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About Thomas Brendler

Thomas Brendler has led strategy engagements with a wide range of multinational NGOs, advocacy groups, foundations, and cultural institutions. He has interviewed hundreds of NGO leaders from around the world on a wide range of critical issues including endangered species reintroduction, Ebola response, big data, climate change, health systems strengthening, historic preservation, low-residency higher education, and reproductive health and rights. He has been a guest lecturer at Brown University, a freelance business journalist, and a mentor with Social Venture Partners Rhode Island. His first book, A Part of This Earth: Three Generations of Progressive Philanthropy in Georgia, was published last year, and he is currently at work on his second. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Open Letters Monthly, and Grist. He holds a B.A. from Tufts University and Master’s Degree in Forestry from Yale University.

Writing Like an Organization: Some Tips for Balancing Collaboration & Solitude

November 27, 2018 by Thomas Brendler

Writing, especially for an organization, can be a stressful. But it doesn’t have to be. The key is to understand how writing works in an organizational setting, and to appreciate its potential—and its limitations.

The first and often hardest thing to accept is that writing is not a group process. As the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote, at its heart writing is about an individual sitting in a room by themself. Group work, especially early on, can enrich an organization’s writing and provide a growth opportunity for staff. Working with language collectively can stir conversations and bring people together in a way that few things can. But it’s just one part of a larger process.

Another reality is that in any organization some people are better writers than others. This isn’t a bad thing to accept, and even embrace. My plumber has a good sense of humor and smiles patiently when I explain my theory about what’s really going on with our boiler, but in the end she’s the one that fixes it. Besides, writing, probably more so than plumbing, can be readily learned, and (probably more like plumbing) people get better at it with practice. The same is true for organizations.

From our experience working with NGOs, here are some other things to consider:

  • Identify writer(s) early on, deferring as little as possible to hierarchy, and empower them managing the process. At the same time, keep a deep bench of people who can read thoughtfully and critically, with fresh eyes, as the writing takes shape.
  • Remember that listening and reflecting are big parts of writing—even the most compressed processes benefit from leaving space for them.
  • Be aware of the discrete phases of writing (e.g. generating, drafting, editing, revising, proofing) and always know where you are. (More on this in a future post.)
  • Appreciate writing as an iterative process: It can be unpredictable, and needs room to roam. In the language of wildlife ecology, writing’s “home range” is more antelope than snail darter. This also means that writing can generate ideas which while not relevant to the project at hand, are still valuable. So it’s a good idea to keep a folder or bulletin board handy for these. Writing is a task, but it’s also a form of thinking.
  • Recognize that it’s easier to respond or work with something once it’s written down. All the more reason not to treat writing—especially early writing—as precious. In her wonderful book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott takes an entire chapter to espouse the virtues of “shitty first drafts.”
  • Stay attuned to the difference between editing and worrying—at some point you have decide you’re done. Remember “done” doesn’t mean “perfect.”
  • Value concision. One of my biggest concerns is that the nonprofit world is so overloaded with words that they start to lose meaning.  Once when I had a job that took me to a lot of conferences, a colleague would regularly finish his remarks with a third or a quarter of his allotted time remaining. It stood out to me for two reasons—first, everybody else was going over (requiring gentle herding by a designated “time keeper”), but second, and more importantly, it was clear to me and most everyone in the room that he’d actually said more in less time.
  • Say what you mean, even if it makes you cringe. It’s tempting to use words you’ve heard elsewhere, but it’s worth starting with your own. With clients we’ll often kick off a discussion by putting up a list of their mission along with five of their competitors’—without attribution. Most of the time when we do this, the missions are nearly indistinguishable. Meanwhile, these same clients often struggle to describe what makes them unique. There’s nothing like when an organization finds its authentic voice, and uses it.

How does your organization handle writing projects? What have been your biggest challenges? Do you have any advice for other organizations? Let us know.  Email Thomas at tbrendler [at] bernuthconsulting.com or tweet him at @thomasbrendler.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits Tagged With: communications, nonprofit management, nonprofits, storytelling, strategic planning

Starting in the Middle: Step One in Strategic Planning

October 3, 2017 by Thomas Brendler

In the nonprofit world, few props can induce more panic than blank flipcharts, especially when the task ahead is mapping out the future. While a crisp new pad and scented markers might seem like green fields and blue skies to some, this setup belies the messy reality that organizations are in perpetual flux, layered with histories, personalities, worries about the future—not to mention all the “real” work waiting for you back at your desk. Retreats and other engineered spaces for reflecting and regrouping have material value, but they can overlook the fact that, as the poet John Ashbery wrote, “all stories begin in the middle.”

In our work, we’ve found that gathering information and insights ahead of a strategy session—from staff, stakeholders, peers, and the board—sets the planning process up for success in several ways. It provides something to put on the flipcharts, making the intangible tangible and providing everyone in the room with a common frame of reference in the form of qualitative and quantitative data. At the same time, the process of collecting information helps involve people at all levels of the organization in the planning process as it gets underway—and can even serve as an informal professional development opportunity for junior staff. And asking fans and critics alike for their candid perspectives not only signals that the organization is striving to do its best, but can also spark or revive relationships that are critical to mission—or funding—success.

Once gathered, the weight of these insights can create opportunities to address urgent but delicate issues. The research can help galvanize languishing change or growth by connecting the dots in a way that cannot happen through episodic staff satisfaction surveys, management-team meetings, or board visioning sessions alone.

