A new CAO opens the organization's strategic plan two weeks into the job. She lands on one line.
Objective 2.3: improve access to recreation services. Progress: 65 per cent.
She asks three questions, in this order. 65 per cent of what? Who decided it was 65 per cent? And what did we try that did not work?
All three go unanswered. Not because the organization is badly run. Because the plan was handed over, and the reasoning behind the plan was not.
This is not a rare situation. Ontario's new municipal councils take office on November 15, 2026, following the October 26 election, and many of them are sitting down this month with a plan they did not write.
What hands over on its own
Start with the good news, because it is real.
The adopted document hands over. The text of the directions, the objectives, the targets, the resolution dates: everything written in a document travels with the document. That is exactly what an adopted plan is for, and it is why organizations adopt one.
The numbers hand over too, at least the latest ones. Last year's tracking file exists somewhere, and it contains percentages.
That is not where the problem is. The problem is that those two things, the text and the numbers, are precisely the least useful things to someone arriving.
What does not hand over
Three things disappear with every change of team, and none of them is written in the plan.
The trade-offs, first. A strategic plan is made of what was kept, but it is understood through what was set aside. If council chose to invest in facilities rather than in programming, that decision had a reason, and the reason still holds. It lives in minutes nobody rereads, or in somebody's head.
The abandoned attempts, next. An indicator that stopped being measured because it said nothing useful. An action deferred twice for a specific reason. With no trace, the next team runs the same attempt, gets the same result, and loses the same time.
The definition, last. The one that hurts most. "Improve access" meant three very precise things to the people who wrote the line: opening hours, transportation, fees. Six months later, the line means whatever each reader brings to it.
That is what explains the 65 per cent. It is not wrong. It measures something real, decided by someone competent. But that someone has left, and the 65 per cent stayed.
The file test
There is a simple way to find out where you stand, and it does not require an audit.
Pick an objective from the current plan, not the best looking one, an ordinary one. Ask someone to produce, in under ten minutes: the person accountable, what has been done since adoption, what the indicator measures exactly, and what was tried and then dropped.
Three possible outcomes.
- The answer comes out of the tracking tool in a few clicks. The memory is in the plan.
- The answer comes out of somebody's binder, after a search. The memory exists, but it is private.
- The answer requires calling someone who has left the organization. The memory was never recorded anywhere.
The third case is the most common, and it is also the fastest to fix. What is gone cannot be recovered, but the losing can stop as of now.
Where memory gets recorded
A plan's memory does not fit into one more document. A document about organizational memory gets lost exactly like everything else.
It gets recorded in three places, and each one calls for a tiny gesture, repeated.
Working notes, attached to the plan element rather than to the file. When a committee defers an action, the reason gets written there, in two lines, the same day. Not in an email.
The accountable lead, named as a person and not as a department. A department remembers nothing. A named person knows why the line exists, and when they move on, there is someone to talk to.
The indicator's history, kept rather than overwritten. A file you update holds today's value and loses the trajectory. And it is the trajectory that answers the question "are we making progress". The value alone answers nothing.
Periodic updates play the same role, as long as they stay short. A three-paragraph quarterly update that actually exists beats a forty-page annual report written by reconstructing the year.
For an incoming team
The reflex on arrival is to want to redo the plan. That is often legitimate, and it is almost always too early.
The first weeks go better the other way around: read the trail before rewriting the text. Take the three or four objectives that touch the most departments, and for each one, ask for the file. Not the number, the file.
If there is no file, that is already the first finding of the term, and it is more useful than a new strategic direction. You do not build a credible plan on tracking whose numbers nobody can explain.
What we are actually after
Let us be clear on one point, because the continuity argument can quickly turn into a conservative one.
A new CAO, a new council, a new board have every right to change the plan. That is often exactly what they are there for. A plan that survives three terms untouched is not a good plan, it is a plan nobody dares open.
So the continuity we are after is not continuity of content. It is continuity of evidence: being able to say what was done, what it produced, and why it is stopping.
Changing direction knowingly is governance. Changing direction because nobody can say where things stood is just a restart.
Keeping the trail of your plan from one term to the next
See how notes, periodic updates and indicator history stay attached to plan elements rather than to files.
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