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The Big Ideas: Checking the Authenticity of a Strategic Plan

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One of the dominant themes in my blog posts this year has been outlining dimensions of nonprofit strategy and, in my conversations with clients and potential clients, strategy is still the major theme.  A question that I have recently been man with binoculars pondering was asked by a colleague who had just gone through a strategic planning process.  His question was simple, “Okay, when you are all done and are looking at the final approved strategic plan, how do you know it is a good one?”  Unfortunately, while the “Checklist Manifesto” may be a popular business concept right now, I do not believe that there is one right answer to this question. However, one off from the checklist, is my belief that a team developing a strategic plan should establish external “ideals” against which they can reference their work. These ideals are the BIG ideas that frame the process and yet can sometimes get lost as planning teams wrestle with tactical objectives and operational details.  A working list of meta ideas might look like these:

  • Multiyear Funding: When the strategic plan is finished does it outline a clear pathway for developing an integrated approach to multiyear funding that provides stability to the organizations programs and infrastructure?
  • Capacity Building: When the plan is implemented will the capacity of the agency be strengthened?  Have we considered the operational systems and support required to ensure a healthy and growing organization?
  • Risk Taking: Does the plan lead us outside of a business as usual scenario in ways that challenge us to excel? Is the plan bold enough to encourage the agency take calculated (yet protected) risks to increase the impact of our programs and services?
  • Movement Building: Programs and services change lives while movements change communities.  Does our strategic plan reflect movement building that has the potential of leveraging change at the community level?
  • Making a Difference: Does our plan outline a pathway to demonstrate a clear and compelling impact? Will we be able to answer the question, “do we make a difference?”

Again, the list of “meta ideals” might differ from organization to organization but the common thread is that they are anchored to the core organizational values and aspirations. These ideals answer the question, “What do we as an agency want to become?” While the mission of today may be clear, the ideals drive the focus of the mission for tomorrow.  One agency might be ready to become a “game changer” while another agency’s big idea might be to reinvent their funding model to ensure sustainability.

If, in practice,  the use of BIG ideas is tackled at the front end of the planning process then the principles can then serve as the compass points during the planning process and sometimes, more importantly, revisiting  the ideals at the the end of the planning process can become useful final evaluative criterion to check the plan’s completeness. As I have worked with numerous teams on strategic planning, the process often (and ideally) starts large, aspirational and almost dreamy. As teams work to prioritize and define with some specificity, the end of the process is often mired in details — “now should be be projecting a .5 FTE or .8 FTE development associate?”  When the final copy is produced. the board has likely seen five or six iterations of the plan and the final vote is often, “yes. let’s be done with this monster.”  Rather than that sort of unceremonious end to a large investment of time, energy and passion, reflecting on how well the plan addresses the “big ideas” related to what an agency wants to  become can give energy and vitality to the approval and implementation of a strategic plan.

While this post may seem like it is discussing a tiny facet of strategic planning (and I agree it is), I am writing about it because it is a facet that it often overlooked.  By intentionally including reflection about “big ideas” in the strategic planning process, it can help frame, reinforce and energize a process. For any agency committing to a thoughtful strategic planning process the “Big Ideas” are critical tools to build and maintain focus and give a point of reference by which an agency can judge the authenticity of the finished strategic plan.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.

 

 

Facilitating a Crowd Source

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Crowd sourcing is an increasingly trendy concept that is popping up in the world of group dynamics, network development and strategic planning. Elevated to prominence by books with titles like “Here Comes Everybody” and the “Wisdom of Crowds” the concept is that if you get enough people engaged and contributing ideas, unstructured, then breakthrough thinking can occur. Couple the “crowd concept” with social media technology that enables the “viral” spread of the idea and the distributed connection of larger groups, and the result is that even corporate marketing departments like Pepsi see the value in the crowd.

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So it is no longer uncommon to hear at least one voice in a strategic planning process, suggest that the group “crowd source” a strategy. In this post I’d like to tackle the question of what does it take to facilitate a crowd?

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Let me back up to the streets. Over the last several months I have worked with several clients where the facilitation processes have had a large group component.   For example, I just completed an intense three month project where I helped a leadership team facilitate the process for a group of 26 professionals from across the state tasked with creating a comprehensive and forward-thinking Health Improvement Plan for the Oregon Health Authority. I also have had two strategic planning clients where assessment work included gathering diverse opinions from a range of program partners, board and staff members, and community volunteers. In one of these projects I aggregated open-ended survey comments from over 100 people. For me, convening groups, creating authentic community engagement, and navigating agreement have been standard operating practices for as I have long been engaged in community development and coalition-building work. So along with other colleagues who came up on the streets of collaboration, I simply smile at the wonderful new-found term of “crowd sourcing.”