Most importantly, building a planning process around information is the closest an organization can come to appraising itself objectively. Painting a picture of how an organization looks from the outside—warts and all—and a clear-eyed sense of its place in the world, is critical to charting a safe and true course.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits

When Mission Matters

August 22, 2017 by Thomas Brendler

Over the past week several charities called off fundraising events at the President’s Florida estate over concerns about his response to the recent violence in Charlottesville. Some expressed concern that the locale would create distraction and controversy. There is a real logic in this rationale, as in the lives of nonprofits few pursuits are more delicate than asking people for money.

Others took a bolder stance, claiming that holding an event at Mar-a-Lago would be at odds with their mission. In explaining its decision, the American Red Cross proclaimed, “we must be clear and unequivocal in defense of [our principles].” Nancy G. Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen, was even more direct, saying “There are no excuses, parsing or moral relativism when it comes to racism, bigotry and violence.”

There are risks to any public-facing decision, especially for large and visible nonprofits like the Red Cross, Komen, and the American Cancer Society, which took a similar tack. Backlash can be swift and vicious: there is already a campaign to boycott companies that withdrew from the President’s business advisory councils last week on similar grounds. Behind even the clearest and boldest statement lies plenty of deliberation, however vast the swell of public support.

There are times when an organization’s mission—especially its commitment to it—is publicly tested. Relief groups during natural disasters are one obvious example. At these moments, organizations we ordinarily may not think of every day are thrust into the glare of public attention and scrutiny.

Reverberations from Charlottesville provide a particularly interesting public test because the organizations speaking up are interpreting their missions in broad, humanistic terms—in the spirit of their programmatic work, but reaching well beyond it. Charlottesville had nothing directly to do with breast cancer or disaster relief, but the leaders of those organizations saw a deeper, urgent relevance, rooted in ethics and morality. No doubt they also had their donors in mind.

Mission and vision statements, however aspirational and enshrined, are no more than strings of words assembled by people. They are crafted with care and precision, with the intent to focus and inspire an organization. But to be effective, the people of the organization must put the mission and vision to work every day. And continuously interpret them with candor and vigilance, with an appreciation of an organization’s broader role and responsibility in the world.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits, Management Tagged With: mission, nonprofits, strategic planning, strategy, vision

Telling the Rest of the Story

April 2, 2016 by Thomas Brendler

Stories about nonprofit organizations—particularly the ones they tell themselves—tend to focus on their scrappy beginnings, near-death experiences, big wins, and marquee moments that lace annual reports with the glow of valor.

Yet in hewing to an assumed logic of success, these stories often overlook the most critical element of the NGO life cycle: Periods of transition—a change in leadership, a shift in strategic focus, the loss of a longtime funder. These times are marked by great uncertainty—even fear—because they diverge from a predictable arc of growth and a reliable, heroic narrative. As a colleague once advised me when I was an executive director, “The true test of organizations is not how they grow, but how they shrink.” Indeed, transitions are an acute test of an organization’s vision and capacity. This is exactly why they have so much to teach.

One reason nonprofits downplay transitions is that they see them as evidence of weakness. Some fear they risk revealing fissures and points of friction that board members and senior leadership would rather keep in house, and tamped down at that. But uncertainty does not necessarily portend failure. Unquestioned assumptions about what transitions mean (and about what constitutes failure) can blind organizations to their value. Understanding and documenting difficult times—not just to satisfy a story, but to mine them for critical insights and lessons—can strengthen institutions over the long term.

Nonprofit storytelling mattersOne of the most important parts of telling these untold stories is finding people who can tell them, and providing them with the resources to do so. Organizations naturally build institutional memory over the years, through the collective experience of the individuals engaged in them. It is already there, we only need ask. Yet, documenting this knowledge is widely considered a luxury, a box to be checked off in an exit interview. Institutional memory is particularly vulnerable during periods of transition, with restructuring and changes in staff. The clock is always ticking.

How does your organization think about its institutional memory?  Have you found a way to capture it? What are some of the questions and challenges that come up for you? Let us know.  Email Thomas at tbrendler@bernuthconsulting.com or tweet him at @thomasbrendler.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits, Management Tagged With: Change Management, Institutional Memory

Small Data, Big Insights

September 30, 2014 by Thomas Brendler

There is no doubt that the vast troves of data residing on the web—“big data” as they have come to be known—hold enormous potential to inform business strategy and boost productivity. One recent report estimates that data could generate gains of 1 to 5 per cent, seemingly modest improvements which could translate into game-changing returns. Amid such great promise, rising demand is spawning dozens of specialized start-ups, several fueled by venture capital—and an entire field of research, computational enterprise analytics.

The biggest challenge right now is how to sift efficiently through this raw information, in order to piece together digestible and meaningful trends and patterns—a process that has been characterized as “wrangling” and “janitor work.” (A task, as you might expect, that can take up most of a typical data scientist’s day.)

“The leap from the tools to the insight is the weak link,” Professor David B. Yoffie of Harvard Business School recently observed. Echoing this sentiment, University of Washington computer science professor Jeffrey Heer cautioned, “It’s an absolute myth that you can send an algorithm over raw data and have insights pop up.”

These scholars raise an interesting question: where do institutional insights come from? Is it, as they seem to suggest, a matter of the scale and the integrity of data, and the sophistication of analysis? Do more data necessarily mean bigger or better insights?

By contrast, in-depth interviews live at the other end of the data spectrum—allowing organizations to learn about themselves and their operating environments by digging where they stand. They provide an opportunity to probe critical issues with the help of people who are knowledgeable and invested. As with all forms of research there is a certain amount of mess involved, but the richness of what organizations learn from such close looking is hard to match.

These conversations can also teach big data a thing or two: they consistently reveal how vital it is to be clear about what you’re looking for from the outset, to formulate meaningful questions, and to think carefully about whom to ask them. The results may be “small data” by comparison, but the insights they generate can be far deeper.

Filed Under: Ideas for non-profits

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