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Dan Pallotta on why overhead matters in the non-profit sector

April 10, 2013 By Community, Philanthropy

Dan Pallotta at a TED talk on why overhead matters in non-profits.

Here is the essence of the talk:

 

  1. Non-profits exist to alleviate social problems for which there is no market.
  2. Working at the level of causes means needing to take work to scale.
  3. Going to scale means that we need to grow the resources available (without using commerical or profit making methods).
  4. What is called “overhead” is actually the capacity to do this.

Perlotta makes a compelling argument for increasing overhead in the non-profit sector and talks about why we have to change our mindsets in order to see this as unproductive.  The essence is that in situation where you have a fixed amount of funds, then limiting overhead means you can get more of the funds to clients.  But in a situation where the amount of funds can grow, investing in overhead allows organizations to both meet their mandates AND to grow the scale of donors and impact to reach upstream for deeper change.

Overhead can be thought of in a variety of ways, including:

  1. Operations and capital maintenance, so people have good and safe facilities to work in
  2. Talent and benefits, for people who will never receive a bonus payment in their lives.  Many of the people that work for charities by the way are folks that have been clients of non-profits in the past, so this alos makes good economic sense.
  3. Strategy, learning and research, to ensure that the methods being used are the best avialable and to help organizations makes sense of complex and changing environments.
  4. Communications – connecting with others nto make an overall impact on the sector or issue as well as attracting resources such as talent and money to bring the initiative to scale.
  5. Working with governments to help shape policy to address root causes.  Otherwise known as “going upstream” this helps charities get at the root causes of their client’s distress and not simply be plucking babies out of the river without figuring out who is throwing them in.

The work of fundraising for deep social change needs to make the argument that investing in overhead is an investment in real change and not just meeting client needs.  In many ways it is a BETTER investment, because it means that you can address underlying issues which makes it possible to solve some problems and move resources into other places.   If you want to make real social change, find an organization that has a sophisticated approach to issues and you increase your chances of making shift happen.  None of the clear victories of the last century came without these kinds of activities in place. Eliminating polio? How do you think that happened?

Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad

April 8, 2013 By Design, Facilitation 2 Comments

The Groups Works pattern lamnguage deck is now available for the iOS mobile platform.  You can download the app here:  Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store. Or you can also run an Infinite Canvas on your iPad as well.  Learn more  here.

The Group Works Deck team has released these apps as a protoyping exercise and wants feedback on how people are using them.

My initial assessment is that the do a terrific job of reproducing the deck with the added benefit of have related patterns hyperlinked within the cards themselves.  What I’d like to see is a link on each card to the underlying pattern.  I think the patterns in this project are very important because they are the source of the card titles, images and desciptions and although the level of detail varies at the moment in teh pattern language, this information is very important.  Having access to it on the app would be a huge resource.

Download the apps for yourself, or get a copy of the deck itself, a beautiful tactile design tool for group process facilitation.

Random lessons from learning conversations

March 15, 2013 By Being, Collaboration, Community, Learning One Comment

Today was a day of hosting on webinars, with a group looking at the emerging edges of the non-profit sector in BC and with a group od UNited Church ministers and lay leaders who are hosting transformation and learning together in a community of practice.  At the end of our second call, this Thomas Merton quote was shared with us:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

This resonates strongly with the tack Meg Wheatley takes in her no book, So Far From Home, which is a call to spiritual warriorship, despite everything.

Several really stunning insights fell at me feet today, from this five hours of online discovery.  Forexample, a friend working with victims of sexual abuse in northern BC talked about how people who do this work are not burnt out by the work – humans have been caring resliiently for each other for eons.  What burns them out is maintaining the systems that formalize that work of community.  As humans we are easy in relationship, but our energy and lives are sapped by turning away from what nurtures us and tending nto a system of professional practice, regulations, administrative accountabilities and resource deployment that leaves us tapped out.

Or another insight today that the real practice of making change is making space for dissent so that there can be an authentic yes from the centre of the work.  Or that evolution is a difficult metaphor for change work, because so much of what we are aiming to change has been put in place intentionally and which purpose.

We are one learning journeys with these groups, and these little insights trickle in like sunlight when you are listening openly and sharing in each other’s discovery.  Nice way to end the week.

Self organizing transportation options in community

March 14, 2013 By Bowen, Community, Organization

Here on Bowen Island, we are still small enough and friendly enough that stuff like  Bowen LIFT can get started relatively easily.  Bowen LIFT is trying to help people self-organize transportation options to complement our limited but excellent public bus service. This morning on CBC Radio, our LIFTers got a lift of their own.  Listen to the podcast here.

Numbers aren’t everything

February 24, 2013 By Design, Emergence, Leadership, Learning, Organization, Philanthropy

It’s an old saw with me, but Dave Snowdon puts it very nicely and succinctly:

Numbers are good, but they are never the whole picture.  Its easy to focus on them, they give the comfort of apparent objectivity and used to support human judgement they have high utility.  The problem is when they replace judgement rather than supporting it.  Of course in the ordered aspects of any enterprise statistics and numbers can do a lot of the work for you, but in a complex situation they can be dangerous.  Applied to ordered aspects (boundary conditions, probes and the like) they have utility, but for the system as a whole they are more problematic.

via Judgement & statistics – Cognitive Edge Network Blog.