The other week I sat down to read through a newly released Swedish regional development strategy. It described how, with a couple of inputs here and a few activities there, enhanced regional growth and competitiveness will occur in Sweden. It contained a SWOT analysis and plans for a mid-term and final summative evaluation. Weighing in at 83 pages, appendices and all, it was ambitious, elaborate and contained everything needed to describe the strategy in total.

One of the appendices included a series of logic models depicting how the ultimate goals would be achieved. For sure, logic models are becoming ever more common in plans like these. Nonetheless, Even one can’t help but be somewhat impressed that logic modeling has become a widely adopted graphical concept in a relatively short time.

“You’ve Got Your Shit Together!”

That’s what I overheard a program evaluator say at an annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association, as he set his gaze on an impressive logic model my colleague had on display in a poster session. And that’s probably what he would say if he saw the logic models in the regional strategy I’ve been reading. My colleague’s diagram at the AEA conference, and the diagrams in the regional strategic plan undeniably leave an impression of control, mental activity and ambition.

Would that gentleman have been right? Do you have your “shit together” when you can depict something visually? Not necessarily. There is a big difference between visual productions and visual thinking, or what I would call design thinking.

What We Tend to See

Within society development[1] and philanthropy, when we see logic models and other graphical depictions of program theory, what we’re seeing are examples of what I’d call visual productions. As a field, I believe we are still waiting for a breakthrough to visual thinking. Visual productions are created as add-ons to the regular operations and processes of an organization, and usually done after most planning is complete (planning which, by the way, generally occurs through a traditional linear process).

Many times a project plan is developed even before an optimal design can be created. As such, the beneficial forces of visual and design thinking are not capitalized upon, increasing the risk that weaknesses, problems or inconsistencies from the traditional linear and textual thinking will enter into to project plans. In using visual productions in such a way (as to merely repurpose and illustrate a linearly-derived plan) one merely creates a window dressing that makes the plan more appear explicit and look convincing. This visual makes it look like you have your “shit together.”

I would like to see a new position developed within nonprofit agencies and philanthropy: That of impact designer.

Impact Designers Would Be Visual Thinkers

An impact designer in the nonprofit or philanthropic sector would utilize all the skills and talents of their own disciplinary background and employ the best practices in visual and design thinking to develop better, more robust, more impactful programs. They would grasp onto early works, like Rudolf Arnheim’s “Visual Thinking” (from 1969), which talks about how “the visual medium is so enormously superior because it offers structural equivalents to all characteristics of objects, events, relations.” Arnheim argues that polydimensional space is perfect for theoretical reasoning. I’ve heard someone say that visual production is the tip of the iceberg while the rest is visual thinking. What a great way to put it.

I believe that three things are needed to achieve a breakthrough in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors before visual and design thinking can become prevalent.

1. Role shift

2. Reframing of economic realities

3. Better tools

If I were to write a “help wanted” ad for an impact designer, this is what it would say:

IDEO founder, David Kelly, said in an interview (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/a-designer-takes-on-his-biggest-challenge-ever.html) that by applying the competence of design thinking, his group is able to come up with solutions that nobody has come up with before.

My hope is that we can do the same in our sector.

A little over four years ago we started to ask people what some of the root causes were to better organizational effectiveness in the foundation and nonprofit sectors within the United States. We talked with personnel at large and small nonprofits, and program staff from small family foundations to large private ones . We also consulted the literature on organizational effectiveness in the nonprofit world. Over time we captured what we heard into a poster size (3 feet x 2 feet) root cause “map” with over 65 boxes containing discrete assertions about the challenges foundations and nonprofits face in attaining organizational effectiveness. The diagram also contains scores of arrows that conceptually connect the assertions.

Early versions of the map were shown to our initial interview respondents from the foundation and nonprofit world (and to just about anyone who would look at it!). Over time we confirmed, disconfirmed, and refuted many issues, ever refining the map. It’s not perfect, but it does reveal an honesty and candor that underscores the passion of the people working in the third sector.

Because the concepts are ever evolving, our aim is to make transparent what we've learned and start a conversation on

• where the most viable opportunities for improvement are, and
• what we should address as a field.

In a series of posts we’ll report on what we’ve learned and ask for your reaction. Part One is about foundations. In Part Two we'll look at nonprofit organizations. We'll also publish the map in an upcoming post so anyone can have a copy of it and see the ecology of effectiveness, as we've captured it, for the sector.

Part One: Foundation Effectiveness

We began this thought experiment with the following assertion:

“We, as a social change community, not as effective as we could be.”

We then asked stakeholders in the field why that’s the case, particularly in foundations.

Four major clusters of root causes evolved from the above assertion. One cluster of reasons focused on the way in which the input from consultants, on which many foundations rely, doesn’t always translate into better overall effectiveness. Another cluster focused on how proposal vetting is not as effective as it could be. A third looked at how program evaluation is not leveraged in the best ways possible. And the fourth cluster, which I’ll discuss more in depth below, notes that foundations are not as strategic as they could be.

Why Aren’t Foundations As Strategic As They Could Be?

Three major areas developed in our analysis as to why foundations are not as strategic as they could be.

The first is no surprise. It's hard to stick to a strategy.

• With the passage of time, leadership and staff attain new knowledge that influences how they view the future.
• The stakes for not sticking to a strategy are not readily evident in the day to day work of foundation staff.
• It's hard to make strategy visible and operational in every step of an organization's day.
• It's hard to deliberately re-focus a strategy.
• Board members may have personal interests that can influence grantmaking.
• The needs of a community change over time.

Another second reason why foundations are not as strategic as they could be is that program portfolios can become populated with projects that may not be mission-related. This can occur when foundations have vague, unattainable or unrealistic goals. There are several reasons why foundations would hold such goals:

• It can be more appealing for a foundation to make small contributions to a big problem rather than completely solving a delimited one
• Foundations and grantees are not necessarily centered on a culture of measurement. After all, with measurement comes responsibility; what one doesn't see one doesn't need to fix.
• Foundations want to leave their options open.
• A foundation's strategy may be illusive and confusing. The contributors to this include
  • An inherent ambivalence about power and control over grantees. Foundations can be reluctant to tell grantees what to do because
    
    • they wish to be detached and objective and not involved in funded projects
    • they don't have staff or resources to support funded projects
    • they have respect for the independence of grantees
  • A lack of a market that drives foundations to be more effective and outcome oriented.
  • A tendency to prefer being detached and objective and not involved in funded projects

A third area that contributes to foundations' difficulty in sticking to strategy is a lack of emphasis on results that lead to a change or impact. A reason offered for this is that the quality of grantee operations may be based on foundation's perception of a grantee's organizational efficiency rather than a grantee's social results.

Next Time: Evaluation, Proposal Vetting, and Consultants and Their Relationship to Foundation Effectiveness

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.

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?