At Caprivian Strip, we work with teams who want their strategic plans to be more than a document on a shelf. We tend to focus on organizational systems efficiency; but not ‘efficiency’ in the mechanical sense, rather in the flow of energy, ideas, and effort through a team. It’s about how people connect their everyday work to the wider purpose, how information moves between them, and how their roles, relationships, and hopes align in a shared direction. For us, strategy is not about top-down directives or rigid targets—it’s about creating living systems where people feel connected to the bigger picture, their daily work, and each other.

The organization as a living system comprises the relational energy of an organization as well as the practical tools, processes and structures (HR practices, work plans, meeting rhythms, and resource use) that shape how people actually work.

Organizational systems efficiency is about how the structures and practices of an organization—its HR tools, work plans, meeting rhythms, and resources—align with the lived experience of its people. It’s not just whether those systems exist, but whether they flow in a way that feels supportive: helping team members connect their day-to-day roles to the larger purpose, making collaboration easier, and ensuring that resources—time, money, and energy—are being used in ways that sustain the organization and the people in it.

**This definition centers both infrastructure (the systems like HR and planning tools) and human experience (how people actually interact with and feel about those systems).

What We Mean by Organizational Systems Work

When we talk about organizational systems, we’re not talking about machines or efficiency charts, we’re speaking to the lived experience of how a team functions. We mean the lived rhythms of a team: the (spoken & unspoken) questions people carry into a meeting, the hopes they have for their work, the small experiments they try at the edges of their role, their collaborations and the partnerships they envision. These are the threads that weave into an organization’s larger fabric and purpose.

Our work in consulting role is to create conditions where those threads can be seen, shared, and strengthened. Bringing these threads to the surface means the system as a whole can (hopefully) breathe and grow in healthier ways.

An Example in Practice

Recently, as part of an organization’s strategic planning refresh, we guided a team through a three-hour discovery/foundation setting session. We began with a conversation about what strategic planning is—and isn’t. We provided an overview of what strategic planning can offer—not just for boards, funders, or executives, but for the team. Importantly, we framed it as having value to (and input from) every member of the team. Strategy, in this light, becomes a bridge between someone’s day-to-day tasks, the organization’s bigger story, and its long-term direction.

From there, we invited personal reflection. Team members wrote anonymous notes answering three prompts:

What am I curious about? *This presents an opening and openness to possibilities and dreaming
What questions do I have? *This is different than curiosity which can cover concerns and frustrations
What do I fear? *This gets deeper into specifics around tangible and as yet unnamed shadows that need to be surfaced, assessed and held with care - whether or not they are accommodated in the final strategic plan or operationalized annual work plans.

This first part of the three-hour session opened the room in way that allowed for safe honest sharing and humanized the strategic planning experience. Seeing these reflections collected together created a moment of collective honesty. Everyone’s concerns and hopes were visible, without the weight of names or hierarchy attached.

In the second half of the session, the larger group split into smaller teams of 3-4 people for a partnership exercise. In these small groups, team members mapped out their current partnerships, explicitly indicating the direction of impact using arrows. Some participants chose to visualize the weight of the relationships by varying the size of the arrows. As they visualized their current partnerships—the actual relationships at play in their work—the maps revealed not only where the organization’s energy was flowing (or not), but also where efforts were stretching into new territories.

“The directional arrows were indicative of “flow” as “relational mirrors.” – the author.

The arrows also highlighted partnerships that had been left unattended and/or relationships that needed attention to align the team’s daily work more closely with its mission and vision. The arrows made visible what’s often invisible: that strategy is not only about where we’re going, but also about the network of relationships that hold us in place, for better or worse. This exercise laid a powerful foundation for the refreshed plan. Together, the team identified, with striking clarity, what to keep doing, what to stop, and what to start.

The plan became more than a list of priorities—it became a reflection of each person’s role, questions, and sense of possibility. The strategy and the team’s workplans became more connected, weaving each person’s role into the bigger story.

Why This Matters

Across both of exercises, one a personal reflection and the other team discussion (with teammates who may have ordinarily not worked together – and some who were brand new to the organization) we also uncovered something surprising—what had been referred to as “passion projects” [both inside the organization and by some funders] were not in fact side hobbies at all! They were creative entry points into new ways of working, grounded in the interests and instincts of the team. They embodied the living system that was this organization and how team members were expanding their activities to meet the emerging (but not previously known or accounted for) client needs.

By creating space for reflection, curiosity, and collective visioning, this process helped the team surface a shared foundation for their refreshed strategic plan. More importantly, it honored the human side of organizational life: the fears, the hopes, and the hidden energy that drives new possibilities. It also brought recognition to what might have been frustrating to those who felt their work was invisible and considered side – of desk, by making visible how this work connected to the broader story of the organization. It does not mean this work would all be main-streamed within the existing reality of the organization, rather by surfacing the work (and its value) it made space for conversations on what to do meaningfully with existing capacity – and how that work might be shared with other organizations better suited to do it in the ecosystem.

Supporting organizations to more fully, align their living systems with their intentions.

This is the kind of work Caprivian Strip Inc does— helping organizations see the systems they are already living within, and guiding them to shape those systems in ways that feel authentic, human, and connected. In the end, strategy isn’t about control - it’s about connection. It isn’t just about planning—it’s about people, relationships, and the conversations that move us forward together.

Rethinking Organizational Systems: From Strategy as Targets to Shared Connection(s)