Posts Tagged ‘systems thinking’
Strategic Planning: Accountability Matters
. This is the final post in a four part series on creating the right context for strategic planning. In the first post I outlined the need to match strategic planning process to your organizational culture. In the second post discussed the need to have a clear and focused change or ...Read More
Strategic Planning: Building Momentum & Process
. In this series on strategic planning, my goal is to outline principles that inform the development of a strategic planning process. The first principle is that agencies need to connect the planning process and their organizational culture. The second principle is that strategic planning must be tied to a clear ...Read More
Strategic Planning: Connecting Process with Culture
. There are literally hundreds of resources on strategic planning a simple Google search away and likely an equal number of books devoted to the subject. So why do we need another blog series on strategic planning? My goal is not to teach strategic planning but to help teams and agencies ...Read More
Visual Learning In Facilitation
. Have you ever encountered a facilitator whom over the course of a meeting wrote down lots of words on easel-pad paper, filled up the wall space with page after page of notes and at the end of the meeting simply transcribed the notes into a word processing document or worse, ...Read More
Facilitating Collaboration: Five Potential Models
. Facilitators are often called in to help design projects involving multiple stakeholders such as in convening interdepartmental workgroups, cross-functional teams or inter-agency committees and coalitions. For these assignments one of the key assessments that the facilitator needs to make is to determine whether the convening is for the purpose of ...Read More
Characteristics of Quality Facilitation
. One of the common misconceptions that I encounter is that many people equate facilitation with meeting management. If meetings run smoothly they are considered successful and facilitated well. While running effective meetings does require facilitation, meeting management is the most rudimentary of facilitation skills. Virtually anyone can be trained to ...Read More
Socially Responsible Growth & Strategy
. In the last 15-20 years the concept of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) has grown from an abstract investment concept to a mainstream practice. According to the Social Investment Forum’s 2007 report on SRI Trends, over $2.71 trillion in total assets are being managed using one or more of the three ...Read More
Four Board Membership Conversations
. I have outlined board frameworks elsewhere and this blog is a more practical companion. . While there are literally dozens of books, websites and blogs devoted solely to the topic of nonprofit boards it is still a common phenomenon for nonprofits to struggle to identify the strategic composition and functioning ...Read More
Goals and Objectives Matter
. Recently, I was asking a team for their feedback on the goals and objectives for an approaching meeting and one team member emailed me, “I always get confused by the differences between goals and objectives but here is what I want out of the meeting.” As I read these words ...Read More
Agency Capcity, Resource Development Planning & Fundraising
. A few years back, I directed a larger national training project that worked extensively with non-profits on fundraising, capacity building, and resource development planning. One of the challenges of this work was that there was a surprising lack of a common vocabulary describing the the differences between the three terms. ...Read More