FIO Partners Perspectives

A New Dawn in Difficult Times

I woke this morning just as the sun was rising.  It was one of those mother of pearl sunrises with streaks of pink and grey and white.  As I watched, the sun inched above the horizon and then, I realized all of a sudden, started to rise at an angle, moving from one window pane to the next.   I was startled to see this and startled at being startled.  Had I really never noticed that the sun rises, not straight up in the way that it seems to set, but moving on a gently incline from left to right?  Of course, I know that the  earth revolves and the sun stands still and it would make sense that , as the earth goes round,  the sun would rise at an angle.  Perhaps the angle is steeper in Maine, where I am now, and that' s why I am seeing this now.  But I did have the sense of being reminded of something essential and fundamental and inescapable that is an underlying reality to whatever else is happening in the world.

This has been a hard week in which I have had the same conversation with my client CEO's over and over again.  These conversations went something like this:  "I didn't choose this career to turn away people in need, to cut my staff's salaries, to lay off colleagues of long standing.  I didn't choose this job in order to fight with politicians.   I can't accept that the work of my lifetime is now in the hands of seemingly helpless, hapless, clueless bureaucrats who have no idea what to do, who seem incapable of thinking clearly if they have less money to spend, who can't set or see priorities or make decisions on principle.  I didn't choose this;  I don't want this;  I don't like this."

The  impact of the economic downturn is now a  crisis for the nonprofit sector, a seismic shift in our reality.  But we have to remember that just as the sun rises, equilibrium will return.   New patterns will emerge and we will shift our perspective.  Within the seeming chaos of this contraction, are the seeds  of  order renewed.  When it comes, it will be like seeing something familiar in a new way. 

Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/

A bit of inspiration...

It's been quite some time since we've posted to FIO Partners Perspectives - but this seemed like the perfect way to jump back in... in these tough times, enjoy a bit of inspiration from the folks over at Grasshopper.

May this find you well....

Thinking about Change with help from Twitter

I am currently working a viewpoint article to support our design of an organizational intervention around information management.  The article is about our view of change management - what do we believe is an appropriate model for thinking about change and what do we see as the critical success factors for implementing change.  Over the years, there have been tomes of research and writing around this topic - from John Kotter to William Bridges to Rosabeth Moss Kanter to Peter Senge.  Change is an ever-present condition of humanity that, candidly, most people struggle with.  Honestly, do you like change?  Especially imposed change? Or unwanted change?  I decided to poll my Twitter followers on their thoughts around critical success factors for implementing change in organizations  - below are a few of their tips:

• @jefferybiggs An employee base willing to embrace the changes. (And to get that he suggested…) Motivation. Lots of motivation. It's difficult, but emphasizing the benefits to come from the "growing pains" or difficulties helps.
• @sondernagle Buy-in from those directly affected by the change in question.
• @TheLadyV An excellent communications person to provide the right info to the right people at the right time in the right amount. (Best-in-class suggestions for approaches?) Face2face btwn mgrs & direct employees is best. But you'll need a matrix of comm tools for different purposes.
• @missashe This sounds obvious, but buy-in. real buy-in (not lip service) from the board, ED, and staff (And how do we get that? Information? Inclusion? Dissatisfaction?) I think it can happen in all of those instances. but I think active & intentional communication re: changes (& their rationale)...
• @egculbertson Just one? what comes to mind is: endurance, keeping focus on the goals and acknowledging that change is in fact, taking place.
• @bloodandmilk Being able to demonstrate some level of impact immediately.
• @vanessamason At least one cheerleader that will encourage people to follow through and have authority to back that up

Their responses reinforced the concept of buy-in and ownership - but how do leaders achieve this?  I am considering a model for change that includes leadership and communications as key components -- as well as the development of a clear vision, an analysis of the change (what & who & how much change?), and a tactical plan for moving the organization - would include communications plan, training plan. What am I missing? How do you inspire the hearts and minds of your staff to embrace change?  Suggestions are welcome from our readers….and thanks to my Twitter pals for their contributions - all are welcome to come on over and unpack their thoughts here!

Thinking About the Core In A Time of Retrenchment

I have been having so many discussions about retrenchment lately.  The fiscal situation in Rhode Island is so scary and there are so many deep cuts in human service supports under consideration.  I am hearing from clients that I haven’t spoken to in years, asking for help with mergers, management service organizations, and networks capable of managed care contracting. 

While I certainly know the mechanics of creating these entities and have preached for years that they are necessary for the survival of the sector, it is still tough to outline what organizations have to undo, give up, shift away.  It is hard to interact with people who have only known how to build and expand, whose entire careers have been about expanding access, adding services, pushing out to wider geographic areas, inventing new ways to help, building teams of staff that have taken years to assemble and refine, when your message is about undoing, pulling back, shrinking, eliminating services, crafting a smaller, tighter, more nimble organization, letting people go.  Too often the people who are adversely affected are not just employees, not just colleagues, but have, through a career of shared proximity, become friends.  This is just painful to watch.