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On the streets of community development and coalition-building, strategy has always been “outsourced” to the community and is not a construct new to crowd sourcing. So while crowd sourcing may be the new lingo, the principles of facilitating crowds remains the same. In my experience, some of the more critical principles of facilitating “crowds” include:

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Stay Open Early On: As anyone experienced facilitator knows, the messy space of open ideas can be uncomfortable. Indeed, in a recent facilitation process, one frustrated board member interrupted at one point and said, “Can you assure me that when we leave at the end of the day that we will come out of the clouds and stop flitting around?” While being in that open space can be difficult, one of the strengths of crowd sourcing is the very broad opening that it promotes the generation of ideas. In this process, a facilitator needs to be comfortable in the open space and not rush towards narrowing too quickly. Let expansion happen.

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Recognize When a Crowd is a Crowd: A second principle of facilitating a crowd is to recognize when a crowd is all you have. When the expectation is that large, bold new ideas will emerge out of the collective input of the crowd and those expectations are not met, a facilitator needs to be a mirror to the process and acknowledge the limitations of the convening.

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The Pepsi Refresh marketing campaign, thinly veiled as corporate giving, is a great relevant example. When the Pepsi Refresh project started, the concept was that by engaging people in voting for, defending and promoting great ideas, the nonprofit world would reap the benefit of innovation and up-start new ideas would come out of the “wise crowds.” Several months later, one just needs to peruse the list of funded projects to see that they range from the mildly innovative to the immediate & tactical (such as building a kindergarten playground and starting an animal food bank). Worthy projects? Absolutely. The cutting edge of social innovation to large-scale social needs? Not so much.

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Pepsi Refresh has become an exercise, not in “crowd sourcing” but “crowd re-sourcing.” That is to say that those agencies best at mobilizing the time and energy of networks of people to vote (again and again) likely can succeed. In facilitation, a crowd is just a crowd when it is orchestrated engagement meant to influence an outcome. When a facilitator recognizes that s/he is facing a crowd, then s/he is able to adapt the facilitation process to ensure the inclusion and equity in voice, not only of the crowd but the voice of the crowd outliers.

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Recognize Differential Knowledge: In every large group process I have facilitated, one of the core tasks of facilitation is to draw attention to differential knowledge. I have used this imagination as an illustration of the concept. Imagine a group of 5th grade boys walking back from a field trip when a box falls off of a truck speeding by. The boys bring the box back to the classroom and see that it is labeled “chocolate candy, keep out of direct sunlight.” If these boys were left to their own “crowd sourced” strategy related to that box of chocolates, what do you think the outcome would be? Indeed, there would likely be a super-majority of agreement, if not outright consensus on the course of action to open the box and devour the contents. Now enter a teacher who brings differential knowledge about ethics, the purpose of the contact information label on the box, and even the consequences of consuming pounds of chocolate. Do you think the crowd sourced outcome would be different? While the point is oversimplified, the concept should not be lost. In every crowd there is differential knowledge that needs to be given weight. All ideas are not equal.

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Seek Community Not Consensus: A final principle is to recognize that the goal of a large group is to find shared understanding and not necessarily consensus. Facilitation for a large group is about engagement that involves creating equity, voice and understanding. If you achieve these three things then often times consensus matters less. On a level playing field where all participants are given voice, community will emerge and, in the context of community, the collective will trump the crowd. When a group is meaningfully engaged through an empowering facilitation process then more authentic outcomes result. I have written elsewhere about the concept of community engagement because such a process is fundamental to the authentic community-building.

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Taken together, these four principles outline a framework that can assist in facilitating a crowd. Now I recognize that for some, bringing a facilitation process to the concept of crowd sourcing defies some the popular literature on the subject.  It is a flaw of the crowd source construct that creates an artificial either/or dynamic.  It is either “crowd” or “crowd control” with no in between. In the minds of those extolling the virtues of the self-organizing crowd, they believe that crowd control is a bad thing. I contend that a true crowd source process is aligned with (and a cousin of) community organizing, which requires a layer of intelligent design and group process. As with good basic community organizing, a skilled facilitator recognizes the power in the crowd and unleashes the potential of the crowd through a carefully constructed facilitation process.

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As always your thoughts are welcome.

