Sowing seeds for organisational development in the nonprofit sector
There’s an important point to make about Organisational Development (or OD). Namely, it’s pretty certain that you will never see a protest outside your local town hall with placards saying ‘What do we want? OD! And when do we want it? Now!’
You are also not likely to see the term ‘OD’ in the budget for that joint funding bid you are writing with local partners which aims to run an integrated youth justice programme on the peripheral estate near you. Indeed, there are still relatively few forward thinking charitable trusts, foundations or local authorities which will include a budget line for organisational development work in their application forms.
OK, but you might well say: ‘so what? Funding is a competitive field, there are a lot of organisations out there, and if your organisation is not already up to scratch, well, we are sorry but that’s your problem.
Anyway, there is a space on the application form where you can put down an amount for training, and updating your computer software, and taking part in a few city-wide forums. What more do you want?
Well, actually, quite a bit. And that’s where organisational development comes in. But first, it’s a tricky term, and you could be forgiven for asking the question: well, what is organisational development and why is it important?
Why is OD such a chaotic concept?
In our joint project OpenOD, which involves a partnership between Shift, NPC, IVAR and NCVO, we came up with well over 130 words or phrases that pointed to OD activities and processes. These included organisational work to: assess your progress; build a collaborative cross-organisational field; capture learning on the best metrics in your field of work; develop on-line sharing of results virtually with other organisations; grow better team structures; re imagine your vision and how your work could be developed — and more — but, we won’t go through the whole list here.
But even this brief dip of the teaspoon into the soup illustrates the range and number of ingredients we could be dealing with. At times we described ‘OD’ as, what the sociologist Andrew Sayer might call, ‘a chaotic concept’. It is a broad container for an enormous range of organisational work.
This doesn’t imply that the term is not useful but, rather, that it is important to point to which particular fruits and flowers you are trying to nurture in your OD greenhouse and which tools you need to bring out of the shed. Further, to push the analogy a bit further, you might need to consider what needs fetching from the metaphorical OD garden centre and which resources you can share with your neighbours.
The importance of OD
In the Open OD project, our broad descriptor of OD was: ‘various intersecting notions of intentional work involved with organisational change, performance improvement, gaining better outcomes, changing systems, building resilience and organisational learning’ (Buckley and Aiken, (2021:5). Meanwhile the Open OD project is currently teasing out some of the key principles behind OD work within the VCSE sector.
Some of the main questions we have been interested in are: why is OD important; how do those of us in the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise sector (VCSE) engage in OD. Further, in terms of process, are
there ways to integrate our learning into the ongoing design of our organisational work? And in what ways might charitable trusts and other funders support this work?
So, why is OD important? In many ways, the discussion here relates to what an experienced — if weary – practitioner pointed out to me not long after I had got my first proper job in the voluntary sector: ‘Most funders only want to fund the fruit and not the tree.’ It doesn’t take a climate change activist to tell you that, if there ain’t no trees, there ain’t no fruit — and there might not be any clean air for the community either! So just counting the apples but not managing the bark is a bad idea.
Exploring and strengthening some of the existing OD activities and processes in the ‘trunk’ of our VCSE organisations is one possible starting point. This organisational work may help us better understand how the identification and implementation of learning from our own — and our partners’ activities — might better nurture the fruit of the social changes to which we are committed.
First, this could enable us to better design our work and shape a plausible case to funders for example, to expand our reach; or to work more generically with partners on the same patch and to share our data and analysis; or to narrow our focus towards smaller numbers of the toughest, most intransigent and wicked problems. However, the aim here is not about looking pretty and smart to funders. Rather, it is about intentionally aligning our work — and that of our partners — to best fit the core mission and values of our organisations and to have an impact on social and environmental ills.
Second, it is important to consider which OD activities are most crucial. There are now an increasing number of diagnostic and data analysis tools available — many of them online — that can aid our discussions and decision making in this arena. For example, in the Open OD project, we drew extensively from Niahm Goggin’s (2020) examination of the many available tools and techniques. These covered topics such as Digital Data and Design; Organisational and Financial Resilience; and Funding Approaches for large and small organisations. In some cases, these tools illustrated ways for partner organisations to share outcomes from their collaborative work in order to foster inter-agency learning.
The role everyone has to play in OD
Third, it is important to notice that funders have key roles to play in OD. Hence, Big Lottery Fund, Lankelly Chase, Lloyds Bank Foundation, the Young Foundation, and others have, at different times, played important roles in supporting organisational development in the Third Sector. Sometimes this has been through ‘funder plus support’ strategies. Typically this can mean offering grants and specialist consultancy to help small organisations’ in relation to developing their IT systems, communications strategies, advocacy work, or outreach work with new marginalised groups. Sometimes, it has also involved drawing together organisations with similar social change agendas to either amplify their voice or support the building of a field or eco-system of like-minded groups.
Fourth, our OD needs might usefully ‘design in’ from the start notions of collaborative goals and shared learning between organisations working in the same milieu. But, this is tricky in a funding environment where resources are targeted to one or two year projects, with highly specified targets, pre-specified methods, and in competition with other agencies that might otherwise be allies and partners.
Let’s point to a few examples. In the field of support for people who are homeless, or engagement with young people involved with crime, or even local community development, the funding process and working
environment is pre-structured as competitive. In this context, as Nick Stanhope (2020) points out, building collaborative ways of working or shared data platforms will not on their own ‘foster more generous leadership or effective collaboration.’
In addition, meaningful long term linkage and involvement with social movements and the community from ‘below’, is just as important as engaging with the local, national politicians and officers from ‘above.’ Further, at a local level, it is a common — and even intuitive — part of a practitioners’ work to integrate insights and learning from their daily practice into a subtle and iterative re-design of their organisational work in the VCSE sector. That’s OD too.
There will probably never be a march to Parliament, or to the local town hall, demanding ‘More OD Now!’.
On the other hand, if we neglect to support our organisational — and inter-organisational — learning, we may end up with no fruit — and no tree.
Additional references
Cast (2020) Digital Design Principles
Goggin, N. (2019) Outputs No 1 — No 7. Internal Report (available on request from IVAR, London).
