Leading by Design

THE TERM 'FORWARD GUIDANCE' IS USED BY central banks to influence market expectations about the future levels of interest rates.  Banks do this by forecasting where markets will go and communicating their forecasts to businesses, governments, and the public.  I can see I've really grabbed your attention now.  But wait -- I'm going somewhere with this concept that has related, but not necessarily financial, applicability to the nonprofit sector. I'm intrigued by the phrase, which I admit I hadn't heard until recently.  I'm also intrigued with the idea of 'forward guidance' -- of articulating how something will turn out or could turn out based upon agreed-upon indicators, is (or should be) one critical component of planning for a sector as much as for individual organizational planning.  As the chart above from the banking industry illustrates, forward guidance is a combination of calendar-based indicators and trends and outcome-based indicators...

Eleanor Adams' report , Towards Sustainability Indicators for Museums in Australia , was released this month offering museums -- and all cultural institutions -- a set of pilot indicators built on a combination of economic, environmental and social factors.  "Whether they acknowledge it or not," Adams writes, "museums are inextricably linked to sustainability principles....However, most museums seem to be inherently unsustainable organizations." Certainly museums occupy huge environmental footprints, deemed by many directors of large and small institutions as "energy hogs".  But libraries and performance spaces aren't far behind in energy consumption and insatiable need for storage. How can -- should -- environmental sustainability shape vision and mission (and vice versa)?  They're inextricably linked, right?  Adams gets at this by remixing established programmatic and operational metrics with environmental impact indicators and clusterin...