NonProfitBuilder — Initial consultant feedback: Let’s build a learning community
In my last blog post I explained why an OD consultant might be interested in the Nonprofit Builder (the Builder). Now, I’d like to share with you all what we’ve learned from the dozen or so consultants we’ve spoken to in the last month. The first feedback we’ve got is the recommendation that, if we want to build a learning culture in the nonprofit sector around organisational development, we need to start by building a learning community.
What was our initial idea of the Builder?
We set out with the idea that the Builder would mainly be a database of OD consultant profiles, organised in a logical and usable way, for organisations and donors to be able to quickly find the support they are looking for and through the Builder website, easily put together a simple but clear request for support from one or several donors (who are also members) for this OD intervention (the subsidy system). The consultants would appreciate getting more work, the organisations and donors would appreciate getting more choice of qualified, quality capacity builders and having more funds available for this type of intervention.
Then as the intervention progresses, the organization and consultant would report through the system how the intervention went, the lessons learned and their rating of the intervention or course, to the community (including the donor). This would enable consultants to learn from each other’s experiences and allow donors and consultants to see which consultants would be the best fit for their needs, as well as seeing how valuable such organisational development interventions could be. All in all, this would ensure organisations and their donors invest more in building their effectiveness and healthiness.
How has this idea changed to “building a learning community”?
Well, first of all, it’s an important shift from our initial assumption that “consultants will appreciate the Builder as a place to get more work”. This has turned out not to be the main motivation of the majority we spoke to. In fact, consultants and capacity builders told us they see the Builder as a place to get better work (longer term, sufficiently funded interventions with nonprofits who want to go into deep work on their organisational development) and to be part of something larger than just one consultant or consultancy (be it learning from others, connecting with colleagues who can support or complete an intervention team, or solving common challenges).
As one consultant said: “If it’s just another LinkedIn, it’s worth a shot, but I wouldn’t expect too much. If it’s a living community where there’s a team who know my specialities and approach and who can match me with interesting and committed organisations wanting to make a change, or where I can learn from what others have done in their interventions, or even, I can safely recommend an organisation go to find the right consultant or support to do work I cannot do, thus offering them a more complete support this would be much more exciting.”
Therefore, we need more than a great database of consultants, we need to foster a real community of committed consultants, members of nonprofits and donors who are dedicated to learning from each other to build the most effective, innovative and healthy organisations which are able to achieve previously unthinkable results.
Why should we foster such a community?
The leaders and members of non-profit organisations are rarely fully aware of what the underlying issues are that hamper their success — where a director urgently asks for more effective fundraising, the real issues may really lie in the organisation’s overall strategy, in her leadership and delegation of responsibility, the decision making processes he put in place, the structure of the team or the culture within the organisation. As a consultant, I often was called in a for a specific, short-term request (new communication strategy please, now!), and then spent much of our time together working with leaders and teams to become more aware of the true extent of their development needs — often a frustrating outcome to what one consultant called “a request for a silver bullet, which in one short workshop solves all our issues”.
Developing a learning culture begins with awareness. Renowned MIT management expert, Peter Senge refers to how leaders need to start by “turning the mirror inward; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny.” Senge and his colleague Chris Argyris explain how difficult this looking at ourselves can be, as we create “defensive routines” to protect our ways of seeing the world from being changed. Beginning to break down these defensive routines requires developing different mental models (from “knowing” to “learning”), and different skills such as the ability to inquire rather than advocate and convince.
Helping leaders of organisations, members of nonprofits, donors and consultants to see and question their current mental models, to see the challenges facing them and their partners more holistically, and to share with each other what they see and how they are working to overcome these, could potentially bring large shifts in our ability as a sector to address the global issues we face. It seems that developing the skills to do this will be key to fostering a learning community.
Further to skills, a safe space will be needed to enable exchanges and honest reflection amongst practitioners in this community. As one consultant said: “What if I get a couple of bad reviews on my interventions. No one will hire me after that.” A key ingredient will be therefore be trust and psychological safety, alongside a spirit of learning from our mistakes. A recent report by Mobilisation Lab which researched the challenges faced by civil society in training and capacity building, lists as one of the key ones as “need safe and supported spaces for difficult movement conversations.” Also, a huge piece of research Google did two years ago showed that “of the five key dynamics of effective teams that the researchers identified, psychological safety was by far the most important”. When members feel they can trust each other, feel psychologically safe sharing the reality of their interventions, and realise this is an essential part of the whole communities’ learning, rather than an admission of not being good enough, then truly new approaches and lessons can be developed through this platform.
How would we foster such a community?
This is now really the central question we are pursuing by speaking to further consultants, organisations and donors, but also to people who have successfully built and managed communities or ecosystems.
Consultants, nonprofits and donors alike have mentioned that they believe the Builder would require a mix of online discussion, reporting & sharing, somewhat catalysed by the Builder team and offline opportunities (ideally funded!) for learning & sharing, as well as networking.
We imagine that by creating a very concrete tool in the form of the database of consultants, bringing together all the excel sheets and google spreadsheets that different donors and nonprofits have floating around their networks, we can then begin building such a community of learning with the early adopters who join this database, who use it, and who want more. This could be over the next 9 months or so, co-creating with committed consultants, organisational leaders and donors what tools would best serve the sector as a whole: Methods of measuring impact of OD? Ways to better assess the true needs organisations have and align these with organisational development interventions? A marketplace for donors to fund interventions as they are identified and follow the progression of these?
We still have a number of key open questions:
- How can we best foster this community of learning around organisational development?
- What business model will best make this community of learning sustainable?
- What tools are most useful to all our stakeholders, that could be basis for bringing them together to build this community?
- Will people be open to share honestly and learn from their mistakes? If not, what would ensure they would?
Let us know what you think about these initial findings and about the open questions: in the comments below, or by email mike at nonprofitbuilder.org
