Orgforward Opines

Recently, when asking the Executive Director of a Standards for Excellence certified organization why she led the organization through the process, her answer was that it was the best way to prepare for her departure. This is a great example of a leader who saw the value of investments in organizational infrastructure as a way to support sustainability beyond her tenure. The organization’s efforts and focus today were not only on improving effectiveness, but also on supporting the long-term viability of the organization with the knowledge that transition was part of the organization’s future. Given the dynamic, fast paced environment facing our organizations and the demand for constant strategic decision-making, we all need to be actively thinking and talking about organizational sustainability on a regular basis. This includes our boards, our leadership, and our staff. So, what is a sustainability focus? In their book Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decision for Financial V...

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...