Beth’s Blog

What We Talk About When We Talk About Organizational Learning

Photo by Aaron Schmidt

 

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Organizational Learning – guest post by Cindy Rizzo

During the facilitated discussion session at GEO’s National Conference in Seattle it was my great privilege to convene a group of brave pioneers.  Fifteen of us met for 90 minutes to share, commiserate, trade ideas and think about our work at the intersection of evaluation, knowledge management and organizational learning.  I call this a group of pioneers because although evaluation in one form or another has been a part of philanthropy and the larger social sector for some time, it is only relatively recently that foundations have specifically devoted staff resources to the new perspective that evaluation and knowledge management are of greatest value when viewed through an organizational learning lens.  GEO has been a leader in making this case through its publications and Learning Conference, and others, like Marilyn Darling, have been important thought leaders with groundbreaking publications like A Compass in the Woods.

Yet foundation staff charged with organizational learning responsibilities are still charting a new course in our field.  When I asked the group at GEO what was keeping them up at night, it was remarkable how most of the issues raised were shared by so many of us around the table:

• How to explain the value of this work to our boards.
• How to set aside time for reflection and learning.
• How to create systems for accessing knowledge resources that foundation staff will use.
• How to use learning to improve practice.

While our field is very good at making sure staff spend sufficient time developing strategies and making grants, we are not yet as good at making sure that staff spend sufficient time on reflection, learning and the “back end” of the process, i.e., digesting grant reports, discussing them with grantees and disseminating results.  Those of us involved in organizational learning of one type of another are at the forefront of trying to change this.  And GEO has been our guide and our ally in explaining how learning, streamlining and stakeholder/grantee involvement all come together to improve impact.  The difficult work begins when we leave the GEO Conference and go back to our offices to try to make this happen.

Luckily, the learning, evaluation and knowledge management pioneers want to keep talking and meeting.  Someone at the table said, “I need thought partners,” which seemed to capture the general consensus among us.  We’re going to start a listserv and take some initial steps to become our own combination of learning community and support group.  We’re happy to carry over some additional chairs to widen the circle so you can join too.  Just let me know and I’ll put you on the list.

Cindy Rizzo is the Senior Director for Grantmaking & Evaluation at the Arcus Foundation. She has been working in philanthropy for over 15 years in community and private foundation settings focused on social justice, conservation and health and human services.

Grantmakers Should Avoid Frankenthinking, Expert Suggests

Photo By Kalexanderson

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Grantmakers Should Avoid Frankenthinking, Expert Suggests – guest post by Albert Ruesga

In Mary Shelley’s beloved novel, Dr. Frankenstein was a visionary member of the scientific community of his day, who, sensing the terrible nature of his work, isolated himself from the world to conduct his experiments.  He was a god-like figure, a “modern Prometheus” breathing new life into inanimate flesh.

Imagine how a well-meaning member of the nonprofit or foundation world might have rewritten Shelley’s tale.  Perhaps, from this perspective, Dr. Frankenstein’s approach to creating human life was too top-down.  This is what ultimately led his townsmen to pick up their torches to hunt down and kill the monster.

Suppose instead that Dr. Frankenstein had invited each villager to dig up his or her favorite body part in the churchyard and bring that to a community visioning process.  The creature, when finally stitched together, might have sported five arms and two heads and been unable to breathe for lack of a trachea, but it would have been their monster.

Unfortunately, research indicates that group brainstorming processes that involve simply eliciting and accepting the contributions of multiple participants, without examining these contributions critically, rarely outperform processes that incorporate a robust measure of respectful disagreement and debate.

“Never, ever brainstorm,” cautioned Jonah Lehrer, the keynote speaker at the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations conference in Seattle.

And yet brainstorming, “consensus-building” processes are endemic to our field.  Every potentially bone-headed thing we’ve ever said is reverently recorded on a piece of flipchart paper now hanging in some facilitator’s office.  Being overly cautious not to offend our colleagues, we self-edit our “yes, buts” into “yes, ands,” as if by doing so we can bleach out the stain of our disagreement.

That is how we in the foundation world take what might be an extraordinary tale, a great advance in human knowledge, and turn it through groupthink into lifeless quiltwork.  These processes account for the myriad incoherent mission statements we encounter in our work, which are not so much mission statements as overwrought landscape paintings attempting to capture every inconsequential detail of some alien terrain.  What might have been simple statements of purpose are often yes-anded into meaningless word salad.

Inclusiveness is an important value in nonprofit work, I get that. Yet I often find that a regard for including all points of view in these processes does more to make us feel good than to improve our work.  We celebrate our consensus not fully understanding what the cost is to the communities we serve.

