Do you think that organisations go through growth lifecycles?
There’s been a fair bit written about lifecycles and nonprofits (1) and lifecycle is another way of looking at growth, as a curve on a graph, over time. Plotting where your organisation is on the curve helps strategic decision making – it’s a useful lens to look through as you ponder future strategies. It’s important to think about growth in terms of impact as well as income too, so if you draw a graph where the bottom axis is time, the left hand axis (growth) can be about impact as well as income. It isn’t just about getting bigger.
I do observe organisations going through phases of growth – from Idea through Start-up, to Maturity, and without intervention, ending up in Decline. Not all organisations travel at the same pace of course, and often not all are entirely in tandem within an organisation, but there is a growth curve as an organisation exists over time. It may be steep at first, then it can plateau, then if we aren’t careful, we get decline. Charles Handy refers to ‘sigmoid curves’ where organisations anticipate potential hazards and reinvent themselves, continuing the growth curve upwards. Hazard spotting (and growth opportunity spotting) is of course what all of us who love the Third Sector Foresight website spend our time doing!
Linked with growth is having a firm foundation – actually the two go hand in hand. Organisational infrastructure needs to adapt as we go through the lifecycle, otherwise we will decline. Firm foundations help us make growth decisions, as well as persuade others to invest in us. Being an organisation in which others want to invest is very much a theme of a series of guides developed by Cass CCE: Tools for Success: doing the right things and doing them right. It’s aimed at helping small voluntary and community organisations ensure the basics are in place for long term sustainability and growth. The guides help identify capacity strengths and gaps, build capability and gear up to implement recognised quality standards. In effect, to move progressively up the growth curve, anticipating hazards and spotting opportunities.
The next guide in the Tools for Success series takes this thinking a stage further offering tools to help make best use of all opportunities for sustained development. It’s funded by Capacitybuilders and is due for publication in early summer 2009. The guide will help tackle topics critical to growth including successful tendering and working well with others to ensure improved service and reduction in costs.
Where is your organisation on its growth curve? How do you spot opportunities and anticipate hazards? What kind of factors go into your decisions about strategic growth?
(1) for example Handy (1988) Understanding Voluntary Organisations; Hudson (1999) Managing Without Profit; Sharken Simon, J (2004) The 5 stages of nonprofit organisations, Amherst H Wilder Foundation
Helena
Online communities
Caroline
How to grow?
Do you think that organisations go through growth lifecycles?
There’s been a fair bit written about lifecycles and nonprofits (1) and lifecycle is another way of looking at growth, as a curve on a graph, over time. Plotting where your organisation is on the curve helps strategic decision making – it’s a useful lens to look through as you ponder future strategies. It’s important to think about growth in terms of impact as well as income too, so if you draw a graph where the bottom axis is time, the left hand axis (growth) can be about impact as well as income. It isn’t just about getting bigger.
I do observe organisations going through phases of growth – from Idea through Start-up, to Maturity, and without intervention, ending up in Decline. Not all organisations travel at the same pace of course, and often not all are entirely in tandem within an organisation, but there is a growth curve as an organisation exists over time. It may be steep at first, then it can plateau, then if we aren’t careful, we get decline. Charles Handy refers to ‘sigmoid curves’ where organisations anticipate potential hazards and reinvent themselves, continuing the growth curve upwards. Hazard spotting (and growth opportunity spotting) is of course what all of us who love the Third Sector Foresight website spend our time doing!
Linked with growth is having a firm foundation – actually the two go hand in hand. Organisational infrastructure needs to adapt as we go through the lifecycle, otherwise we will decline. Firm foundations help us make growth decisions, as well as persuade others to invest in us. Being an organisation in which others want to invest is very much a theme of a series of guides developed by Cass CCE: Tools for Success: doing the right things and doing them right. It’s aimed at helping small voluntary and community organisations ensure the basics are in place for long term sustainability and growth. The guides help identify capacity strengths and gaps, build capability and gear up to implement recognised quality standards. In effect, to move progressively up the growth curve, anticipating hazards and spotting opportunities.
The next guide in the Tools for Success series takes this thinking a stage further offering tools to help make best use of all opportunities for sustained development. It’s funded by Capacitybuilders and is due for publication in early summer 2009. The guide will help tackle topics critical to growth including successful tendering and working well with others to ensure improved service and reduction in costs.
Where is your organisation on its growth curve? How do you spot opportunities and anticipate hazards? What kind of factors go into your decisions about strategic growth?
(1) for example Handy (1988) Understanding Voluntary Organisations; Hudson (1999) Managing Without Profit; Sharken Simon, J (2004) The 5 stages of nonprofit organisations, Amherst H Wilder Foundation