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
When you map out your strategic staircase for the next 5 years, what are the big drivers that will create really powerful opportunities and threats for your beneficiaries in the period up to 2012? Don’t say you can’t possibly know – if you don’t have an informed view of that – who will have one?
What are the big drivers that will impact your beneficiaries over the next 5 years? How can you lead a strategic conversation in your organisation that will ensure that you can respond positively and proactively to new challenges and opportunities?
These are the questions that Megan and I will be seeking to answer in what promises to be a fun and interactive session at the Alive and Kicking conference on 11 December. In our session – Look out! How to do a foresight analysis – we will be taking participants through the stages of strategic analysis, with a difference! Intrigued? Come and join us (there are still a few places left).
‘Building expertise, sharing experience’ is what this new website is all about. It launches in Spring 2009 and is being built gradually over the next few months.
The site already has some material and a few forums on strategy, and a number of links to Third Sector Foresight. It even has a podcast with Megan Griffith Gray from 3S4 and Fiona Ash from Cass CCE discussing Strategic Analysis!
The Strategy section has ‘how to’ guides for each of the different stages of the strategy development process. There are articles and links about a range of current strategic challenges, plus our view of what a perfect strategic plan might look like! There’s no such thing as a perfect plan of course, but why not join the debate and improve on what we have put out there…
We are also looking for help in building the content (for example you could help us with case studies and articles). If you’d like to help with this, please email knowhow@city.ac.uk
It must be used in conversation all the time (internally and externally), both during the building of the thinking, testing assumptions etc, and during implementation, testing reality.
It must have beneficiary needs at the heart; if you don’t base your strategy on a powerful and deep understanding of need and how to meet it, then it won’t; it’s as simple as that!
I’m with both of you on this, and would add that in forming a vision we often think about ‘the world’ we want to create (as opposed to the organisation…). What this gives us is a recognition that we can’t do it on our own, and thus the strategic push to consider working with others (as opposed to the non strategic, very tactical push that we are more often responding to when we consider collaboration). nfp synergy have a very useful paper (downloadable pdf from this page on their website – just scroll down) called ‘Mission Impossible?’ by Elisha Evans & Brian Garvey May 2006. It gives definitions, pointers on how to do it, and many examples from our sector.
The model is one by Connolly and York. Proper reference: Connolly, P and York, P (2003) Building the capacity of capacity builders, TCC Group. Basically it helps us think about the resources impacted by drivers: time, facilities, human resources, technology, programme design and model (I like this one very much), finance/funding. So if you take your chosen drivers and consider how each might affect each resource area – you open up your thinking. Need to get my head round how you use them in scenarios…maybe just as you suggest!
Caroline
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
Caroline
When you map out your strategic staircase for the next 5 years, what are the big drivers that will create really powerful opportunities and threats for your beneficiaries in the period up to 2012? Don’t say you can’t possibly know – if you don’t have an informed view of that – who will have one?
What are the big drivers that will impact your beneficiaries over the next 5 years? How can you lead a strategic conversation in your organisation that will ensure that you can respond positively and proactively to new challenges and opportunities?
These are the questions that Megan and I will be seeking to answer in what promises to be a fun and interactive session at the Alive and Kicking conference on 11 December. In our session – Look out! How to do a foresight analysis – we will be taking participants through the stages of strategic analysis, with a difference! Intrigued? Come and join us (there are still a few places left).
Caroline
‘Building expertise, sharing experience’ is what this new website is all about. It launches in Spring 2009 and is being built gradually over the next few months.
The site already has some material and a few forums on strategy, and a number of links to Third Sector Foresight. It even has a podcast with Megan Griffith Gray from 3S4 and Fiona Ash from Cass CCE discussing Strategic Analysis!
The Strategy section has ‘how to’ guides for each of the different stages of the strategy development process. There are articles and links about a range of current strategic challenges, plus our view of what a perfect strategic plan might look like! There’s no such thing as a perfect plan of course, but why not join the debate and improve on what we have put out there…
Take a look at the site and share your expertise.
We are also looking for help in building the content (for example you could help us with case studies and articles). If you’d like to help with this, please email knowhow@city.ac.uk
Caroline
More pre-requisites:
It must be used in conversation all the time (internally and externally), both during the building of the thinking, testing assumptions etc, and during implementation, testing reality.
It must have beneficiary needs at the heart; if you don’t base your strategy on a powerful and deep understanding of need and how to meet it, then it won’t; it’s as simple as that!
Caroline
I’m with both of you on this, and would add that in forming a vision we often think about ‘the world’ we want to create (as opposed to the organisation…). What this gives us is a recognition that we can’t do it on our own, and thus the strategic push to consider working with others (as opposed to the non strategic, very tactical push that we are more often responding to when we consider collaboration).
nfp synergy have a very useful paper (downloadable pdf from this page on their website – just scroll down) called ‘Mission Impossible?’ by Elisha Evans & Brian Garvey May 2006. It gives definitions, pointers on how to do it, and many examples from our sector.
Caroline
The model is one by Connolly and York. Proper reference: Connolly, P and York, P (2003) Building the capacity of capacity builders, TCC Group. Basically it helps us think about the resources impacted by drivers: time, facilities, human resources, technology, programme design and model (I like this one very much), finance/funding. So if you take your chosen drivers and consider how each might affect each resource area – you open up your thinking. Need to get my head round how you use them in scenarios…maybe just as you suggest!