SFPL · V2B hero · NOTE: one session scene and two specific design moves still needed before publishing Read the editorial memo →
San Francisco Public Library · 2023 Service designer · Harmonic Design

The strategic plan that didn't need to be sold

32 ambassadors co-wrote the values, tested the priorities, and carried the plan back into 28 branches — adopted unanimously, mechanism still running two and a half years later.

32
ambassadors across 28 branches
Unanimous
adoption · December 2023
2026
Ambassador mechanism in SFPL midyear report

The San Francisco Public Library needed more than a strategic plan. It needed a plan its 28 branches would carry — one that staff recognized as their own rather than something handed down from leadership and consultants. The risk was familiar: a plan adopted on Tuesday, ignored by Friday. The Ambassador Program was designed to close the gap between adoption and implementation before the vote happened — by making sure the people who'd have to carry the plan had helped build it.

Chapter 01

A 145-year-old institution needed a plan its staff would actually carry

In 2023, SFPL launched Vision 2030 — its most ambitious strategic planning process in recent history. Gensler led a consortium that included Harmonic Design, Margaret Sullivan Studio, Contigo Communications, and Corey, Canapary & Galanis Research. Harmonic's job was to make sure staff recognition got built in, not bolted on. The mechanism was a Staff Ambassador Program: 32 people drawn from across the system — different branches, departments, seniority levels, lengths of tenure — engaged across five workshops over nine months.

They did real work: surfacing internal insights, drafting and pressure-testing organizational values, modeling those values inside concrete service moments, and prioritizing the opportunities the strategic plan needed to address. In parallel, a Management Team track ran the same work from leadership's vantage point. The two tracks were designed to feed each other — what ambassadors surfaced about frontline reality went up; what MTeam clarified about strategic intent came down.

image: parallel tracks photo — Ambassador and MTeam sessions running side by side, or both groups in adjacent rooms. Source: raw-case-material/sfpl/ — mteam-ambs-sessions.jpg or mteam-ambs.jpg
Two tracks running in parallel — Ambassador sessions and Management Team sessions covering the same ground from different altitudes.

Chapter 02

Thirty-two ambassadors, five sessions — and a room that started hostile

By the second session, the program had a problem. A portion of the 32 ambassadors had arrived visibly skeptical, and a vocal group was openly hostile to both library leadership and the consultant team. Some skepticism came from prior experience: consultants who had shown up, extracted input, and disappeared. Some came from the structural reality of a workforce with active labor concerns being asked to participate in a process its leadership had commissioned. All of it was reasonable.

The internal diagnosis, captured in the Gensler meeting record: staff felt the process was a "check the box" exercise. The next session would have to reinforce that they were "playing a meaningful role" before any other work could happen. Past is not a prologue was the frame we had to earn. What that meant in practice was redesigning the approach between sessions — both what happened in the room and what happened between sessions to demonstrate that feedback had been heard.

image: one concrete scene from inside a session — a minute of tension, surprise, or recognition that earns the trust-as-deliverable framing. Whitney needs to name this moment before publishing. Do not invent.
⚠ This placeholder needs a real scene from inside one of the five sessions — a specific moment Whitney can name. See rewrite-memo.md open question #1.

Chapter 03

When feedback is visibly metabolized, not just collected

The design move that changed the room wasn't a particular activity or icebreaker. It was a commitment to making ambassadors' feedback visibly present in the next session's materials — traceable from what someone said to what appeared on the board in front of them the following month.

One ambassador noted it mid-series: "I really appreciate seeing that the feedback from the last session was taken into account. Thank you!" That observation looks small on the page. In a room that started where this one started, it was the entire game. It meant a staff member who had arrived skeptical now trusted that the process was real. That trust was the precondition for them carrying the plan back into a branch and treating it as their own.

The Ambassador Team Purpose Statement was the first signal of this principle. Drafted from kickoff worksheets through affinity mapping, written from the perspective of the ambassador team rather than the consultants, it gave the ambassadors back a statement of who they were and what they were there to do, in their own collective voice. Most strategic planning processes make the opposite choice. This one didn't.

Chapter 04

What the ambassadors actually produced

The ambassadors didn't just give input. They drafted and pressure-tested SFPL's new organizational values. The five values that ended up in Vision 2030 — Well-being, Equity, Community, Collaboration, Exploration — went through ambassador hands before they reached the Library Commission. The specific phrasing carries the working language of the people who would have to live with it: We strengthen our communities when we come together to engage, inspire, celebrate and learn from each other.

Values written by leadership and handed down rarely survive contact with daily branch operations. Values written with the people doing branch operations come pre-tested. The engagement generated a library of artifacts that drove the synthesis: consolidated values profiles, a traceability poster set showing the lineage of every value from workshop to strategic priority, moment cards modeling values inside concrete service interactions, and the SFPL Collaboration Board holding the cross-session through-line.

Annotated values-redraft section of the SFPL Collaboration Board, showing proposed value categories with margin notes capturing language changes, additions, and reasoning between sessions.
SFPL Collaboration Board — values redraft with traceability. Every value can be traced from workshop to strategic priority to adopted language.

The reframe

We were hired to facilitate a planning process

We were hired to facilitate a strategic planning process. The process was real, the timeline was real, and the commission vote was real. What we found by session two was that a planning process whose participants don't trust it doesn't produce plans that hold. The harder job — the one that determined whether any of the deliverables would matter — was designing for trust. Not collecting feedback, but metabolizing it visibly, in front of the people who gave it, so that the process itself became the first evidence that the plan would be different from what came before. That's not facilitation as a neutral frame. It's facilitation as the primary design problem.

What stays behind

How an engagement mechanism becomes standing organizational practice

In December 2023, the San Francisco Public Library Commission adopted Vision 2030 unanimously, committing SFPL to a five-year program. The unanimous adoption is the headline. The harder outcome is the one that doesn't show up in a vote count: by the time the plan reached the Commission, the staff who would carry it had already handled its values, tested its priorities against their own working reality, and seen their feedback show up in the next session's materials. The plan didn't need to be sold internally. It had been built internally.

In March 2026 — two and a half years after adoption — SFPL's Chief of Public Services presented the Vision 2030 midyear progress report to the Library Commission. Among the four pillars she named was Staff Ambassador Engagement. The mechanism built to land the plan in 2023 had, by 2026, become part of how the organization works. Strategic plans get adopted regularly. The ones that get carried are the ones whose conditions hold.