During the last decade the partnership model has really advanced and become central to activities in all sorts of fields. The interagency and public-private nature of broad partnerships naturally provides benefits for implementation of anything from health initiatives to local and regional growth initiatives.

For many years we have been coaching partnerships dealing with rural development and we believe the partnership model will spread even more in existing and into new fields. Successful partnerships obviously open up opportunities that no single actor can accomplish. Below, we mention a couple of the key factors for success.

When reading these tips we would like you to bear in mind one risk with broad partnerships that rarely is acknowledged; while a partnership gets strong through a broad base of key stakeholders the output from the partnership work may turn out to be the “least common denominator”. In critical situations or situations that require very forward-looking, innovative and/or unconventional solutions, a least common denominator might not be enough. In those cases strategic and dedicated interventions may be needed to advance the cause. But more on that in a later post.

The following tips are general for most kind of partnerships and are based on our coaching and evaluation of partnerships.

1. Pinpoint and make explicit the real needs the partnership potentially could address and harmonize every stakeholder’s expectations against those. A shared perspective on the underlying rationales for potential collaboration items is fundamental for a successful partnership.
2. Make sure to implement a process that makes everyone’s voice heard on equal terms. Very often an informal power structure creates an imbalance already from start in a partnership. The first measure for success is to establish a neutral forum.
3. Pinpoint and aim for outcomes that lie close and are concrete. Unite your efforts first around achievable short term outcomes that help the learning and partnership to grow before aiming at long term outcomes or visions. Aiming for concrete short term results is a god way to get the dogs to learn how to pull the sled in the same direction.
4. Make explicit how every stakeholders’ unique strengths contribute to the achievement of the outcomes agreed upon. Being explicit about the assumption on how a program expects to work increases the chance for success.
5. Involve the partnership immediately in evaluation planning and engage stakeholders continuously in the learning process as well as data collection if possible. Reflect collectively on outcomes relative expectations and aims. The shared learning is the biggest boost for enhanced success.

In November we teamed up with Kairos Learning to deliver two online hour-long courses, Building Accountability Into Your Team and Activating Your Program's Strategy and Evaluation.

Below you'll find the recording of the second virtual class,  Activating Your Program's Strategy and Evaluation, which presents an approachable perspective on setting strategy for achieving goals in education, nonprofit and community programs. 

Watch the video to learn:

• A simple yet effective technique for setting strategy and goals for your work
• How to effectively answer the question "Is my project reaching its goals?"
• How to confidently demonstrate to funding sources that your programs are effective

Let us hear your comments on this webinar -- what do you think of this topic? What else should we be covering?

[By the way, the chat window in the recording is not very readable. But this won't prevent you from enjoying the slides and the synchronized audio. If a higher resolution video becomes available, we'll post it.]

In November we teamed up with Kairos Learning to deliver two online hour-long courses, Building Accountability Into Your Team and Activating Your Program's Strategy and Evaluation.

Below you'll find the recording of Kathleen Sexton's interactive virtual class,  Building Accountability Into Your Team, which is directed towards managers and directors in nonprofit organizations who would like to learn strategies for increasing accountability amongst their team members.  

Watch this video to learn:

• How to manage by results
• Create a shared vision
• Role clarification for team members; and
• Team member personal accountability

Let us hear your comments on this webinar -- what do you think of this topic? What else should we be covering?

[By the way, the chat window in the recording is not very readable. But this won't prevent you from enjoying the slides and the synchronized audio. If a higher resolution video becomes available, we'll post it.]

The total amount Sweden spends on regional development is at least 100 times bigger than the biggest number that fits on the display of a regular calculator. We are talking about the Regional Growth Programs, the EU Structural Funds, The Rural Development Program, The European Fisheries Fund, The Regional Service Programs and others like them. Progress is most evident in initiatives that address bottlenecks and barriers blocking the way for improvements. In most initiatives I believe we would expect that fixing the problems is part of the strategy.

However, in a review we made recently of the regional strategies for the implementation of the Rural Development Program in the different regions in Sweden we discovered that problems and priorities in many cases do not match. The priorities set in a strategy do not reflect the conclusions in the SWOT analysis. In other words, it is not clear how the measures planned in a strategy will address challenges that exist in the area. Of course, this does not apply to all strategies. Some regions have a great strategy, but alas, they are way too few.

