Simple Education Foundation is currently at a vantage point of building its next five years.

This is the third time in SEF's 13-year journey that the organisation has deliberately taken a step back to build a strategy. And, as anyone who has been part of a strategy process knows, the process is rarely linear. There are days when the whiteboard is full of frameworks, hypotheses and arrows going in every possible direction, and days when it feels like there are simply a million questions and no answers.

As someone leading the Founders Office and much of the strategy work happening within it, this felt like a good moment to look back at how SEF has approached strategy twice before and what those experiences might tell us about what strategy means for a nonprofit more broadly.

The word "strategy" comes with a lot of baggage. Much of what we know about strategy has been shaped by the business world: competitive advantage, market share, differentiation, customer acquisition and operational control. There is a lot the social sector can learn from this way of thinking. But there is also a risk in borrowing frameworks without examining the assumptions underneath them.

A nonprofit operates in a fundamentally different context. The problem it is trying to solve, the people it is accountable to, the ecosystem it operates within and even the levers it can control are different.

There are three differences that I keep coming back to.

First, nonprofits need to understand their audience; businesses often need to educate theirs.

Businesses often educate consumers about the larger ecosystem within which their product exists. A protein brand can relentlessly talk about the Indian diet, why our bodies need protein and what "clean protein" means. A shampoo brand can talk about different scalp and hair types, problems associated with the Indian climate and how its products offer solutions.

This education ultimately creates a market for the product.

The development sector cannot work that way.

We don't enter communities assuming we already know what people need. As experts in a particular domain, we may have a hunch. We may have years of research, literature and experience behind us. But no amount of secondary research, literature reviews or large-scale government surveys can provide a complete picture of a particular classroom, district or community.

Our work in Punjab is a good example of this.

When we began expanding our in-service teacher development work in the state, the instinct could have been to reach every district as quickly as possible. Punjab is a large state with significantly diverse needs, and scale is always tempting. Instead, we spent nearly a year conducting a deep needs assessment across the state. We met teachers, school leaders, district officials and state stakeholders and built relationships across the ecosystem.

Much of that work felt ambiguous because we weren't yet building a programme.

We were building understanding.

Only after understanding the landscape did the strategy become clearer. Today, we support state-wide policy advocacy, teacher training and coach development and additionally work deeply in two districts through high-touch implementation in carefully prioritised schools. 

The strategy was not to impose a predetermined solution across the state. It was to understand where the need was deepest, where SEF could add the most value and what different levels of engagement should look like.

Second, other organisations are rarely competitors; they are often essential allies.

In business, strategy often seeks competitive advantage. If two companies sell similar products to the same customers, each is trying to capture a larger share of the market. In the social sector, success rarely comes from outperforming another organisation.

If the goal is better learning outcomes, another organisation working on teacher development is not necessarily taking away from our impact. They may have expertise, relationships or approaches that we don't. They may even be essential to solving the problem at scale.

SEF's Pre-service Collective is one example of this different approach.

Rather than building understanding from scratch in an area that is untapped by the non-profit space, SEF brought together organisations already working to improve teacher preparation. Along with FIRKI, Teach For India, we launched the first Pre-Service Collective in India to collectively think about the gaps in India's pre- teacher education ecosystem.

The idea was simple: the problem is too large and too complex for any one organisation to solve alone. Different organisations bring different expertise, networks and experiences. Instead of each organisation building its own solution in isolation, the Collective creates a space to learn together, identify shared challenges and strengthen the broader ecosystem.

Social sector strategy seeks collective ownership, not competitive advantage.

Third, nonprofits rarely control the system they are trying to change.

A business has significant control over its means of production. It can decide what to build, how to price it, where to distribute it and how to change it. A nonprofit working on a public problem operates very differently.

Consider something as seemingly simple as building a technology product for government school teachers.

The users may be teachers. The decision-makers may be government officials and bureaucrats. The ultimate beneficiaries are students. The content may need to draw on academic and practitioner expertise. The product may be funded by philanthropists. And ultimately, its ability to reach thousands or millions of teachers may depend on government systems and partnerships.

There are many moving pieces, and SEF does not control most of them.

This is why we couldn't simply decide to "build an AI product for teachers" and start building.

We first had to ask: What problem are we actually solving? Is it common across the geographies we work in? What do teachers already have access to? What role should technology play, and what still requires human judgement? What would government stakeholders need to trust and adopt it? What should the technology do and, equally importantly, what should it not do?

Those questions shaped the product long before the product itself took shape. We tested it with small groups of teachers, iterated on the experience and gradually introduced features such as voice interactions.

The technology wasn't the strategy.

It was one component of a strategy designed around a system that SEF does not own.

These three differences lead to three questions that, I think, should sit at the heart of nonprofit strategy.

First, how will we understand the problem?

This means spending time in classrooms, communities and government offices; listening before designing; understanding what already exists; identifying what is working; and finding the real bottlenecks rather than simply treating the most visible symptom as the problem.

Second, how will we rally the ecosystem?

What capabilities already exist? Which organisations have solved parts of this challenge? Where should we partner instead of building from scratch? Who needs to be involved for the solution to work? Which parts require government ownership rather than nonprofit delivery?

Third, how will we design for adoption, not just innovation?

A good solution isn't one that works only when the nonprofit is present. It is one that the system can eventually own, adapt and sustain long after the organisation steps away.

These questions sound simple. They are not.

They require nonprofits to make very different choices about where to focus, what not to build, whom to involve, what to test and when to scale. They also require accepting that the best strategy may sometimes make the organisation less visible, rather than more.

At SEF, these are precisely the questions we are grappling with as we build our strategy for the next five years. We are stepping back, zooming out and asking ourselves what we have learned, what has changed in the education ecosystem in the past 5-6 years, where our capabilities can genuinely add value and what role we want to play in the system over the next phase of our journey.

There are, unsurprisingly, still a million questions on the whiteboard.

But perhaps that is what a good strategy process should look like.

The longer I work in this sector, the more I realise that strategy is, at its heart, an act of humility. It begins by accepting that we don't fully understand the problem, that no single organisation can solve it alone, and that the people living closest to the challenge often understand it better than we do.

The role of a nonprofit, then, isn't to arrive with all the answers.

It is to ask better questions, bring the right people together, build what is genuinely needed and, ultimately, make itself less necessary.