Orgforward Opines

I doubt anyone would argue that to succeed successfully and sustainably one needs a plan. In fact, we hear the words throughout our sector all the time. We set time aside to develop a strategic plan with goals, benchmarks, time-frames, new mission statements AND then we go to work. Unfortunately, we often go to work doing exactly what we have always been doing, often getting frustrated as we cannot seem to get those strategic goals underway. Guess what, you are not alone. McKinsey & Company conducted a survey in 2006 and found that nearly 90% ** of organizations failed to implement their strategy, as identified through the goals of their strategic plan.*  (**2026 UPDATE - In the past 20 years things have only gotten slightly better. 2025 research by Gartner has this number now at 85%; Harvard Business Review has it around 70%; and Kaplan & Norton at 90% - all of which don't change the point of this post in any significant way) Kudos to the 10%, but what about the rest of...

Doing more with less is a financial construct. One which community benefit organizations feel backed into as they work to manage within an increasingly difficult economic climate. Ironically, it runs against our DNA. It is a construct we have allowed others to define us by. We work to build a system on infusion. By identifying what we believe a better world is, we rally our talent to find the resources necessary to make the change possible. And we deploy those resources in pursuit of betterness. Virtually every community benefit organization came into being with a More Mentality. They started with little and found those who had capacity to give (usually time, talent, and goods, NOT MONEY); engaged them, and went to work changing the world. Somewhere along the line, money and budgets became the defining factor, not the assets that were engaged early on. We went from asking "what can we use to make this work and who has it" to fretting "where can we get the money we need t...

Spending a year of my childhood outside of Boston, I was introduced to the regional phrase “wicked awesome.” A usage of wicked as an adjective that I quickly learned was meant to push the scales beyond just your plain old “awesome.” Years later I read Wicked by Gregory Maguire, a novel that turned Oz’s wicked witch of the west into a misunderstood heroine. Now, I’ve come across a Harvard Business Review article about Strategy as a Wicked Problem (http://hbr.org/2008/05/strategy-as-a-wicked-problem/ar/1) that states: “A wicked problem has innumerable causes, is tough to describe, and doesn’t have a right answer, … environmental degradation, terrorism, and poverty—these are classic examples of wicked problems. They’re the opposite of hard but ordinary problems, which people can solve in a finite time period by applying standard techniques. Not only do conventional processes fail to tackle wicked problems, but they may exacerbate situations by generating undesirable consequences." I...