Breakthrough Thinking for Nonprofit Organizations : Creative Strategies for Extraordinary Results (Jossey Bass Nonprofit & Public Management Series)

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Summary: For everyone connected with a noprofit
Review: Good performance is no longer enough for nonprofits; nonprofits must set and achieve breakthrough goals. Managers and board members need to think in new and creative ways about how they define and meet the challenges they face and the strategies and techniques required to achieve extraordinary performance in fundraising, service delivery and overall results. Almost all nonprofits are affected to some extent by nine change drivers. There are five internal change drivers: organizations need a new mission or vision or they will run out of steam; the speed of business requires more decisions made faster; rising costs require new ways to deliver service from a distance; high profile service failure may require drastic measures such as clearing out top management to win back public confidence; new technology may make a nonprofit redundant or may offer opportunities to improve ways of doing business. There are also four external drivers of change: changes in public perception may result in being dropped from people's consciousness or require 24/7 availability; rapid public awareness of disasters quickly changes priorities; competition for funds has increased as distinctions between nonprofits, the public sector and the private sector has blurred; technology change can make old solutions redundant. Nonprofits that fail to answer two fundamental questions: where do we want to go? and how do we get there? may find themselves wandering in a fog, not knowing how they got into their current situation and wondering what is the right way to go. The decision to go for breakthrough is a strategic one involving risk and asking questions such as 'what is the worst thing that can happen if breakthrough goes wrong?' and 'how likely is it that the worst thing will happen?' and 'what can we do to minimize the risk of the worst thing happening?' and 'should we have a Plan B to cope with problems?' After appraising the risks and challenges and adopting a strategy you still need to decide on the approach required to encourage the people and innovation needed and the leadership required. Even then you need to ask 'to what extent do the improvements and changes made match up to what is needed?'

Once an organization has decided to transform its performance to have an impact on the need/performance gap or to achieve its potential, plotting the position on a life cycle chart can be very helpful. Organizations decide to change at various points in their life cycle and for different reasons. The challenge with the most common change point - just past the peak - is that the organization has to break out of its comfort zones and one way is to think about a dramatically improved level of performance. To drive that change a vision of the new performance level has to be agreed together with positive and negative drivers to provide pleasure and avoid pain. Two words have proved exceptionally useful in setting new goals - kaizen and horshin - because they describe not only the nature of the goals but the change process. Kaizen is slow, incremental change that leads, over time to significant improvement in performance. After the second world war Japan applied kaizen to a whole range of activities, including their car industry by setting a long-term world class performance goal and breaking it down into small, achievable chunks. Horshin is about sudden, exponential, discontinuous and radical change that leads to dramatically improved performance in a relatively short period of time. This process resulted in Sony's Walkman becoming one of the most widely used personal electronic devices on the planet. It was used by the National Trust in raising $7.5 in 200 days to save Mt. Snowdon in Wales for public use. In practice most organizations need a mixture of both kaizen and horshin as some areas of work need the stability and methodical progress of kaizen while others need the drive, transformation and vision implicit in horshin. An organization could have ten goals as part of a three-year strategic plan of which six might be kaizen and four horshin. Balance is important as you cannot transform everything overnight and you need to focus and emphasize a small number of key areas to transform quickly.

Engaging a horshin goal can be very stimulating such as Kennedy's "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth" or Fords " My vision is to build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be at so low a price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one". Many nonprofits build on Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" to express mission as an overarching, simple, concrete horshin goal while others are more specific such as "To become a world-class center for research of childhood diseases and to radically reduce their incidence." To achieve breakthrough, language is important as it helps people to shift into a different mindset, distinguish breakthrough goals from ordinary goals and to think creatively about 'how to' as well as 'what'.

The remaining eight chapters of 'Breakthrough Thinking for Nonprofit Organizations' deal with unlocking potential, releasing creativity, creating a smart organization, mapping the possibilities, balancing creativity and innovation, challenging mind sets, driving change and working in a breakthrough organization. It is difficult to imagine than anyone connected with a nonprofit could not profit from this book.

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Summary: A Great Book to help with Change
Review: I heard one of the authors speak at a Public Broadcasting Service conference a couple of months ago and was excited enough to buy the book. This has proved really helpful to me as a development professional trying to change the way the people here at my college think about their potential. It offered me some really powerful and simple frameworks to analyze our current work, to establish what a breakthrough might be, and finally how to implement a change programme.

