Why the nonprofit sector moves slowly

April 12, 2016April 11, 2016 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Recently I heard a telling narrative about the “old days” at some of the big American foundations.

The old-school modus operandi of these foundations (more recently than I’d have thought, closer to 20 years ago than 50) was a program officer locked away in her office for months, drafting PhD-type documents explaining a theory of change and a grant strategy. These documents would wend their way up to the Foundation President who would inevitably send them back with long and detailed critiques, asking for the next draft. Years could pass in this back-and-forth.

The apocryphal version of this story was that by version 16 version of the paper, an exasperated program officer would just send back the original draft….which would then get approved.

We’ve come a long way in the nonprofit sector, but we still are, by and large, slower than we should be.

Part of the cause is the looseness inherent in the kinds of financial transactions we engage in. There’s an organizational culture multiplier around how we act when money changes hands: years couldn’t pass if there were a real customer waiting to buy a real product from that program officer. “Budgets” are just that – intentions and plans – and they operate with a different logic and profoundly less urgency than accounts payable and working capital. We convince ourselves that we are prioritizing getting things right, when all we’re really doing is letting another month slip by.

Because we mostly lack the tight and consistent drumbeat of traditional financial transactions – of buying and selling – we have to do extra work to create cultures of hard deadlines. These days we talk a good game about moving fast and being nimble, but the pendulum is just starting to swing in the right direction. To keep the momentum going, we need to make sure we ask ourselves questions like:

When we have a deadline, what happens when our intention to move fast hits up against our desire to get things right?
How often do we break an established process to keep a promise to make a call by a given date and time?
When a key decision-maker is unavailable to join a decision-making meeting, does the meeting get rescheduled?
Do we regularly track and review the external promises we make and how good we are at keeping them?
If we posed a free response question to our customers asking them to describe us, how sure are we that nobody would say “slow”?

Often we’re so busy asking those around us about their process and their results that we forget to look at ourselves in the mirror.

Seth Godin’s Manifesto for Small Teams Doing Important Work

February 19, 2016February 18, 2016 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

File under: Things I wish I had written & Things to print and have up on the wall.

The question this makes me ask is: is there ever a time that I’m not part of a small team? Is there ever a time when I’m not working on a tight deadline? Is there ever a time when the work isn’t important?

And, if no, then here are the rules of the road around communication, making and keeping promises, having a real Plan B, and keeping it personal, all while remembering not to question goodwill, effort or intent.

Thanks Seth.

A Manifesto for Small Teams Doing Important Work, by Seth Godin

We are always under tight deadlines, because time is our most valuable asset.

If you make a promise, set a date. No date, no promise.

If you set a date, meet it.

If you can’t make a date, tell us early and often. Plan B well prepared is a better strategy than hope.

Clean up your own mess.

Clean up other people’s messes.

Overcommunicate.

Question premises and strategy.

Don’t question goodwill, effort or intent.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” is not a professional thing to say. Describing and discussing in the abstract is what we do.

Big projects are not nearly as important as scary commitments.

If what you’re working on right now doesn’t matter to the mission, help someone else with their work.

Make mistakes, own them, fix them, share the learning.

Cheap, reliable, public software might be boring, but it’s usually better. Because it’s cheap and reliable.

Yesterday’s hierarchy is not nearly as important as today’s project structure.

Lock in the things that must be locked in, leave the implementation loose until you figure out how it can get done.

Mostly, we do things that haven’t been done before, so don’t be surprised when you’re surprised.

Care more.

If an outsider can do it faster and cheaper than we can, don’t hesitate.

Always be seeking outside resources. A better rolodex is better, even if we don’t have rolodexes any more.

Talk to everyone as if they were your boss, your customer, the founder, your employee. It’s all the same.

It works because it’s personal.

The sprint at the end

November 21, 2013November 20, 2013 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

The sprint at the end of a project does get you there. It focuses your and your team’s energy, keeps the pressure on, and is an occasion for heroic efforts. It can work.

Except.

Except it only really works when you guess right about where that finish line is. It only really works when you time everything just right, so that you cross the finish line just at the moment when your and your team’s energy is about to run out.

Meaning that, once you hit maximum velocity you’ve closed yourself off to discovery, closed yourself off to noticing, a good ways down the path, that you need to make a turn, you need to double down, you need to shore up for a longer haul.

That tortoise was on to something.

The deadline opportunity

December 7, 2011December 6, 2011 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Deadlines force focus, can create superhuman results, can help people who have been dithering decide to act.

They are, in short, incredible opportunities.

Your leadership challenge is to see deadlines coming and plan for them appropriately, get the groundwork and underpinnings and infrastructure in place well in advance so that you can use them to your and your customers’ advantage.

So, for example, since you know deadlines are going to help you close a sale, you work backwards from the deadline, you have all your prep work in place, and then you make the deadline part of the pitch long before it arrives. This way you use the deadline to your and your client’s advantage, to help them move from good intention to action.

A good deadline is a terrible thing to waste.

Missing deadlines

August 11, 2011August 10, 2011 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

There are two things that happen when you miss deadlines, the first obvious, the second insidious.

The direct impact is that you don’t ship your product. Revenues come in later. Business partners are disappointed. Your team is let down.

The insidious part is that – drip, drip, drip – what you mean by “deadline” starts to erode. “Deadline” becomes “what we’re shooting for if nothing goes wrong.” But of course something always goes wrong, so the first sign of trouble becomes a chance to negotiate (with your team , with your business partners, and with your procrastinating self), a chance to argue that something’s got to give.

When hitting deadlines becomes non-negotiable, you and your team put that whole negotiation aside and just get to work. It’s amazing to discover what you can produce when you expect yourself to deliver every time.

* * * * *

(If you’re curious: it turns out that the source of the word is a “dead line” for American Civil War prisoners who were kept inside a stockade. A railing placed inside the stockade marked the line prisoners were not allowed to pass – and guards were told to shoot any prisoner who crossed the line, because they were deemed to be trying to escape.)