An "Aha!" Moment in Strategic Planning

WHEN DO "AHA" MOMENTS COME FOR YOU? If they rolled up on your doorstep with unfailing regularity, you'd take them for granted. They wouldn't elicit an "aha!" at all. But real "aha" moments, for me at any rate, come after stretches of concerted problem-solving and reflection. They more often occur as a prolonged unfolding of understanding rather than in one flash of insight.

So it was with a strategic planning committee I'd been working with for months. Our regular meetings were moving well through the obstacle course of mission refinement, goal development and strategy creation. But it wasn't until we were buried knee-deep in strategies and tasking that some very forthright conversations started to take place.

As the morning fog lifts from the landscape, this team began to articulate -- as a group -- that its resources for at least the short-term had to be spent on strengthening its organizational core. Board and staff development, along with financial management and planning, were without question a top priority. How will board leadership be chosen? What is the role of a nominating committee in a 21st century nonprofit? What approaches can be employed to integrate all fundraising activities?

The animated discussion around these and dozens of other questions was unlike any other meeting of this committee. Was it because we had moved from the theory of strategic planning into the very real realm of practice? I think so. We began to see where and how earlier decisions about mission, goals and strategies would need to be played out. We began to make concrete connections between all the plan's elements. But, it didn't happen until now -- now as we near the end of the formal planning process, where tasking strategies challenged us to connect all the dots. Aha!!

Photo: AHA from St_A_Sh

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin. We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week. If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014. It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog. I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs. Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management. Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for? This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.) Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although

Leading by Design

Search This Blog