When we hold seminars and presentations at events and conferences involving public officials we frequently ask if anyone has ever experienced working in a program that, when completed, was unable to demonstrate tangible results. We get roars of laughter. We see nods of recognition from all directions in the room. People confirm they have seen large amounts paid out through programs that only had marginal impact, or less. Public benefit programs are not the only types of project that suffer this sort of fate.

We wonder why this is the case. Is it because we routinely think in terms of inputs rather than results? Perhaps this is not so strange after all. Any kind of grant system is about the distribution of money. And money is an input. The more money we spend the bigger the input, right? In reality, however, results do not only depend on the size of the sum alone. The best results are produced by adequate measures and performance. To get to that, we need to build on the analysis and understand what the problem is that needs to be fixed.

We are also noticing that more and more people are dedicated to ensuring we get more value from public spending. Do you have the same impression? I believe that today both directors and managers at our public agencies are striving for tangible progress. Surely, everyone wants to do a good job.

A challenge for every organization and its leaders is maintaining a heightened sense of situational awareness that’s necessary to leverage different strands of your operations at the right time to create tangible impacts.

For some time OpenEye has been crafting a collaborative working arrangement with Googol, a business development firm whose expertise involves enhancing the innovation capacity and innovation value chains within commercial enterprises. Since “social innovation” is a key term in our approach to creating impact within society, Googol and OpenEye have found many opportunities for mutual learning. Together we hope to leverage best practices on innovation strategies within the commercial sector to enhance governmental and non-profit impact, and vice versa.

For example, Googol has developed a tool called the Innovation Capacity Indicator. This tool provides organizations with an efficient and structured approach to diagnosing a business’ capacity for innovation.  Analyses conducted via this indicator can reveal where opportunities lie to enhance an organization’s innovation capacity and value chain.

Observing Googol’s tool in its business context has inspired us to develop something that could measure a program’s or project’s capacity to create impact within society.  Because we believe that social innovation is a craft, we also believe that something we call Impact Capacity can be systematically enhanced.

To take these ideas further we’d like to get in touch with anyone who would want to help us develop and test an Impact Capacity tool in their program, project or organization. Want to collaborate in a no-cost pilot? Such collaboration will drive many interesting discussions and exchanges of experience.

I appreciated Madeline Smith’s remarks (may require login) at TCI 2009, wherein she outlined her thoughts on how regional clusters can become learning clusters. Clusters, she noted, are complex animals wherein you have “good companies, strong research universities and supportive policy makers, and you sort of mix them all together and magically economic growth pops out the other end.” Ultimately clusters are relationship-based entities, and they are susceptible to the pitfalls that strike most socio-economic initiatives. This includes, as Madeline noted in her talk, changes in the external environment, changing customer expectations, demands to learn to adapt and evolve, and a need for internal systems that allow for incorporation of formative feedback. One can see why it’s a challenge for clusters to achieve the Holy Grail of organizational effectiveness: status as a learning organization.

In addition to the challenges outlined by Madeline, I would argue that a necessary component to becoming a learning cluster is judicious and systematic use of strategy and evaluation. But one takeaway I have from my hallway conversations in Jyväskylä is that neither is happening as well as it should within the cluster community.

What’s keeping clusters from rushing headlong into strategy and evaluation? I’d like to leverage something that Madeline brought up in her talk. In discussing barriers to learning, Madeline talked about how “our current world view restricts our ability to learn” and that everyone brings a cognitive bias and their own cognitive frameworks to a project.

I’d like to suggest that a good deal of the variance in why clusters don’t engage in strategic planning and program evaluation is explained by the world view of cluster stakeholders, or to be more specific, the competing world views of the stakeholders.

It’s quite easy to imagine how this might be the case. The concept of strategic planning and the ideas behind program evaluation, depending on one’s disciplinary background, are defined, applied, and conducted in different ways. Thus the cognitive biases and frameworks of those from business, government, education, and the social sector tacitly and explicitly collide in ways that can lead to inaction, adherence to status quo, and lackluster results in the face of rich resources.

For instance, as Allison and Kay have noted, strategic planning is a term that is often used interchangeably with “long-range planning,” “business planning,” and “operational planning.” In the case of evaluation, its not uncommon to have the term “program evaluation” be confused with “monitoring” or “surveillance,” or “reporting,” all terms which are antonyms to the beneficial, learning-focused nature of quality program evaluation. As Mari Jose Aranguren and her colleagues noted in their presentation (may require login), there are severe difficulties in evaluating clusters due to their implicit characteristics: a mixture of tangible and intangible objectives; the complexity of determining cause-effect relationships. (By the way, I think the application of participatory evaluation frameworks, which Mari and her colleagues are doing, could have great promise in advancing program evaluation within clusters.)

