For many years on this site I have kept a page of facilitation resources that is my working library. I haven’t updated it for a long time, and so today, I went through folders and bookmarks and old emails and blog posts and revised the page.
For your edification, my renewed library of Facilitation Resources, free for the taking. The best links and site to partcipatory process I have found.
Enjoy.
Over the years I’ve written about how convoluted strategic planning gets for most organizations. Most of the small non-profits I work with seem to think it’s wise to use mainstream business strategic planning frameworks to plot their way forward. Even though these frameworks are pursued with the best of intentions, for many volunteer Boards of small and meagerly funded organizations, it’s usually overkill to adopt highly technical frameworks for planning. It might just be too much.
Even the process of vision, mission, goals and objectives is often too overbearing because it tends to force conversations into boxes, and it often results in Boards spending a lot of time designing statements that are too high minded, and largely forgotten. It also constrains the process and uses valuable time to talk about abstract notions that might be over kill for an organization that just does one thing well. Sometimes “providing quality child care at an affordable price” is all you need to say.
So I’m thinking about what IS essential for Board planning in small organizations, and here are some of the things that make good sense to address:
What’s going on out there? A conversation about what is going on in the world and how it effects the work of the organization. This could take the form of a reflective Board meeting, a presentation on demographics or other social trends, understanding the political forces that shape their funding and operations and so on. Could be as simple as a conversation, or as involved as a learning journey. Regardless it grounds the work of the organization in the world that it serves.
What’s happening in here? What has heart and meaning for us? What do we love about the work we do in the world? What needs to be said about our contribution? Also, what is the current state of play here? What pressing issues do we have within the organization in terms of staff, funding, capital and service? This is a look at our mission and vision but also raises awareness of the important governance issues for a Board. Keeping this conversation high level has the added benefit of resulting in only the big things making the radar, meaning that the staff can concentrate on the day to day operations without being micromanaged.
What are the scenarios that might unfold? What is possible in the next five years? How might we react to things? I find scenario planning to be a fun and creative activity, and the deeper you can go into it, the more ownership people take over their futures. This kind of exercise can involve others as well, including staff, stakeholders, clients and supporters. Everyone can be involved in imagining scenarios for the future.
What decisions do we need to make? Really, all planning comes down to making decisions. Some of these are big and others are small, but if you can get a handled on the key decisions that you will be facing in the next five years, it helps to focus the work of a Board on gathering information and preparing to choose between options. So what decisions will we be faced with? A new site? New program offerings? Changing the funding model? Capital decisions? The best planning is directed at being able to make these decisions in a timely and wise fashion.
These are four main areas to focus on. Each could be the focus of a Board meeting that drives the planning process. What other simple instructions can we use to streamline the process of strategic planning for small Boards and organizations?
Johnnie Moore has a great post today that discusses how people act within three distinct forms of networking. Along the way he points out that in the above diagram we have too much A and B masquerading as C.
IN the discussion he praises the establishment of seemingly redundant links in a network, which is something I am heavily in favour of as well. The more ways you have to work between people, the more creative you can be and more truly community you are. Johnnie rolls this into his observation of how people behave in Open Space events:
First, it’s really important if you want to talk about something to put it up for discussion without concern for it’s popularity as a topic. And second, be wary of criticising how others choose to engage: are you in effect demanding they conform to your personal view of what’s important, as if yours is the only one?
I think the picture that Johnnie uses to illustrate this is very important. Often in talking with organizations they want to move to a more networked way of being but in reality they choose just to decentralize. This intermediate stpe has several characteristics. It is certainly a shift to a networked organization and it invites a community to arise within. It also preserves some of the weak points of a centralized organization, which includes reliance on a hub, meaning that the system does not have the kind of resilience that a true network has.
The trick I think is seeing that the network actually does exist in several organizational settings, and lives happily alongside a bureaucratic structure which moves resources and accountability around. It is the active network within siloed structures that invites and encourages innovation to emerge. Open Space events are a great way to make the network visible and to put it to use.
Finally settling into Peter Block’s book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. My partner has been hoarding it since it arrived a couple of months ago.