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Facilitating for Organizational Learning

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I have organized my facilitation practice around a range of practice foundations, which helps as I work with potential clients.   In recently discussing a potential large-scale facilitation with a client, I found myself  drawing from the foundations of performance improvement and empowerment education to help frame the project.  At first, the client was jumping ahead to facilitation methodology as I was still trying to wrap my head around the process. As we spoke, it became clear that while the primary goal of the facilitation was focused on operational planning that there was a secondary goal to foster a nascent learning community.  With that perspective in mind, I focused the discussion around the larger process of facilitation before discussing facilitation methodology and suggested that the methodology would reveal itself if the process was clear. Once we agreed that the process needed to align both goals (community-building and operational planning) the rest of the discussion focused on the “how” of the convening (e.g., would open space or action planning be an appropriate methodology). The challenge of the facilitation was to both create a useful operational plan and accelerate the curve of the developing learning community.  Had we launched right into methods planning we might have missed the larger process. In this post I would like to describe a basic framework of group/organizational learning and discuss its implications for facilitation design.

If you were to align models for program planning, strategic planning, instructional design, organizational learning, and knowledge management, it would become apparent that the contour of all these processes includes a similar pathway of gathering information, making connections between information, interpreting information, and acting on information.  Specific to structuring a “learning group” facilitation there is the added dimension of community building. As such a learning group processes needs to be grounded in a participatory framework (more on frameworks) while moving through four phase pathway that looks like this:

Generating:  For most group processes, the first stage of the convening is to help all participants gather and share information.  Whether the information is derived from a structured assessment process in advance of the meeting or is a real-time sharing process, participants need to open the universe of information before moving to understanding and action.  In addition, when you are trying to help nurture a learning community it is critical to build interaction and participation into the generative phase.

Integrating/Interpreting: The second stage of the learning group pathway is to begin to create a share understanding of the connections between information.  As a group starts to move towards learning the process of synthesis begins to take place.  In group settings this is also the stage where participants begin to weave together socially.  In this context, the process of integrating and interpreting is both a constructivist activity and is also a social exercise where transparency, listening and sharing become stated values.

Participatory Meaning:  As the group’s understanding how the information connects together as a whole, the group is then able to start to create meaning out of the information and begin to sort and choose what is relevant and actionable.  In essence, the actions of this stage are prioritizing and narrowing.  Critical to this stage is that the process of narrowing must be grounded in principles of inclusion, voice and democracy.  Without a sense of authentic participation and ownership, the process of collaboration and network weaving is undermined.

Creative Action: The final stage of of the process is moving towards creative action.  This is the point where the group decides “what’s next.”  At the end of the day, all group process requires the facilitator to focus on concrete next steps.  For a learning group process, the next steps must also include discussion of what’s next for the social network weaving.  There needs to be the dual focus on both “where is the group going” and “how will they get there together.”

In talking to my potential client, I suggested that, on the surface, the process of moving from information to action looks like the primary task of most facilitation processes. However, if organizational learning is also a goal for the process, the second layer of “movement” is not just about information but the “movement” of social relationships.  The implication for such a facilitation process is that the facilitator should not only understand how to manage a group process but also understand principles of coalition building, adult leading, empowerment and constuctivist learning.  In a day when the processes networking weaving and organizational learning are, in many ways, more important that creating a product, facilitation becomes a higher order practice that simply “running a good meeting.”

As always, your comments are welcome.

Book for your bookshelf

Nancy Dixon: The Organizational Learning Cycle

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Maximizing the Limits of a Strategic Planning Retreat

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As a facilitator who specializes in nonprofit organizational development and strategic planning, a typical call that I might receive is from an agency in the planning phase of a board and/or staff retreat.  Frequently the goal of the retreat is framed as a day of strategic planning or visioning.  When talking to such potential clients, one of my standard discussion points relates to the “limitations of a day.”  In this post I want to discuss the limitations of a day long retreat and, in the context of strategic planning, discuss how to maximize the use of a planning retreat in spite of the limitations.

At the most basic level, any lengthy group process has built in ergonomic and logistical limitations.  In scheduling a day long retreat, my first advice to clients is to recognize that in a typical 8:30-4:30 retreat schedule, you lose productivity during the first, last and middle hours (in addition to losing a bit more time on the edges of scheduled breaks). In addition, participants coming late, leaving early, as well as texting, phone calls, and checking online for sports scores, also contribute to lower productivity.  I often half-jokingly suggest that good coffee at the beginning of the meeting, good food in the middle, and wine & cheese at the end of the meeting can help manage the lower productivity barrier but the reality is that people need down time during a day long process.  Sitting, thinking and being fully engaged in process, has physiological limitations.  With that said, my personal rule of thumb is that there are typically only 5-6 strategic hours during a day-long retreat.  That doesn’t imply that the less productive time can’t be used meaningfully but simply recognizes that there are limitations to the density of thinking that can be extracted out of meeting participants.

