B&W’s strategic planning methodology incorporates principles of all four in varied ways throughout the process, reflecting our conviction that these issues are too important to relegate to an individual or separate department. They are everyone’s business. When done well, they are embedded throughout the enterprise. (The same holds true, by the way, for innovation: it’s always a red flag for us to find an “innovation department” on an organization chart.)

Three simple steps distinguish our approach, which continues to evolve based on changing best practices, our internal conversations, and what we learn from and with our clients. Just as mission-driven organizations must adapt, so must we who counsel those organizations. Below, our current thinking.

1. We apply a “DEI lens” to each phase of the strategy process. What does that mean? In the research and discovery phase, for example, this means scrubbing the list of external interviews to reflect not just the usual suspects but also voices that have been excluded in the past. It means being sensitive about asking identifying questions in a staff survey. It means digging into your data to understand not just about who’s gotten grants, but also who didn’t apply. It means assessing your brand image relative to best nonprofit practice in DEI. And it means engaging your stakeholders, especially the more junior staff, in multiple meaningful ways during the process.
2. We use what we have learned through the discovery phase to help our clients clarify what DEI means to them. Clients are often at different stages in their work towards increased DEI, and we work with them to understand and weave together existing strands of work, highlight gaps, and consider partnerships.
3. We take a highly operational approach to DEI. In working with clients, we have found that these principles take hold only when reinforced at multiple levels, from an organization’s mission and goals to staffing and culture to systems and processes, especially resource allocation and performance management. DEI needs to be reflected as a priority in organizational, departmental, and individual goals; it needs to adequately resourced; it needs the constant attention and accountability of senior management to ensure that there’s no slippage in the commitment. These details of execution are distinct from the kinds of staff training and awareness-building offered by consultants who specialize in DEI work. As management experts, we see our role as helping to institutionalize changes so that they stick.

B&W has been applying this general approach to our engagements for the past several years, starting with a plan in 2017 for a venerable cultural and educational center that put issues of diversity and inclusion at the center of their institutional strategy. Virtually all our clients in recent years have struggled with these questions as part of their strategy processes. Different emphases emerge. At a prestigious post-graduate program focused on environmental studies, for example, students were focused intently on equity; for two privately funded conservation groups, the challenges revolved around diversifying an aging, overwhelmingly white membership base. In its strategic plan, a well-known international development NGO responded aggressively to critiques about unequal access to its programs. And at a national organization focused on election law, the staff wanted greater inclusion while the board needed diversity – in their case, fewer lawyers.

We continue to discuss what DEI really means within our firm, with our clients, and with leaders in the field. While there are milestones along the way to be measured, striving for diversity, equity, inclusion, and access is a journey. How is your DEI journey progressing?

This can make for a rough transition.  It can be difficult for people who have been used to wearing multiple hats to accept a narrower remit. They understand intellectually why it’s preferable to have someone with real content expertise on the team – in Human Resources, for example – but will often chafe at the more bureaucratic systems and processes an HR professional will institute. Certain personality types, as well, thrive in the somewhat chaotic, informal culture that dominates start-ups and are less suited to such management challenges as building high-performing teams and taking programs to scale. Others like the camaraderie and family feel of a small institution.

I sympathize with these perspectives, particularly because the disruptions unleashed by turning 40 are, ironically, the consequence of success. It takes a tremendous about of determination, skill, fortitude, and luck to grow a nonprofit from an idea to a thriving enterprise with 40 people and an operating budget in the millions.

So rather than focus on what’s lost, we advise our clients going through this phase in the nonprofit lifecycle to celebrate their successes and to take heart in the increased mission impact that operating at greater scale will enable them to achieve. More capacity and expertise is a good problem. New HR practices really can make life easier. More sophisticated financial systems really do add value. Professional communicators really do know more about marketing than program staff. And so on.

It takes strong leadership from the top to turn 40 successfully. Leaders navigating this transition – especially founders – need to be willing to delegate, to listen and respect the expertise of others, but at the same time to set high standards and hold people accountable. Staff need to keep an open mind and not feel threatened by changes. And instead of expecting more care and feeding, the Board, donors, and stakeholders can tamp down their expectations for organizations that are hitting this 40-person inflection point. After all, by 40 we all deserve a little slack.

