you so much.

Um, so yeah, so w- I mean, we approach this from a lot of different directions.

And so I do, I...

You know, we, we lead consulting practices where we're leading strategic planning.

I also teach a class on strategic planning through Cal State East Bay.

And I do have some students who come to my class and they say, "You know, we have this plan," exactly what you're describing, "It's on the shelf, and we got it.

Yeah.

... avoid just being performative?

Again, I think part of the idea of, of creating more transparency in the process and just sort of s- and saying, "Here are the different roles that people are gonna have," so that people understand here's the steps that we're going to be doing in planning.

Here are some places.

And each chapter- Actually has a, um, some com- points around communications, right? So that you could, n- if you start, you kick off your plan, and then you kind of, you can at that time be letting your, your people around you know, whether that's clients, community, donors, um, staff, partners, "Hey, we're doing planning now, and we may be consulting with you in these ways." So yeah, I think s- and I think just kind of being direct about, all right, you know, we don't have 20 deciders.

We have a couple of deciders, but we also have a lot of people who are those builders who are co-creating this vision for what the organization is going to be.

... strategic planning process?

Yeah, yeah.

So we've worked with organizations that have, have included the board in different ways, and it kind of depends on the culture of the organization.