Philanthropy lacks the respectful, yet bracing, debate that is so much a part of the culture of the business world and of academia.  It would take a deliberate and sustained effort to shift our culture, but doing so might at least help us avoid compounding the sin of ineffectiveness with the sin of incoherence.

Albert Ruesga is president & CEO of the Greater New Orleans Foundation and the vice chair of the GEO board of directors.  He’s the managing editor of the White Courtesy Telephone blog.

Why Funders Need to Get Out of the Kitchen and Let the Nonprofits Cook More

Flickr Photo by S. ALT

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Why Funders Need to Get Out of the Kitchen and Let the Nonprofits Cook More - Guest post by Paul Connolly

Most attention to scaling social impact has tended to focus on replicating programs to extend service delivery.  During the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) conference session today on “What Do We Mean By Scale?,” a set of experts emphasized that other pathways must be pursued too.  Sometimes just spreading a great idea or reframing a critical issue can make a big difference.   Advocating for particular policies, likewise, can lead to positive systemic change.  In addition, recent GEO research has revealed that the specific practices, resources, and talents that are most needed by nonprofits striving to accelerate social change vary according to developmental stage.

How can funders be most helpful in supporting these efforts? Recent TCC Group research, based on an analysis of reliable and valid organizational assessments for over 2000 nonprofit organizations nationwide, found that one of the best ways is by not meddling too much with nonprofits’ program design.  A chief predictor of growth and scaling was centralized program design leadership – in other words, only letting the necessary “cooks” belong in the program development “kitchen.”  Nonprofits that scale up tend to employ this sort of “R & D” approach to concoct successful program recipes and establish success measures.   They keep funders outside of the kitchen by pushing back with evidence of measurable achievement.  Funders can usually be most supportive by selecting the best chefs, learning about why their recipes and resulting dishes are successful, providing resources for groceries and equipment, and maybe offering – but not requiring — the use of some ingredients and knives along the way.

Too many cooks in the kitchen can indeed spoil the soup.  Funders need to learn how to do a better job determining how and when to intervene in programs less.  Likewise, nonprofits need to figure out how to do a better job setting some limits with grantmakers who want to interfere too much, while proactively establishing and tracking success measures.  These advances would be, as Martha Stewart would say in her own kitchen, “a good thing.”

Paul Connolly is Chief Client Services Officer at TCC Group, a 34 year-old consulting firm that provides strategy, evaluation, and capacity building services to funders and nonprofits.

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

Photo by Sea Turtle

Note from Beth: I’m hosting a small army of guest bloggers, grantmakers, who are attending the  GeoFunders National Conference taking place this week in Seattle.   The GEO community is united by a common drive to challenge the norm in pursuit of better results. GEO’s 2012 National Conference  shares a range of perspectives and new ideas for smarter grantmaking that leads to better results and presents opportunities for participants to learn from the wisdom and experience of their peers.     If you’re not attending and curious what funders are learning,  you’ll have an opportunity to read some of the ideas and questions being discussed right here on this blog.

Can you have your cake and eat it too? – Guest post by David C. Colby

That was the question in the “The Intertwining Services Funding with Policy Initiatives to Achieve Systems Change” session at GEO. Funders develop service delivery projects, in this case around behavioral health, and used the efforts to facilitate policy change. Lynda Frost of the Hogg Foundation talked about funding integrated mental health services and how that Foundation was able to be the neutral convener of stakeholders to discuss policy. Becky Hayes Boober described how the Maine Health Access Foundation provided $10 million investment for mental health integration initiative that integrated care in over 100 practice sites. They were also able to leverage an evaluation and learning community to develop common definitions for policy.

Karen Linkins, Desert Vista Consulting, discussed the Tides Center and California Endowment efforts on integrating mental health services in California. These efforts contributed to policy changes, but were not catalysts of change. For those interested in using service deliver to produce policy, Karen provided two tools—Strong Field Framework from Irvine Foundation and the System Change Framework—that are on the Session A5 GEO conference website.

Well…can you have your cake and eat it too? As with many things, it depends. Bringing people to the policy table through services projects seems to have worked in Texas, Maine and California. Administrative policy change seems possible—or as Becky Hayes Boober said “less silver bullet, but more silver buckshot.” Buckshot policy is possible.

If were looking for a silver bullet, a high level policy change or redistributive policy, this tactic seems difficult to execute. It involves being an insider and outsider at the same time—how can one be Saul Alinsky and the State Medicaid Director at the same time? Have any of you used this approach? When does it work? When doesn’t it?

David C. Colby, Vice President, Research and Evaluation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. David focuses on using evidence to improve philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.