Islam in America

Instead of sitting in a closed room with a few people to come up with “the strategy”, community leaders should find ways to open up the process and get input from all over. In fact great input may come, not only from the Muslim community, but even from interfaith partners.

I have seen this process successfully happen in an Islamic context, and it produced wonderful results. Gather input from community members as an integral part of the strategy setting process.

This was also done often by our prophet, in many famous incidents where he would ask the companions : “ashiroo 3alaya ayouha al nas” (Oh people, tell me what to do). Companions spoke their minds, and in fact sometimes offered suggestions that initially countered that of the prophet.

An important success of the leaders is to open up the planning and strategy setting process to more and more people.

This is a good article about the subject. http://hbr.org/2010/10/can-you-open-source-your-strategy/ar/1