According to a 2019 Johns Hopkins report, nonprofits are the third largest employment sector in the United States, with 10 percent of the workforce on payroll.  Yet according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund 2018 survey, three-quarters of nonprofits only have cash on hand to survive six months or less.  Organizations fortunate to receive CARES bill Small Business Administration loans to help keep staff on the job are getting short-term assistance, but these funds will not be nearly enough to keep our country’s diverse array of nonprofits alive.  We need to explore creative approaches that might previously have been unthinkable or unpalatable to staff, boards, and supporters.

For like-minded groups with shared missions and strategies, now could be the time to consider mergers. Even before the pandemic, mergers were a strategy to help organizations gain strength and stability, particularly in a crowded (or sparse) philanthropic market, and where multiple organizations serve similar or overlapping missions and geographies.  Now, nonprofits should view mergers as a tool in their arsenal and explore potential marriages before financial situations become dire.  In the for-profit world, acquisition of a distressed asset may bring financial benefit.  The same does not apply in the not-for-profit sector.

Foundations and other funders have an important role to play here, beyond providing emergency grants or loans to help groups stay afloat. In the Baltimore region, a group of foundations supported a multi-year effort resulting in the merger of five watershed groups into a new, stronger force for clean water: Blue Water Baltimore.  As Executive Director Jenn Aiosa reports, “We realized that we could be stronger than the sum of our parts.”

The Blue Water Baltimore merger took several years of relationship-building, research and negotiations to accomplish. There are ways to hasten the process, and best practices for success.  Organizational mergers can be divided into an exploratory phase, negotiations phase, and implementation phase.  The Blue Water Baltimore groups’ reflection on their merger process identified four success factors:

1. Sound reasons for merging
2. Compatible organizations and inter-staff relationships
3. Shared organizational awareness of long-term needs
4. Encouragement from grantmakers

The merger team enlisted a facilitator, strategic analyst, and legal counsel.  Bringing in a neutral, outside “matchmaker” can provide objective research and analysis to ensure the marriage will be a good one; surface more subtle issues ranging from culture to management style; and help set a sound governance, strategic, operational, and financial path forward. (Interested in a deeper dive? Check out Blue Water Baltimore’s case study.)

B&W has served nonprofits at various steps along their merger journey.  In the health sector, we supported the GO2 Lung Cancer Foundation, a merger of two organizations with complementary missions. B&W worked with GO2 to identify the combined organization’s overarching goals and theory of change for how best to achieve those goals. As a result, GO2 is investing in a more focused set of programs and priorities to track its success.  Our team has also helped two smaller Parkinson’s disease organizations that could not sustain themselves financially as they merged into a new group, the Parkinson’s Foundation.  We worked with the new organization to position it well in the marketplace relative to its largest competitor, take advantage of the two merged organizations’ strengths, and eliminate programs with low strategic value.  The result? The Parkinson’s Foundation has doubled in size in three years.

To be, or not to be – that sadly may end up being the question for far too many nonprofit organizations.  In many cases, it could be better to be in a marriage of strength with like-minded partners than to cease being altogether.  Your mission, people, and communities served depend on it.

I went to TEDx MidAtlantic a few days ago. A day and a half of fascinating — and mostly comprehensible — lectures on the theme of “Unbreakable.” It being DC, there were some common threads: Policy and governing were discussed a lot, by people who are all about policy or are in government. But we also heard from a young man who decided to get vaccinated against his mother’s wishes; a Holocaust survivor who teaches children magic tricks; and a researcher who has figured out that catching people doing the right thing can change behavior for the better.

The real action, however, was not in the room. It was in the hallways, at the breaks. Faces were alight with possibilities; attendees were clearly connecting their dots in new ways. Over dinner, we too had a far-ranging conversation that would not have occurred but for the ideas we had heard (and were trying to digest).

