Agile, Evolution, Innovation, Leadership, Management, Nonprofit, Strategy

HEARTBEAT a simple and fast TRANSFORMATION approach for smaller NONPROFITS

HEARTBEAT is the smallest natural cadence of our human life. There are others (sunsets, seasons, years) yet heartbeat represents something profound. It’s an expression of the very act of living. It reduces the clutter of our noisy existence to what is really… truly… unequivocally… critical… our heartbeat.

I find social events really awkward. I always get asked what I do for a living and I can never give a straight answer. For the last 20 years I’ve helped various companies and organizations transform. Whether it’s “Digital Transformation”, “Customer-Centric Transformation”, “LEAN Agile Transformation”… in today’s rapidly changing market, all organizations must evolve to survive and thrive. My specialty is evolving organizations by evolving their people. In the last five years, I’ve married my skills and experience with my passion for helping people. I’ve been a “serial volunteer” all my life. Now I spend my days help nonprofits evolve. Below I would like to share with you an approach called HEARTBEAT designed to evolve small and medium nonprofits.

LET’S START WITH WHY

The most recent and relevant research comes from Imagine Canada’s 2014 Sector Monitor (page 4, N=1698) authored by David Lasby and Cathy Barr [#1] where they stated…

Currently, the percentage of leaders of charities under high levels of stress strongly agreeing their charity is experiencing increasing  demand has risen to 55% from a low of 43% in mid-2011.

This stress was especially higher with smaller non-profits with fewer then 10 staff and revenue under $500k (as per Table 1 / page 6). In their conclusion (page 12) they stated:

Sector stakeholders should be on the lookout for emergent challenges and adaptive strategies related to increased demand. In addition, we should continue to be particularly vigilant regarding the small and medium-sized organizations that are consistently more likely to report higher levels of organizational stress. In terms of number of organizations, these charities make up the bulk of the sector and challenges there will inevitably have effects throughout the charitable ecosystem.

Large organizations (and large nonprofits) have budgets large enough to support dedicated organization transformation efforts and staff. But what about smaller nonprofits? How are they to evolve? How can they, in spite of their limitations, transform to meet increased demands, increased costs, and rapidly evolving donors?

That’s how HEARTBEAT was born… simple idea… for a pervasive problem.

WHAT IS HEARTBEAT?

Forget complex change management frameworks. Forget enterprise-level digital and customer transformation frameworks. Forget PMI, Waterfall, Prince2 and other frameworks for managing your priorities and work. They are simply too large and carry too much overhead. Here are the objectives I’ve set for HEARTBEAT:

  1. Approach must be easy to learn within minutes and use almost immediately
  2. Approach will generate impact quickly (within days and weeks, not months)
  3. Approach that will work for a variety of nonprofits regardless of their focus, their organizational structure, and their funding model
  4. Approach that will function in normal, minimal, and even zero-budget environments (e.g. all volunteer-led)
  5. Approach should easily fit into the nonprofit culture and existing methods of working (e.g. broad roles, high collaboration, high agility)
  6. Approach can work for group of 2 to 20 people, whether a small team, a group of volunteers, or an entire small nonprofit

HEARTBEAT is an approach for transforming small nonprofits. You  can think of it as a micro-framework based primarily on LEAN principles [#2] and Edward Deming’s [#3] productivity theories (especially PDCA).

HOW DOES HEARTBEAT WORK?

I want to use a visualization of a hand (common in nonprofit world) to air remembering this method quickly. Just like five fingers on your hand, HEARTBEAT has FIVE simple steps repeated in a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly cadence. Each finger means to be highly focused and short. Here are the steps:

  1. PURPOSE: Remember and celebrate the very heart and purpose of your nonprofit. How do you impact your benefactors, donors, and even staff? Use this as the ANCHOR throughout all next steps!
  2. SIMPLIFY: Create capacity (time and money) by removing of work that has LEAST value. Simplify and cut the scope of what you do. Consciously accept that loss and let it go. It doesn’t matter how much you have. This capacity is necessary to pivot and transform. If you cannot simplify, you cannot transform.
  3. EXPLORE: Planning is great but it often makes us delay till we have all the information. Don’t wait. The cost of delaying is greater then the cost of making mistakes. Explore. Make a choice based on the information you have right now. Don’t try to figure a perfect solution. You will learn more by exploring then you will learn by creating hypothetical plans.
  4. EXECUTE: It’s OK if you’re doing something for the first time. Try new things you’ve never done before. Prototype. Fail than try again. These are all learning opportunities. The cyclical nature of this approach will allow you to evolve your plan and manage risks. Just don’t wait. Waiting robs you of delivering the value early, learning from your mistakes, and give you an opportunity to improve.
  5. SHARE & PIVOT: The end of the cycle ends with shared reflection. Failures in action are recognized as successes in learning. True impact is weighted as more important then our attachment to specific ideas because at the end the purpose of the organization is at the heart, not a specific idea. We share lessons learned transparently… and relentlessly let go of failed ideas… than pivot, evolve, and  improve them. We don’t develop perfection by planning a full-proof solution. We do plan best but we also accept that the only way we can achieve a great solution is by testing and learning and pivoting.

Now, just like your five fingers are connected to each other through your palm and they work together to get work done, the same principle is applied here. All of these steps are meant to be done COLLABORATIVELY not alone. Exploration and transformation is fueled by collaboration and communication in cross-functional teams.

APPROACH EXAMPLES

I’ve created a couple examples to help understand how this approach works.

FEW QUESTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

  • What nonprofit transformations can HEARTBEAT be applied to?
    • This method is meant to be used for any type of transformation that involves staff, volunteers, and benefactors of the nonprofit. It’s intentionally general.
  • How do you decide which new changes to introduce and which work should be simplified / deprecated?
    • This question is precisely why the first step exists. The focus on purpose (what’s important) needs to drive what’s not important. The work least aligned with the purpose or least valuable in delivering the purpose should ideally be sacrificed for something new that provides more value / impact toward the purpose.
  • Is it necessary for the five steps to be done collaboratively?
    • Yes. You may think that’s inefficient and you would be right if you were doing something predictable, something that rarely changes (e.g. bookkeeping, mailing letters). That’s NOT the case here. You are doing something unpredictable, ambiguous, and inherently changing. In this scenario, you will need to work together because alone you will not have enough perspective nor information to achieve successful change. You are doing something new. Collaboration will also help with aligning on a shared approach because everyone will have the same information. Lastly is easier to work together in difficult situations encouraging and even having fun together.

WHAT’S NEXT

I would love for you all to provide feedback whether this makes sense, whether you tried it, how it can be improved, etc.

If there is enough interest in HEARTBEAT, I would be willing to write a free ebook for Amazon / iTunes to provide further details and examples.

References:

  1. Imagine Canada 2014 Sector Monitor: http://sectorsource.ca/sites/default/files/resources/ic-research/sector_monitor_v4_n1_2014.pdf 
  2. LEAN Principles
  3. Edward Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Credit for the beautiful heart drawing: http://emilyjhay.tumblr.com/

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