Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 3 No 2

ED BOGLE Strategy

Manage Change and Leverage Opportunity

P lanning in the nonprofit world has largely been based on the continuance of past trends and the assumption that constituents’ needs, environmental factors, funding sources, and staff and volunteer commitment will remain fairly constant. However, those things have become less dependable. Change is largely unpredictable, often comes in big waves at great speed, and is often discontinuous from the past. Today’s organizational leadership must read the tea leaves, lay out a road map to the future with a believable vision and a constancy of purpose, build staff competency, gain commitment from the workforce and volunteers, and watch for early warnings and opportunities derived from change. From Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in 1970 to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan in 2007, we have been told repeatedly that change is the only constant. Organizational success today is more about developing management techniques, processes and commitment to manage and adapt to change for strategic growth and impact, than in predicting the future, and today’s success does not constitute grounds for future optimism. Principles of Strategic Management 1. Embrace change as opportunity and stem the tide of threat. Be willing to change everything except the basic values underpinning the conduct of the

organization. Most organizations’ mission and vision evolve as their reach and impact progress. 2. Engage the board, management, staff and volunteers in a strategic process to periodically evaluate the evolution of the impact on, and changing needs of, those you serve.This involves developing short- and long-term horizons of clear vision and objectives. 3. Build a strategic framework to view changes in the external and internal environment, assess opportunities and threats, and measure progress against all objectives. This plan will serve as the guiding document for renewing strategy and evaluating progress, and to evaluate new ventures, projects, or significant undertakings for strategic fit. It should keep decisions focused within the context of your vision, mission and purpose. The strategic framework should be tight enough to focus resources, yet loose enough for organizational units to be opportunistic, but accountable. It communicates the vision and mission of the organization to the employees and defines their role/engagement in achieving that vision. Several key principles underpin the success of a strategic planning process for change- oriented management.

1. The organization must focus on the con- stituency it serves and be vociferous in measuring the impact of its works. The growth of its impact will come from staying close to the customers and their evolving needs, and services provided will evolve within the mission. 2. The doers must be the planners. Strategic planning should in large part be under- taken by those responsible for the plan’s implementation. Wide participation in the process creates ownership of the strat- egy and their role in fulfilling the vision and mission. It also creates a greater abil- ity to identify and manage change and delivers discretionary effort, whereby staff and board will put in extraordinary effort to achieve the objectives. 3. Measurement is essential for recognizable achievement. Vision and mission state- ments must be qualitative to survive in a rapidly changing world, but they only become practical if they have quantified objectives that define their accomplish- ment in any given time period.These ob- jectives are unlikely to be reached unless they have equally specific resource com- mitments focused on their achievement. Most strategic planning failures can be attributed to the lack of rigor in one or both of these steps. 4. If the effort does not result in action plans, it is probably wasted. An action plan con- sists of a set of tasks, the responsibility for undertaking it, and a time frame for ac-

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