What do those 36 hours have to do with developing strategy for organizations? Simple: It is very hard to look over the horizon — to develop a strong strategic plan — until you can get out of the ruts you don’t even know know you are in. We often work with nonprofit leaders and boards who have been doing the same thing for a long time. One way we get them to see things anew is we bring them information, data, new research to underpin their strategies. What if, however, you could really shake it up? There is the trope of big hairy audacious goals; getting brains unstuck enough to get to that level of goal-setting can be hard. And some organizations don’t need to change their whole mindset to develop a strong plan. What is clear, though, is that in order to plan successfully, organizations need to acknowledge that they need some amount of new perspective.

So for anyone out there considering a strategy development process: One question you’ll want to consider is not IF you need to shake up your thinking before you plan. It is HOW MUCH you need to do so.

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.

I had not, however, connected the team’s success at the Olympics to lessons for those of us in the social sectors until I read an article in The New York Times about the “five time-honored, if unconventional, team dictums” that guide the men’s alpine team in Norway.  I read and reread the article, struck by the way that these dictums seemed to apply not only to my own broad experience on work teams, but also to my specific experience helping our clients form successful strategic-planning teams.

1. “A prohibition on jerks,” which, as noted in the article, is a variation on what Robert Sutton famously referenced with some stronger language. Not everyone on a strategic-planning team needs to be the picture of positive and polite, but we’ve certainly seen how including someone who is overtly negative or rude, often with the hope of ‘winning them over,’ can backfire and delay if not derail the process.
2. “No class structure on the team.” As one of the team’s leaders noted, “There are no rookies and no champions on the team – we’re all equals.” On this point, what stood out is that we’ve certainly seen the benefit of having a mix of staff, from senior executives down to an occasional intern, participate as equals in a planning process. Some of the best ideas come from newer voices.
3. “The social fabric of the team is paramount.” My own work experience aligns exactly with what one of their veterans said about his team experience: “There is almost no skill or ability you can have that is so good it allows you to ruin the social qualities of the team.”
4. “Talk to each other, not about each other.” Translate this into an organizational planning process and you get two interpretations: talk about the plan or process, not the people; and if you really feel you must make a well-intentioned comment to someone that could be seen as critical, make it directly and quietly to that person.
5. “Friday night is taco night.” Tacos or beer or big bowls of pasta – your call. Sharing a meal or a drink at the end of a long planning session is perfect for reinforcing points one through four.

I don’t know if following these rules will lead everyone to the same level of success that Norway had at the Olympics. They certainly are, however, a sound foundation on which to build any team, including a strategic planning team.

In making the selection, the chairman of the prize committee cited Thaler’s broad “contributions and discoveries” in behavioral economics, and how he helped take the field from “being sort of a fringe and somewhat controversial part of economics to being a mainstream area of contemporary economic research.”

While that is undeniably important, we would, however, point to the more actionable aspects of his work.  Many of our clients have come to us with a hope of informing and improving public policy, for example, and on that topic Thaler’s work has been a revelation. In his book, Nudge, Thaler brings to life the way in which people make decisions, and the role of policy in shaping those decisions.

Click here to view a “Big Think” interview with Dr. Thaler explaining nudges,  or visit nudges.org for more examples.

So congratulations Dr. Thaler, and thank you for your insights and advice.

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.

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.

Nonprofit organizations undertake strategic plans for many reasons, positive and negative. We see new leaders come through our door eager to change their organizations for the better…and leaders who have lost funding and need to retrench strategically. Calls come from board chairs who want faster results, or top staff who feel their effort is becoming less relevant in the changing world around them. The genesis for every strategic planning effort has some level of both pain and opportunity wrapped into it.

No matter what the genesis for the process, there is a universal answer to that “why?”: If you don’t drive, someone or something else will do so. If you don’t set a course — imperfect though it may be — you will not get to where you want to be. As all-consuming as an organization’s day-to-day activities may be, leadership must make the effort to periodically look over the horizon. I won’t get too sailorly, but that look over the horizon helps an organization see what change is happening in their operating environment (the good and the bad), where they are in reaching their organizational goals, and how they might want to adjust course to get there more efficiently or effectively.

As to the “how” of approaching strategic planning? At the end of that meeting, the same person pointed out an excellent approach to any strategic planning process: “We should have courage, you know, courage to say yes and to say no. And we should take some risks.”

Point taken.