NonProfitBuilder — Why should an Organisational Development consultant care?
“All of us who join nonprofits are so dedicated and driven to bring positive change to this world, so why is it so inefficient and painful when we work together?” This question is what lead me to focus on developing effective and healthy nonprofit organisations. Rather than, like my dear courageous colleagues, focus on the substance of defending human rights or delivering emergency aid, I got excited by strategic plans, by excel sheets of perfect accounting, by teams finding their common purpose, or by leaders thriving and growing as individuals. Since 2008, I did this whilst working in organisations, then since 2014, as an independent consultant.
The obstacles which I came across whilst working within nonprofits in developing our institutional strength are beautifully summarised by Daniel in his post about his experience as an NGO director. As a consultant, there were a different, but interlinked, set of obstacles to me really being able to support organisations to become sustainable and powerfully bring change to the communities they work for. Be it the lack of a holistic approach to Organisational Development (OD), the lack of funds or commitment from organisations and donors to undertake long-term, or even continuous, organisational development or my desire for more team-work and collaboration with other consultants. More on this later.
I had been exploring different ways to deal with these issues, and then Daniel and I had lunch. After a lot of chocolate mousse, we agreed that we could certainly find a solution to many of our common difficulties by developing together a platform which would allow others with these same challenges, including nonprofits (like Daniel used to lead), the consultants who support them (like me) and donors who provide funds for this support, to share these and work together to overcome them. Essentially, we want to create a learning culture in the nonprofit sector which would, to paraphrase Peter Senge, “allow each of us to continually build our ability to reach the results we strive for”.
Joined by Marina and her great experience of Ukraine and Brussels based-nonprofits, we together defined what we assumed were the key issues faced by these stakeholders and what solutions would overcome these, and then set out to validate these. This is how I ended up spending the last month doing dozens of interviews with fascinating, talented and dedicated consultants, trainers, capacity builders, and foundations based in North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia… yes, life is hard.
We want to know from you consultants, what are the key challenges that you face, as a consultant working on supporting organisations to develop themselves? What would be most helpful for you to overcome these challenges?
Also, in order to be able to show organisations and donors that investing in OD makes sense, we want to know if it is an important part of your work as a consultant to be measuring and showing the impact of the work you do and how you do this today? We want to know how you learn from the interventions you do and how you share this learning with other consultants, nonprofits & donors? How?
Importantly, we want to know if you would you be willing to report on the impact and lessons learned of the interventions you’ve had on a platform which helps you to learn from others’ interventions?
This blog will share all that we learn and our open questions with you, whoever and wherever you are, so you can join this journey and create with us this learning culture! Get in touch via the comments below or to mike at nonprofitbuilder.org
In my next post, I’ll be explaining our first key learning from speaking to consultants: to build a learning culture, we need to build a learning eco-system!