In the opening chapters, Block takes inspiration from the likes of John McKnight, Robert Putnam, Christopher Alexander and others to crate some basic patterns for collective transformation. These are beautiful and quite in line with the work I do and the things we teach through the Art of Hosting. In fact, I’ll probably add this list to our workshop workbook.
Here is the list, with my thoughts attached.
From John McKnight:
- Focus on gifts. Look at what people are willing to offer rather than what people are in need of.
- Associational life. There is great power in the associations that people form to come together to do good work
- Power in our hands. Who do you think is going to change things? In doing Open Space action planning, I sometimes make reference to the fact that there will not be an angel that parachutes in and saves us. It’s up to us to find the way to make things work.
From Werner Erhard:
- The power of language. What we say about things and people makes a huge difference. Speaking and listening (and therefore conversations) is the basis of changing things.
- The power of context. Contexts are the worldviews which we employ to see things. Powerful contexts enable powerful transformation. For example, in First Nations the context of self-government vs. Indian Act government represents a powerful context for community development.
- The power of possibility. Once a possibility is declared, it comes into being and with skillful invitation, work can organize around it.
From Robert Putnam:
- Work with bridging social capital. Social capital is the relatedness between citizens We express this through bonding social captial, which helps us find others like us, andbridging social capital which helps us find relations across groups. Bridging social capital is the holy grail that takes us from insular groups, to true communities.
From Christopher Alexander:
- Work with aliveness and wholeness. One of my favourite ways to think about work that changes minds is to ask “How does a forest change a mind?” How do you react in a forest? How does it happen so suddenly? Why do old growth forests leave a permanent mark on us? How can we transform minds like a forest does?
- Transformation as unfolding. What is known by the whole of a group or community cannot be exposed all at once. You have to journey to the centre of it, one small step at a time. As you go, you harvest more and more of it, and as it becomes visible, it accelerates the collective consciousness of itself.
From Peter Koestenbaum:
- Appreciating paradox. Paradoxes help us to see the creative tension that lies in complexity. Chaos and Order, Individual and collective, being and doing, work and relationships…all of these contribute to our understanding of the kinds of questions that take us to collective transformation.
- Choosing freedom and accountability. Freedom is not an escape from accountability. “the willigness to care for the whole occurs when we are confronted with our freedom, and when we choose to accepts and act on that freedom.”
- Accountability and committment. What I, and Harrison Owen, calls “passion and responsibility.” Don’t just ask what is important, ask what people are willing to do to make it come to pass.
- Learning from one another. Co-learning rather than experts preaching to students is the way to build the capacity for collective transformation.
- Bias towards the future. We leave the past where it is and focus on now, and the conditions that are arising to produce the futures we want.
- How we engage matters. Or, as we were fond of saying at VIATT, the system is the conversation. How we relate to each other in every instance IS the system.
From David Bornstein:
- Small scale, slow growth. Big things begin from very small ideas. Cultivating the Art of Calling, whereby we learn to issue and embody invitations, and find the people to work with who will bring these into being, is the key practice here.
From Allan Cohen:
- Emergent design. Everything is in flux, and constantly adapting. Ask why the organization hasn’t been moving naturally in the direction that it desires and convene conversations on what you discover. Feed those back to the whole and the course corrects. Cohen also says that he CAN herd cats…by tilting the floor. Deeper contexts often have more leverage.
I realize that I have just provide a precis of Peter’s first chapter, but it is such a cogent summary of all of these ideas, that I couldn’t resist the temptation to add thoughts and links to his synthesis.
Jon Husband has been threatening to write his book on Wirearchy for as long as I’ve known him, and I can’t wait for it to come out, but in the meantime, he is posting what could well be a chapter from it in two parts over at his blog in a post he calls Perspectives on Designing and Managing Knowledge Work.
(This is me nudging him to get it done so I can add it to my list of books by friends…:-) )
In a synchronous moment, also today George Por, a mutual friend of Jon and I published a nice set of thoughts about collective intellegence and spaces in organizations for the new to emerge.
It’s so interesting to be relationship with people thinking so deeply about organization.