Ther are some useful ideas on how to set up and sustain an innovation programme that are really provocative.

There are also some very useful checklists and a really neat framework for working out your own role in any breakthrough. I found this exceptionally useful in deciding what I could do by myself and what I needed to ask other people to do. Chapter 5 is good on this.

Finally it's good that lots of the examples are from outside the US. That gives the book a wider perspective.

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Summary: This book should be on the best seller list for charities
Review: I wish that two decades ago when I was leading the initiative to establish the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy there had been a book available like Breakthrough Thinking. It would have been helpful in shortening the gestation period. Some of our clients have already benefited from our application of tools described by Ross and Segal, particularly regarding fundraising

Ross/Segal are well qualified to address Breakthrough. The book benefits from their experience in working with charities in the United States, Europe, Canada, Africa and South America through their UK based Management Centre. The book is peppered with examples of the application of the tools they discuss by named organizations on different continents. They even have the refreshing temerity to identify failures.

Ross's presentations in North America have led to recognition of what Europeans and others already know - he is one of a handful of truly outstanding international thinkers and presenters in the charity field. Participant evaluations testify to the fact that Ross's seminars/workshops are both brilliant and entertaining. Neither of these characteristics are lost in the book.

Ross/Segal are very effective at adapting new business management theories and tools for use by the charitable sector. To give but one example, using the metaphor of the "Wild West" they identify the seven character roles required to successfully implement change. Acknowledging this to be a modification of management consultant Rennie Fritchie's five roles they identify the attributes required by the pioneer, wagon train leader, scout, sheriff, homesteader, medicine man or woman, hired gun. This greatly facilitates the reader's understanding and remembering the special requirements for each of these roles to achieve a successful "breakthrough journey." As they point out, "the roles idea is simply a metaphor to help cluster the skills, competencies, knowledge, and qualities needed."

In their preface Ross/Segal state that their mission in writing the book was "to inspire managers and board members in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to believe they can achieve extraordinary results, and to give them practical strategies and techniques for achieving such results."

Ross /Segal do indeed deliver on the mission. They provide us with a toolbox of approaches and ideas to achieve "extraordinary results." As they point out - a toolbox provides a variety of tools for tasks and some are easier to use than others. We get better with our usage of them!

It is difficult to imagine a CEO, Board member, fundraiser, consultant and others desiring significant increased or dramatic new goals for their organization, in whatever area, who would not gain from applying some of the very practical and tested tools described in the book.

My business partner has found mindmapping an invaluable tool for working with groups to help them organize their thinking, let alone her own. One of my many favourites from the book is how to get rid of creativity and innovation killers. Maybe you want to foster greater innovation and creativity in your organization; fight "the tyranny of incrementalism" and establish new breakthrough goals; put in place an organization that makes sustained breakthroughs; ensure that the necessary people are on board to support your breakthrough idea - you will find the tools for each of these and many others in the book.

While Ross/Segal state that they are not seeking to provide, "a step by step, how to guide to achieving breakthrough," it is difficult to imagine there could be a better guide to helping your organization "breakthrough."

Already in high demand as presenters internationally Ross/Segal should expect to have to pack their bags more often as a result of this groundbreaking book.

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Summary: This Imaginative book will change your human toolkit!
Review: Imagine your fundraising abilities as a human toolkit: thoughts, beliefs, skills, experience, creativity, and intelligences. Now imagine that someone offered you a foolproof book to completely enhance your toolkit and revolutionize your thinking by combining the use of your tools in new and unexpected ways to expand your creativity and its results exponentially. Would you buy it for $...?

Bernard Ross and Clare Segal, co-directors of THE MANAGEMENT CENTRE (=MC) in the United Kingdom, offer just such an enhancement in Breakthrough Thinking for Nonprofit Organizations: Creative Strategies for Extraordinary Results (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2002) with their commitment 'to inspire managers and board member managers in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to believe they can achieve extraordinary results, and to give practical strategies and techniques for achieving such results.'

Leonardo da Vinci wrote: 'Small rooms discipline the mind. Large rooms distract it.' Drawing upon their extensive experience in working with nonprofits in the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and South America, Ross and Segal animate their strategies with persuasive examples that not only articulate the process of 're-tooling' outmoded ways of thinking, they also provide working examples of how different organizations have applied these techniques in order to achieve astonishing results. The discipline they teach is the 'small room' eurekas of breakthrough thinking by making learning more creative, more collaborative, and more fun.