A 5-6 strategic hour planning frame of reference drives the content limitations. It is important to think about what can and cannot be realistically achieved in a 5-6 hour window.  More than once, I have had potential clients hope to complete an entire strategic planning process in a one-day retreat.  Unfortunately, a thoughtful strategic plan requires more than 5-6 hours.  For an organization with a strong strategic plan, it may be realistic to create an operational plan for the next year’s activities in a single day but it is not possible to thoughtfully create a strategic plan in the time span of 5-6 hours.  However, at the risk of sounding like a mere curmudgeon, I would like to shift the conversation to what can be achieved in a day long strategic planning process –as I do believe a dedicated day of strategic planning is critical to a strategic planning process.

In short, I believe the positive use of a strategic planning retreat is to link it with the most appropriate stage of the strategic planning process (see here). Without belaboring the point, strategic planning involves anywhere from 4-8 (or 10) steps depending on the model that being followed.  In essence these steps are organized around the stages of: planning, assessing, designing, and launching the plan.  Any of these primary stages can serve as a rich context for a day long strategic planning retreat.

Planning Retreat:  For an organization just embarking on the strategic planning process,  a day long retreat can be used to create a the plan process, build energy for the process, and begin to dream dreams and build a vision.  One approach to a retreat with a planning focus would be to help the staff to think about the positive aspirations and celebrate where they have come using tools like appreciative inquiry  or open space facilitation.

Assessing Retreat:  During a day long retreat organized around assessment it is the opportunity to engage board members and/or staff in assessing the the strategic planning context.  Such a retreat might be organized around reviewing and synthesizing previously gathered data or could be a structured  scenario planning or future search exercise (more here) or a SWOT or SOAR analysis (more here).  The goal of an “assessing retreat” is to create a meaningful understanding of the internal and external environment to inform the strategic plan direction, goals and activities.

Designing Retreat:  A designing retreat is the midpoint of a strategic planning process where assessments are completed and draft goals and strategies may have been developed.  Such a retreat is the opportunity to engage board, staff and/or stakeholders  is the critical work of synthesizing and narrowing ideas into a concrete strategy.  A designing retreat might be organized around  using visual tools (more here) to structure models such as as a a social impact , logic model (more here) or it may be an action planning retreat where teams translate assessment findings intro broad plans -that can be refined following the retreat.

Launch Retreat:  As artists and musicians celebrate milestones (such as the production of a CD or the opening of an art show) by hosting launch parties,  nonprofit agencies would also do well to consider staging a day long retreat at the end of a strategic planning process as a “launch retreat.”  Such a retreat can help orient and focus the organizations board and staff around the new plan and help build momentum for the work ahead.  A launch retreat is an opportunity to breath life into the words on paper.  It offers an environment to both celebrate and motivate.

This list of possibilities is not exhaustive but it makes the point. When considering the use of a facilitator for a strategic planning retreat, be wary of the ones who can promise strategic planning in a day.  While it it possible to run through the steps of a strategic plan in a day, meaningful strategy is the product of a process that requires the thoughtful engagement of a team over time.  There are clear limitations associated with convening a group for a day long strategic planning retreat.  A competent facilitator will help an agency think through the entire strategic planning process and make recommendations that maximize the use of a strategic planning retreat in the context of the overall planning framework.

If we can help you with strategic planning, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Four Facilitator Archetypes

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This post is one in an occasional series to help guide those looking to hire a facilitator.  Other posts in this series can be found here.  If your questions about facilitation are not answered, please don’t hesitate to email me and I will be glad to help!

On more that once occasion in my consulting practice I have been called into projects somewhere in the middle of the process.  At such times, I feel like the relief pitcher being called in when the arm of the first pitcher is failing.  In these situations,  clients often talking about the first facilitator’s wild pitches, consecutive walks or even the occasion “grand slam” error.  The challenge of walking into a project in mid-process is that the psyche of the team is often shaken and the progress to date ranges from “behind schedule” to “disarray.”   While this post does not present an exhaustive discussion of why facilitation fails, I would like to suggest four facilitator archetypes that can help guide the the hiring of a facilitator and prevent facilitation failure.

