According to our clients, one of The IllumiLab’s greatest skills is meeting management. However, there’s nothing particularly innovative or creative about how we facilitate meetings. I think it’s safe to say that our meetings: Set and accomplish objectives, Have and adhere to agendas, Start and end on time, End with a recap of what was[…]
Culture Eats . . . Everything If you want to hear the most generic, meaningless string of buzzwords ever, ask a leader to describe their organization’s culture to a funder, potential partner, or employment candidate. Ok, maybe that’s a cynical over-generalization. Or maybe it’s not. It is legitimately difficult to identify and describe an organization’s[…]
Nonprofit professionals are do-ers. We are fixers. Heck, we build planes while we fly them, right? Believe it or not, these penchants for action and for fixing can actually interfere with sound problem solving, data-informed decision-making, and continuous improvement. In our rush to make changes and improvements, we skip important steps that shortchange our understanding[…]
In my last two posts, I have been exploring how to articulate and align what I see as the four elements of a nonprofit organization’s strategy: Why: Vision statements often express an organization’s “why.” It describes why you exist and do the work you do. This is the change or result you seek. What: A[…]
In my last post, I compared four elements of your organization’s identity and strategy to four tires on a car. The tires must be equally and properly inflated, pointing in the same direction, and with enough tread to grip the road if you expect them to get you to your destination. In this post, I’ll[…]
Alignment Issues Someone once told me that one way to know if your car is out of alignment is to take your hands off the wheel on a flat, straight (and empty) stretch of road and see if the car slowly glides straight ahead or if it pulls to one side. If your car is[…]
In our last post, we highlighted the importance of recognizing the significance and impact of change efforts and preparing our teams for change. This post is about how to sustain changes to make lasting improvements. It is springtime, which means the lessons I have learned from nature, many of which I learned the hard way[…]
The only constant is change, so they say. Nonprofits are constantly adapting to changing needs, demands, and circumstances. We react, adapt, pivot, and make do. It can be exhausting and unsettling. Change is so common and constant that we often fail to see it at all, much less recognize that it is something that needs[…]
Analysis paralysis. Navel-gazing. Beating a dead horse. Talking in circles. Spinning our wheels. Do any of these describe how decision-making feels in your organization? A client recently lamented to me that, in the face of an enormous strategic decision, her organization’s board was talking around the issue repeatedly, never making any progress toward clarity much[…]
This is our third and final post in this series. We believe outcome statements should be meaningful, measurable, and manageable, and we recommend that organizations evaluate their outcomes against those criteria in that order, because each serves as a more narrow filter than the one before. The universe of meaningful outcomes is big, complex, abstract,[…]