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21 Jul 2006
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Not-for-Profit Observations: Board and Staff Alignment Fuels Exponential Growth
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The logo for Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great , is a graph that represents an organization that has continued for some time in a steady state, a relatively flat and stable level of performance. Then, at an inflection point, the organization makes a steep growth shift. An inflection point is a point on a curve at which the sign of the curvature (i.e., the concavity) changes. Collins’ book, Good to Great, and the public sector monograph , are about organizations that have been able to make and sustain such growth well beyond the inflection point (see Jim’s excellent description of the inflection point diagram on page 3 of his brief on-line materials: Where are you on your journey from Good to Great? ).
For CGC and our clients, a central focus of our work is what happens at and after the inflection point. This is a critical event, a transformation. To engage in trying to make the shift is one thing. To engage in accomplishing and sustaining the change is another.
In the Not-for-Profit world, the growth shift is often brought about by a few very successful projects. These key events begin the growth incline. It is the nature of Not-for-Profit staff to tend to the organization on a day-to-day basis and for the governance/volunteer board to intermittently tend to the strategy and operations of the organization—after all, they haven’t quit their own day jobs! As such, the staff leadership often sees the effect of this growth and its potential before it is fully apparent to the governance/volunteer board.
Not-for-Profit board members, often founders or long-term volunteers, have a clear sense of the organization’s mission, rooted in its history and steady-state that has preceded the inflection point. This understanding is a social construction, and appropriate for members of the organization. As a member of both the organization and its board, they know the conventions and language, and they are aligned with the culture. Although this supports the rhythm of an organization, it also can support an insular paradigm--witness the British Society’s support for the competition to find a reliable method of measuring longitude to aid in navigation. Its members had severe difficulty over a course of decades in accepting what at the time (late 1700s) was a far superior analog method using a remarkable clock vs. the astronomical approach to measuring longitude ( Dava Sobel , 1995).
Consequently, if an organization wants to move forward, the staff leadership and the board have to enter uncharted territory. This territory is a crisis of mission, vision, and membership culture. The question for the organization now becomes, “How do staff leadership and the board work together in a new way that respects the membership culture and maintains the new growth energy (shown after the inflection point)?” Geoff Bellman has said that change of this sort is very difficult because people (membership/ governance) have worked for many years to mold the organization and its culture into its current form – not to change it (see my review of his The Beauty of the Beast: Breathing New Life Into Organizations ).
A useful Organizational Development (OD) aphorism (originated by Marvin Weisbord ): “the organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” At some point, the staff leader becomes frustrated—he or she wants the board to recognize the organization’s achievement and focus on new possibilities, yet the staff leader is unsure how best to do it. To break out of this groove, the environment and method of communicating needs to change. What is needed is a way to change the status quo, focus on strategic business communication, and engage all in a look at the future - creating what Appreciative Inquiry (AI) calls a possibility statement. From a systems-thinking perspective, the board and the staff leaders need to collectively plan the practical infrastructure and cultural changes needed to sustain their combined and aligned imagination of the future state.
Staff leaders intuitively sense the need and value of a third party to help mix things up. To encourage change, a naturally occurring event like a board meeting or a retreat can be arranged to signal that things will not be as usual. We’re frequently called in at this point to “facilitate” a board meeting—one the staff leaders hope will be somehow different. If we get the call in time, we can help to shift the design of this communication opportunity toward the possible future. Our Appreciative Inquiry approach is a key aspect of helping both the board and staff to understand what has led to the growth, how it was enabled and what a tremendous appreciation of assets it has brought. CGC can then help lead the Board/Staff inquiry into future possibilities for how best to leverage these appreciated assets into new levels of contribution to society – around which both the board and the staff leaders are aligned and poised for action.
To be effective, much planning and design work should go into the event. We often start the planning one-on-one with the staff leader. After some dialogue, we usually discover the phenomenal growth curve that the leader is well aware of, yet frustrated about because of its obscurity.
Getting back to the inflection point discussion, and using the organization’s own data, we start drawing the inflection point graph in an incremental manner working from the organization’s history and documenting key events that gave rise to the change. Honoring the past is critical to the value of this exercise.
Drawn to scale and including years of time-based data, the image representing the magnitude of change over time often surprises staff leaders. Once it is visual, an “Ah Hah” moment frequently follows. As the image is being drawn, it’s almost as if a documentary of the organization’s long suffering commitment and recent success are being filmed. Objectively, we are watching it unfold! We have thus created a creative moment--time to fully discuss the diagram, understanding important roles and influences, and grappling with meaning and the excitement of the possible future, while continuing to realize the crisis the picture conveys (Chinese definition of crisis: danger and opportunity).
Daniel Quinn said (in his The Story of B ) that “change comes from changed minds.” In the early interview and visualization process with the staff leader, we demonstrate that by imagining the organization working at its future best one simultaneously and unconsciously changes one’s mind in the direction of the desired end state (Appreciative Inquiry principal of simultaneity). It is then possible to start discussing how we might engage the board in also imagining this positive possible future so that together the organization’s key leaders will be inclined toward it. This opens the space to engage all in the barrier-free dialogue.
As an OD and strategic change firm, CGC brings the toolbox and expertise to enable the staff leader and the board to practice the art of the possible (see the great tool from Grove Consultants to facilitate this visual discovery). This valuable time spent with the staff and board is both a great grounding and orientation as well as an eureka phenomenon producer. As with the staff leader, once “Eureka” is uttered by the board, we have a creative moment to engage all in vision and alignment for the future. We can help the leader sort through additional options for improving the organization like AI, Open Space , Whole Scale Change , Future Search and Dialogue . Together, we can design the right event at the right level of effort and bring possible new contributions out of obscurity and into the light—a nurturing place for continued growth.
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| posted by Kevin Coray
at 17:25 | trackbacks [1151] |
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