In Convergence:  How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector we described how demographic shifts, technological advances, networks that organize work in new ways, interest in civic engagement and volunteerism, and the blurring of sector boundaries would be changing the way that we come together to respond to and solve social problems.

If you have followed the emergence and spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you can see these trends at work – and it’s precisely the changes implied by the trends that have made this a difficult story for traditional media to cover.   How many times have you seen reports that this is a “leaderless movement?”  In a session on social change at the recent Independent Sector conference, a young woman expressed her frustration at this term, saying “The problem that people seem to have in understanding OWS is that it is, in fact, a leader-full movement.”  She makes a good point.   Those involved are sharing leadership, inviting others to engage in the movement, and they are using technology to communicate broadly and through open channels – but not necessarily the channels to which traditional media are accustomed (no one issues press releases announcing the next day’s events).

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AbilityFirst is a Southern California nonprofit serving people with developmental disabilities.   They came to La Piana Consulting at the height of the Great Recession in 2009 in order to think about strategies for responding to economic change.  Our Real-Time Strategic Planning (RTSP) process was a perfect fit for their needs because they wanted to know how to make good decisions in the face of change, and RTSP focuses on creating a Strategy Screen—or list of criteria—to guide decision making.

The challenge: the state of California provided approximately 50% of AbilityFirst’s funding either directly or indirectly—and the state was in the throes of a major budget crisis.  The last state budget process had resulted in significant cuts to state funded services, and the prospect for additional major cuts in coming years was certain.  AbilityFirst knew they had to be prepared to survive these cuts.

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