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...

At our most recent board meeting for Creating the Future , we took time to deeply explore the role financial management, reporting, and leadership should play in the organization. As a demonstration project exploring what could be possible for all boards, we spend a fair amount of time engaged in a process talking about process. I personally think this is at the heart of leadership and creating space for process is essential to organizational success, but I found it particularly relevant here. Many of us come to financial issues, be they our own personal ones or those of an organization with which we are involved, from a place of reactivity. We get a report or a statement showing us what has transpired and are asked to react. Let’s look at how different people react:   For those who consider themselves “not numbers people,” fear and embarrassment are the first reactions as they confront something unfamiliar and intimidating. Fear and embarrassment don’t generally lead to engagement...

“One reason Tibetans have never been active proponents of nature preserves as we know them is that it is hard for Tibetans to conceive of what would be different on the other side of the boundary” Galen Rowell, My Tibet – 1995 I first heard this statement while attending a talk given by Galen Rowel, an adventure photographer, who at the time, was working on his book My Tibet.    The book is an amazing collection of photographs of Tibet which Rowell asked the Dalai Lama to comment and write on. The essence of the quote about the meaning of boundaries struck me then as an ambitious student.    However, unlike the hundreds of other thought-provoking ideas that sparked robust dialog with my peers but faded into intellectual obscurity as I entered and acclimated to the “real” world, this one still haunts be. It just won’t go away. In fact, it has started screaming even louder. Here, we (developed countries) had come up with the fix to losing cherished natural resources by...

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...

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...