So I have been working to craft a set of experiences and processes, and a message strategy that helps with the transition, that envisions what could be on the other side of this great divide full of potential loss.   The message is about fighting back of course (who would we be if we did not advocate for those we serve?),  but it is also about finding what is essential in what you have already built.   I draw on analogies from psychology and medicine.  When the body is stressed, when the mind is stressed, you focus very clearly on survival.  But when you are very ill, it can be helpful to envision yourself well and whole again, rather than give in to the deer in the headlights syndrome of utter paralysis.  Part of that envisioning, is to understand who you are, what makes you, you.  The process also involves stretching notions of possibility.  When we are stressed we do focus, but often too much, inadvertently narrowing our options. 

One ED asked me point blank, “How can we plan now?  We don’t know what will actually happen?”   While it may seem counterintuitive, this is when planning will count the most.  So I start by asking my clients to focus on the core of what they have built.  There are a variety of ways to get at the core and it takes an iterative process to find that set of values, or competencies or programs that express, for the leadership, the essential core of this particular nonprofit. For some it is the whole agency and they envision all of what they do but in a smaller sized package.  For others, there is a paring away of the not so essential programs, to find the heart of what they do.  For others it is a primary relationship that must be enacted in a certain way to have value:  a particular model between service provider and consumer.  Others choose a group of people as the core, the group of people who have the most creative minds, who are the most likely to be able to reposition and reinvent. 

Once the core is identified, we engage in a process of envisioning the organization with an intact core and craft a strategy to ensure that happens.  This is enormously useful when planning for layoffs.  It is so helpful to know, quite clearly, who you can let go and who you must convince to stay.  Once this picture becomes clear, it becomes possible to go back to environmental scanning that looks at new possibilities or to talk about mergers.  It is much easier to enter into merger discussions if leadership knows quite clearly what must survive for the organization’s history of service to have ongoing meaning and worth. 

It does occur to me as I write this, that this mental exercise might be healthy for any organization in any environment. If you are facing these types of challenges, what types of planning activities are you undertaking?

Do we need a fourth leg on the old three legged stool?

When I was In Calgary last week, a client handed me an article on nonprofits in Canada that was actually written in 1998, indicating as she did that its main points about a funding crisis for the Canadian nonprofit sector continue to this day. The crisis is largely made up of the dependence of Canadian nonprofits on government contracting and the actions of Canadian provinces to reduce these ties.  As I have more and more conversations with RI agencies who are struggling with the prospect of massive government budget cuts and the potential for bankruptcy, the parallels are obvious. So I have been thinking about what might make a sustainable revenue strategy for a nonprofit organization these days.

Last year, a client asked me to do some research and create a brief history of the sector and an overview of “nonprofit economics.” As a result of that exercise, I saw some connections that I hadn’t noticed before. (I am going to oversimplify a bit.) Over the course of its history, the nonprofit sectors in the US and Canada, as a whole, have known only growth, as remarkable as that may seem. The sector has an uncanny ability to reinvent itself. When individual donors were insufficient, the sector learned to partner with, first, foundations, and then, corporations. When philanthropy was insufficient, the sector learned to contract with government. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, we used to say that a healthy nonprofit’s budget was like a three-legged stool: funds from donors whether individuals or corporations, foundation grants, and government contracts.

Of late, however, there appear to be increasing doubts about that government contracting piece. Since the 1980’s the forms of support from the federal government have changed in several ways: (a) government program managers have been encouraged to promote for profit involvement in government contracting, causing significant entry of for profit entities into traditional nonprofit markets including, home health care, nursing, hospice, substance abuse, and day care; (b) the ascendancy of conservative forces has favored forms of assistance that maximize consumer choice, leading to the proliferation of vouchers to consumers rather than grants and contracts to providers. Nonprofit providers have been forced to compete in the private market for these consumers, and, as a result, must master complex billing and reimbursement systems as well as learning to market directly to consumers. Managed care, involving capitated rates, has become more of the norm in health care and has increasingly invaded the fields of drug treatment, rehabilitation, and mental health.

The Social Enterprise Alliance says on its website that: “Social Enterprise is the next thing.” (www.se-alliance.org).  They define social enterprise as: An organization or venture that advances its social mission through entrepreneurial, earned income strategies. This is an international movement that seems to be furthest along in the UK, the Netherlands and Australia. The movement recognizes a very wide range of investments in the common good and acknowledges these investments as made by government, nonprofits and for profits. The social enterprise movement is less concerned about the source of revenue or the type of sponsoring entity and more concerned about the intended impact and the choice making inherent in achieving the organization’s objectives.

I recently had a fascinating discussion with a network of disability providers who were able in about ten minutes to identify an array of possible social enterprise ventures that could be undertaken collaboratively and that could employ their disabled clients and/or generate income to support the work of their agencies.  What was interesting and different about this discussion was the obvious fact that these opportunities would only work if pursued collaboratively. So my last email from Michael Gilbert wanted to know if we were working at all on “financial structures that facilitate network centric funding?” Yes, we are working on those models, and, for many in health and human services, they may well be the replacement leg on a new four legged stool: funds from donors, foundation grants, government contracts, and income from social enterprise.