Skip to main content

Five Guiding Trends to Help Your Organization Reshape Its Future

Image
By

Thanks to a comment on one of the many listservs I read, I’ve just started reading Convergence:  How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector, published last November by the James Irving Foundation.  Right off the bat I’m encouraged that there are many avenues cultural nonprofits can explore right now based on the report’s findings.

These avenues stem from five trends the report discusses: 

• Demographic Shifts Redefine Participation
• Technological Advances Abound
• Networks Enable Work to Be Organized in New Ways
• Interest in Civic Engagement and Volunteerism Is Rising
• Sector Boundaries Are Blurring
The future will bring a wider array of structural options and a greater willingness to experiment, as well as a heightened demand for accountability and compelling measures of social value.  The driving question will be, “What do we want to accomplish?” Successful organizations will quickly move beyond traditional assumptions about how those goals are attempted and think creatively about structural forms, recognizing that different goals demand new solutions.
These five trends offer so much opportunity and optimism for cultural organizations – two commodities that seem to be in short supply.  Fortunately, inventive thinking is free.

Discussions based on the driving question, “what do we want to accomplish?”, are excellent starting points for reengineering organizational infrastructure.  Taking small steps, an organization can change its board composition, its committee structure, its staffing structure, its volunteer composition and structure, and ultimately its programming – even its physical assets – to support the answer to “what do we want to accomplish?”.

Photo:  Pigeon Point Lighthouse from MumbleyJoe 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back in the Saddle

By
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
14 comments
Read more

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

By
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 .
Post a Comment
Read more

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

By
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
27 comments
Read more