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.

The case in 6 moves

  1. A plan staff would carry
  2. Thirty-two ambassadors
  3. Metabolizing feedback visibly
  4. The values they drafted
  5. Trust as the design problem
  6. Becoming standing practice
32
ambassadors · 28 branches
Unanimous
adoption · Dec 2023
2026
midyear report named it

SFPL 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: 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

SFPL needed a plan its 28 branches would actually carry

In 2023, SFPL launched Vision 2030 — its most ambitious strategic planning process in years. 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 insights, drafting and pressure-testing values, prioritizing the opportunities the 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.

Ambassador + MTeam tracks running in parallel
Two tracks running in parallel — Ambassador sessions and Management Team sessions covering the same ground from different altitudes.

Chapter 03

The design move: metabolizing feedback visibly, not just collecting it

The move that changed the room wasn't an activity or icebreaker. It was making ambassadors' feedback visibly present in the next session's materials — traceable from what someone said to what appeared on the board 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 this room, 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. Written in the ambassadors' voice rather than the consultants', it gave them back a statement of who they were and what they were there to do. Most strategic planning processes make the opposite choice.

Chapter 04

What the ambassadors drafted: the five organizational values

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

Facilitation as the primary design problem

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 was designing for trust. Not collecting feedback, but metabolizing it visibly so the process itself became the first evidence the plan would be different. That's facilitation as the primary design problem, not as a neutral frame.

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 later — SFPL's Chief of Public Services presented the Vision 2030 midyear progress report. Among the four pillars she named: Staff Ambassador Engagement. The mechanism built to land the plan had become part of how the organization works. Strategic plans get adopted regularly. The ones that get carried are the ones whose conditions hold.

Vision 2030 adoption — December 2023
Library Commission adopts Vision 2030 unanimously. Ambassador mechanism named again in the 2026 midyear report.