At the outset, let us be very clear.  Facilitation is a totally unregulated discipline.  No training, degree or certification is required for a person to consider him/herself a facilitator.  Indeed, of the training and certification programs that do exist, many can be misleading as they often are bought for a price, have a nominal process of vetting of skills and are perpetuated by the mere payment of annual dues and/or training fees.  Further, what actually constitutes strong facilitation skills is not very well defined. As a result, many portray themselves as a facilitator because they have dry erase markers and three books on their shelf.  One book focuses on ice-breaker activities, the second focuses on team-building activities, and the third focuses on running effective meetings.  In this context the due diligence for preventing facilitation failure becomes critical.  One way to think about assessing potential facilitators is to consider the dimensions of Breadth of Skills and Depth of Experience.

Breadth of Skills: When interviewing potential facilitators it is important to ask candidates to describe their breadth of skills.  Be cautious of facilitators who have trouble with this question.  There are many facilitators who get stuck using one or two strategies.  In these cases, the facilitator is like a carpenter who only has  a hammer is in his/her toolbox.  After a while of just carrying a hammer then everything starts looking like a nail.  Facilitators should be able to describe with confidence a broad array of facilitation methods and models and connect their knowledge with actual clients.

Depth of Expertise: The second dimension in the vetting process is to explore the experience and expertise of the facilitator. Not all facilitation is equal. The complexity and the content of a facilitation process should drive the selection of a facilitator.  The conventional wisdom is that facilitation is impartial and agnostic, however, it is my experience, that failure to account for the content expertise and technical knowledge of a facilitator can lead to mediocre outcomes –if not outright facilitation failure.

four archetypesA useful way to think about these to dimensions is to place on a horizontal axis of low to high the dimension of Breath of Skills and on a vertical axis of low to high the dimension of Depth of Experience & Expertise.  In this way, you create a two by two matrix.  Each of the four matrix quadrants represents a different facilitation archetype that can be defined as follows:

Entrant (Low Expertise – Low Breadth of Skills):  At face value one might ask themselves why they would ever consider hiring a facilitator in this quadrant.  However, when the outcomes of the facilitation process have lower consequence or value and/or the facilitation process is predefined or routine, it might make sense to utilize a facilitator in this quadrant.  For example, for routine team or staff meetings and agency might use inexperienced internal facilitators as a way to build the  facilitation skills of staff or team members.  Or in cases where the “stakes are low” but an impartial/outside facilitator is required to give some neutrality to the process, an agency might be able to hire an entrant at a lower consulting rate.

Generalist (Low Expertise – Higher Breadth of Skills): When meeting process and the accuracy of the proceedings are important outcomes then an agency might consider a generalist facilitator.  A generalist can employ a variety of facilitation methods and tools to ensure a well managed meeting.  Noncontroversial community dialogues, focus group facilitation, and operational planning staff retreats, might be examples of facilitation processes that require strong generalist facilitation skills to ensure process and narrative outcomes that are meaningful. Facilitators in this category should be able to substantiate experience in  a range of facilitation techniques that represent inclusive and participatory facilitation processes as well as strong post facilitation documentation.

Specialist (Higher Expertise – Lower Breadth of Skills): While content expertise may not matter in the lower tier of the matrix, there are times when knowledge and content do matter.  For examples, technology planning, executive transitions, implementing a capital campaign are facilitation processes that require more than an impartial facilitator.  Such specialized facilitation requires knowledge and judgment in addition to basic facilitation skills.  Hiring a facilitator in this quadrant values his/her specialized knowledge more than a broad range of facilitation skills.  A highly customized and tailored facilitation process might be sacrificed for the application of knowledge and content to a more generic facilitation process.

Sector Expert (Higher Expertise – Higher Breadth of Skills): The final cell in the matrix is the combination of high expertise coupled with the deep breadth of facilitation skills.  In my view the sector expert differs from the specialist in that the sector expert has cross disciplinary content expertise in addition to a deep range of facilitation skills.   The sector expert has a handle on the facilitation tools and processes required to create a customized and tailored approach to facilitation.  In addition, the sector expert has deep cross-sectional knowledge that can shape the content and knowledge base of the assignment.  A sector expert brings expertise to such complex processes as strategic planning, public policy change, or partnerships and mergers.

These four facilitation archetypes are by no means complete or definitive but rather the the archetypes provide useful heuristics when considering a process of hiring a facilitator.  While the “cost of hiring a facilitator” is a Google search term that drives a lot traffic to a couple of posts that I wrote on that topic (post 1 & post 2), it is my belief that considering the cost of a facilitator as a primary determinant is short-sighted.  More critical to hiring a facilitator is the matching of facilitation skills, process, and content depth to the task at hand.  To this end, considering the four facilitator archetypes is a useful frame for facilitator hiring success.

As always, your comments are welcome.

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