I’d be curious to hear from others who are in the throes of bringing robust strategy and evaluation techniques to clusters. What has been challenging? What seems to be working?

The theme of the TCI annual global conference Oct 2009 in Jyväskylä, Finland is “Learning Clusters”. We are joining business leaders, cluster coaches, funders and researchers who will investigate ways to enhance competitiveness on a global market.  We will partner with VINNOVA, Sweden, to present insights on what’s really essential in a cluster leadership. Our workshop with VINNOVA “How to significantly shorten time-to-impact and create tangible change”, is designed to demonstrate a hands-on approach for leaders on how to establish and maintain a Learning Cluster.

VINNOVA used OpenEye’s visualization technique to uncover how a program can be designed to have the best possible impact. In the process VINNOVA discovered that any program that has a social dimension, which indeed all programs or clusters have, needs to be continuously reinvented. Why?  Because, the area in which we are working will change continuously. It will change both as a result of what we do and as a result of changes in the world around us. So, in order to stay on course we must be prepared to review our inputs and actions over and over. From our experience the message is clear – The basis of a successful design for impact is a good learning strategy.

At the TCI conference, we will talk about how strategic planning and evaluation work significantly better when they go hand in hand. Consequently, we argue that it is necessary to evaluate from DAY 1 in order to learn, revise and reinvent the strategy focusing on the factors that will influence your progress starting tomorrow.

Evaluation is becoming an increasingly important theme in cluster development. More people are becoming aware of the importance of getting early confirmation of progress rather than waiting to see if the ultimate economic goals of cluster policies, such as wage growth and number of new employees, are met. As a cluster goes through several stages in its lifecycle, from embryonic to declining, the evaluation strategy not only has to look at different factors in the different stages but also adapt to what’s unique about a cluster. There are no generic models or standard solutions that can guarantee success. The perfect cluster model is unique for each cluster.

VINNOVA realized the need to pinpoint exactly what the needs and problems are in their programming and continuously keep focus on the evolving nature of them. Being successful in a context where there is a social dimension requires continuous innovation based on what really happens. Success is deliberate change and impact is the result of a careful design. Focus on activities very often will make you see what you want to see. If you focus on what you would like to accomplish you will soon see that activities are simply “tests” that will give you insight on what works and what doesn’t work on your road to success. This is the paradigm shift that we hope to bring to the attention of the conference delegates. It’s about leaving the traditional role as an administrator of a cluster or a program behind you in order to become an impact designer.

If you won't be able to come to the conference, follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/OpenEyeGroup

In this inspiring talk, Katherine Fulton talks about the future of philanthropy – a future where innovation is a key to success. For Fulton, the democratization of philanthropy is allowing citizens to be more empowered than ever act as social innovators of change. She suggests that individuals and organizations can work across and through organizations adn disciplines to find solutions to challenges heretofore unsolved.  Through a democratization of philanthropy, it’s possible for social innovation to occur even when money is scarce.

Katherine’s presentation makes me think how new trends in philanthropy could affect the structure and methods of nonprofit organizations. If innovation increasingly becomes a necessary driver for impact, then nonprofits will need to continually test ideas with their communities in the mode of searcher, as William Easterly puts it.  Moving to searcher mode means that foundations and nonprofits alike will step away from inflexible, long term action plans that focus on outputs and move toward entrepreneurial testbeds that evolve, iterate, and scale. And I'd love to see that.

Clay Shirky, in the documentary Us Now, notes that social media “tools have lowered the cost of doing things for free to the point where our desire to engage with one another is enough to get things now to happen at a very large social scale, rather than just is a smaller family and friends scale.”  Innovation in philanthropy is beginning to mean that people, connected by a common cause, not a large fund, are getting together to create impact in ways never before possible.  Never before has the opportunity to break the silo mentality of philanthropy and nonprofits been greater.  

I believe Katherine is right about social innovation:  that new methods and tools to are needed to help us become more skilled at creating social change.

What are your thoughts and experiences regarding this? What kinds of collaborations should be forged within our sector to support this paradigm shift?