David La Piana

On June 30, Northern California Grantmakers and the Foundation Center, sponsored an engaging panel discussion in San Francisco, about Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector.

Each panelist highlighted different aspects of the five trends impacting the social sector and what their organizations are doing in response to, or in some cases, as part of the trends.

For example, Matt Halperin said the Omidyar Network is sector-agnostic when it comes to their investments, for them, sector-blurring has become sector indifference.

Dee Dee Nguyen of Marin Community Foundation talked about the changing demographics of California and the challenge of engaging younger donors in giving circles.

Peter Friess of the Tech Museum of Innovation showed a footage of kids being videotaped, so that the childrens’ explanations can be used in place of signage explaining the museum’s exhibits, to make the visitor experience more meaningful for other children.

It was a lively discussion with lots of people hanging around after for more.  Special thanks to Judi Powell and Dion Ward of NCG and Janet Camarena of Foundation Center for helping make this event a success!

As I continue my sojourn in the UK, I learned an interesting fact about the nonprofit sector here: There is a national government department devoted to “third sector affairs.” Even more amazing, this entity has created a multi-million pound fund to support capacity building among the nation’s 200,000 charities.

When I heard this today, from colleagues at a meeting, the only thing I could think to say was, “My God, it sounds like socialism!” When the laughter died down, I discovered that my work here, with UK organizations ACEVO and Capacity Builders, is being financed out of this fund. I always did love socialism.

Seriously, it is inconceivable that America would allow its government to take such an active role in supporting a large portion of the nonprofit sector economy, or is it? Until recently, it was equally inconceivable that our government would bail out the private sector’s financial institutions.

The closest thing the US has to this arrangement is the IRS oversight function. But that is really a policing responsibility, ensuring our sector is obeying the law. There is no unified federal (or state for that matter) effort to ensure the health of our nonprofits.

A January 25, 2010 article in the Wall Street Journal caught my attention.  Entitled “Strategic Plans Lose Favor, Slump Showed Bosses Value of Flexibility, Quick Decisions” by Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli, the article describes several big companies’ efforts to find a better way, in the current economic uncertainty, to plan for the future.

Walt Shill, head of the North American practice for Accenture, is quite blunt: “Strategy, as we knew it, is dead. Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.” Corporate planners are increasingly revising their forecasts monthly, but this too is the wrong solution in my opinion. It consists of continually moving the goal posts. When you first miss your numbers, recast them. Next month, repeat.

It is great to see corporate America, and consulting giants like Accenture, beginning to see the problems with long-term static planning approaches to strategy. We identified similar problems in the nonprofit sector years ago and prescribed a better approach to strategy, our Real-Time Strategic Planning methodology, which was described in The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution in 2008. Sometimes our sector leads the way! In this work we describe an ongoing strategy process designed to anticipate and respond to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.