Is breakthrough thinking magic? Is it only for gifted individuals? Ross and Segal don't think so: 'The lesson from our experience is that many breakthroughs'even if they are apparently from out in left field'are often the result of simple hard work and simple rules applied consistently and methodically'you need to create a culture and business structure that strongly reinforces innovation as well as creativity.'

This joy of this book is that it outlines in clear, applicable language how different people are creative in different ways, how to stimulate personal and organizational creativity by simply challenging habits, attitudes, environments and work roles, and why innovation plays a crucial role in turning creative thinking into long-term organizational results. Refreshingly, Ross and Segal's practical strategies are easy to understand, enjoyable to read, and actually do work once you give them a try:

· Second Wave Thinking anticipates organizational decay by restructuring resources in advance of predictable future change and the inevitable decline in results

· Kaizen and Horshin Planning helps you to differentiate between programs that will benefit from incremental growth and programs that will support sudden, exponential growth to create new heights of sustainable development

·Mind Tiles allow you to create a radically new concept simply by building on the combination of two existing concepts

· Gardner's Seven Intelligences conceptualizes individual strengths and weaknesses as being related to physical/kinetic, logical/mathematical, spatial/visual, linguistic, creative/musical, emotional/interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences

· The Learning Cycle relates how individuals and organizations go through a common process of reflection, theorizing, planning, and action before change is possible and how each of these different learning styles needs to change in order to accomplish its own breakthrough

· Creative Mindmapping organically links strategies or issues through creative planning that helps isolate new ideas and opportunities for growth

· The Matrix Analysis helps position your organization against key competitors to assess its direction and the potential fate of its programs

· The Ladder of Implication demonstrates how the same information can be interpreted by different mind-sets to reach different conclusions and strategies

· Reframing is a simple and useful technique for taking a negative mind-sets and restructuring their positive attributes and potential

· The Five C's teaches you how to deal with champions, chasers, converts, challengers, and changephobics in the workplace when your organization undergoes transformational change

Not all of these ideas are new and not all of them will apply to any one individual or organization. But if reading this book gives you one breakthrough technique that leads you to that one amazing idea that transforms your job, your organization, or even your life, then your investment will prove immeasurable.

Throughout their presentation, Ross and Segal talk candidly about both their successes and failures. In fact, they differentiate between failing because of poor ideas and failing because of poor performance. They give a number of constructive tips on how to communicate openly within organizations in ways that allows individuals the freedom to disagree without causing personal recrimination.

My favorite tips are their suggestions to hold 'sacred cow barbecues,' during which participants are encouraged to articulate the 'unthinkable thoughts' about an organization's most cherished beliefs which can then be either 'saved or cooked,' and invoking 'champagne rules' for private group discussions on difficult topics so that anyone can feel free to say what they think, personal attacks are discouraged, and nothing is repeated or recorded outside the group's discussion except by agreement.

Nonprofit organizations face the constant challenge of accelerating rates of change, demand for new services, and competition for scarce donor resources. The key for any organization in meeting these challenges it to answer the following questions:

· Do we know what our organization's mission is and where it needs to go in the future?
· Do our programs and our practices measure up to the needs we serve and the resources we expend?
· Are we, both individually and organizationally, as creative and cooperative as we need to be in order to ensure that our planning can achieve breakthrough results?

Only a poor workman blames his tools. In an age of accelerating change and increasing competition for scare resources, true breakthrough results can only be achieved if we look inwardly at our skills and outwardly at our organizations in new and creative ways. You don't have to be an expert to achieve transformational results: you only have to aim higher, think better, and work smarter.

If you are comfortable with your human toolkit, you can write your own book. If not, buy this one.

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Summary: GOOD GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Review: Refreshing perpective about the non profit world. A truly global book. I enjoyed very much!

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Summary: Breakthrough thinking made easy
Review: This is an excellent read - it's a combination of textbook, manual, map and story book. It describes the route to exceptional organisational and personal peformance in a way which makes it possible for all of us.

It's written in a particularly readable style. Each chapter is self-sufficient so it's easy to pick up and put down. Theories are illustrated visually with diagrams and tables, supplemented by case studies drawn from the authors' work around the world. This gives the text a sense of recency and freshness that adds to its accessibility.

Best of all Breakthrough Thinking explodes myths about creativity making it something that we can all achieve. All we have to do is open our minds and just do it.