photo credit: missmeng

How many times has one of your nonprofit Board members started a sentence, “I had this idea….”

In the innovative nonprofit organization, one trick is how you respond to half-baked ideas. Another trick altogether is how you know which one is worth putting back in the oven.

The May 16th New Yorker has an enormously interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell (a guy who seldom misses…) under the title “Annals of Business”. It’s called “Creation Myth” and subtitled “Xeox PARC, Apple and the truth about innovation.”

Key quote from Gladwell’s article:

…in the real, messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don’t really understand for the thing you do is an inevitable tradeoff…

Are you able to talk with your staff and board in your nonprofit about what you understand, and ask good questions about what you don’t yet understand fully? It’s a worthwhile tool to develop if you’re interested in fueling creativity.

What lessons have you learned in your organization about fueling creativity in your organization? What tools do you use to engage in meaningful inquiry with your staff or Board? Please leave your comments in the box below.

Continuing our series of musings on nonprofit board retreats: This year, consider the single-issue all-day retreat.

photo credit: Elsewhere Artist Collaborative

With all that high-priced brain power in the room, why not dig deep into one question for which there’s no “right or wrong” answers?

Upside? Great opportunity to dig deep into a potential game-changing decision. Downside? This approach requires in-depth pre work for staff and Board leadership.

But when was the last time you (or your board members) had the luxury of full concentration and open inquiry? 

Here’s the pre planning steps…

1. Your Board President, Executive Committee and staff leadership create or examine the long list of BIG, unresolved, issues that have arisen since your last strategic planning.
2. You hold the issues up against your current mission, values and strategic goals to see where it “sits”.
3. Choose the most challenging issue to discuss at your Retreat.
4. Brainstorm the list of all the “unanswered questions” that relate. (You could even do a brief online survey of staff or Board to gather THEIR unanswered questions, or just to assess their level of ignorance. You might be surprised.)
5. With your retreat planning group, determine together what facts, data or research can (reasonably and realistically) be gathered to inform the retreat discussions.
6. Make research assignments, and figure out what information you want to circulate as pre-reading.
7. Even with research, you’ll find you still have a list of unanswerable questions. These become the starting point for your retreat agenda design. The best retreat agendas “mix it up”. (We’ll be sharing more about retreat agenda designs and our tools later.)

A word of caution: The best issue is one that doesn’t need a definitive answer from the Board at the end of the retreat. The very best issue is one that provides you and your Board the opportunity to LEARN TOGETHER.

Example issues we’ve explored with our clients in these types of single-issue discussions

• What’s the most recent academic research being done about [insert topic] and why should we care?
• Should we commit resources to expand programming?
• When will we be ready to buy our building?
• How and why would we consider a merger?
• How would we be different if we had a regional (instead of local) presence?

By the way, this is a terrific empowerment tool when you are transitioning from one Board President to the next.

Planning an upcoming Board retreat?

What have been the most successful (or not so) formats you’ve used in a Board retreat? Why did it work? What would you have liked to do differently? Please leave us a comment in the box below.