Joan Roberts Consulting

Last week in Toronto I attended a one and half day session hosted by ONN.  The Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) is a network of networks that helps to build communication and coordination amongst nonprofit organizations working for the public benefit in Ontario.

The event was annual province-wide forum for nonprofits in Ontario - "Our Sector, Our Vision". The purpose was to come together to start building a cross-sectoral agenda of priority issues. The agenda will be further developed in upcoming fall regional consultations.

I thoroughly enjoyed the session and am delighted to see progress on a united front. There are so many issues that need co-ordinated action across the non-profit sector and the need for a collective voice in discussions with government. I urge you to get involved. The website is www.ontariononprofitnetwork.ca.

Carol Goar of the Toronto Star wrote an insightful article which you can access at  C:\Users\Joan\Documents\TheStar_com Opinion Many names but not much of a voice.mht.

In her comments to the session, Carol gave some great tips to Non-profits on getting your message out there.

Dos:

• Do show people the difference you are making.
• Let the people you have helped speak.
• Use a news hook to grab the reader's attention.
• Put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
• Connect your mission to the listener.
• Explain why you are dependent on government money and why you relinquish control of your agenda to government ( in return for funding).

• Contact reporters who cover the topic

Don'ts

• Don't rely heavily on statistics.
• Don't use wooly language (jargon and buzzwords).
• Imagine yourself talking to your neighbour.
• Don't assume the internal workings of the NPO sector matter to the audience. They are not issues outsiders care about.
• Don't rely on polls-they have little credibility.
• Don't let setbacks defeat you.

Great advice!

I am ambiguous about sharing with you the book I am reading right now. It’s called Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health Wealth and Happiness, by Richard H Thaler and Cass Sunstein. But I think those of us who serve the public, are not very conscious about the choice architecture we design into the programming and form filling procedures. Nudges can be as much a policy instrument as legislation but are also used by the private sector to nudge our purchasing decisions.

I  was just doing some training with a predominately female workplace.

People sometimes wonder why I am so versatile? Why not just specialize in one aspect of NPO development and then bill myself as a specialist. 

It’s too simple and frankly undermines the breadth of skills that collaboration practitioners need to build effective multi-stakeholder organizations. I wouldn't be modeling what I teach.   Over my wild and wacky career, I have developed the key competencies either through education, training or direct experience. After learning how to train professionally, I translated my knowledge and skills into skills training designed to build skills quickly for the non-profit and government workplace.  As much of my work is focused on collaboratives I market it as such. However I do the same kind of training and consulting with sole organizations. The only real difference is the scale and reduced complexity because of the number of players involved.   

In my first book, Alliances, Coalition and Partnerships, Building Collaborative Organizations,  I presented a model of trans-organizational effectiveness that illustrated that a practitioner had to tend to three streams at the same time- people or trust building processes, power and governance processes and work or management co-ordination processes.  My new book focuses just on one process stream in that model-the power and governance process stream but touches on all the rest because the skillsets are intertwined and interdependent.   You still need to build a good group dynamic and trust if you expect effective governance in a collaborative organization. The same holds true for work or implementation processes.

Recently I attended a session with an American Professor who teaches a program for strategic alliance managers (sort of a private sector counterpart of collaborative practitioner except every partner in the collaborative has an alliance manager) and she reported that the job of strategic alliance manager is now seen as a direct route to the office of CEO.  Managing the complexity of alliances requires a very high level skillset similar to a CEO's task of of managing stakeholders  and shareholders.

I think the same holds true in the non-profit and government sector.  For a practitioner to work in the ambiguous territory outside of their home organization requires all the skills of a manager including project management skills to financial and HR knowledge plus high level change management skills.  And as my new book points out the practitioner needs to hold the skillset for governance too.

So building your collaborative skills is not a waste of time or energy but a direct investment in your career. All the skills and tools needed for collaboration originate from simpler applications in a single organizations.  Getting comfortable with conflict is only going to improve your ability to handle conflict in your workplace as it will in working with a collaborative. Ideally people would not engage in a collaborative unless they were highly comfortable with conflict because much of what a collaborative process does is resolve conflict.  From becoming proficient in managing staff to developing awareness of group dynamics and learning how people adapt to change, to understanding governance and oversight functions, all are necessary to work in the complex territory that demands a collaborative response for effective change to take place.

This was written in December of 2008 but just posted.

• Adaptive to emerging resident’s needs
• Nurture leadership and citizenship
• Outreach to citizens on the margins
• Pilot new policy approaches
• Advocate systemic change
• Shape culturally appropriate services
• Holistic policy through services co-location and continuum of supports

Canadians are engaged in learning about the national governance structure like never before. Opinions of ordinary Canadians are being expressed non-stop and many are deeply disturbed at the overt power struggle underway and the overheated conflict. Yet despite the fighting that looks to be all over the map, there exists clear rules of engagement called parliamentary procedure. These rules have evolved over nine centuries and provide for all kinds of possibilities including the rare form of government in parliamentary democracies- coalition government. The amazing thing about this “so called” crisis is that everyone is playing by the rules.

A lot of the debate is focused on what the rules are and interpretation of the rules. Granted the rules are being stretched to the max as with the situation today with the Governor General agreeing to the suspension of parliament. However, in my work with organizations and collaboratives, the most frequent situation I find is that they are playing without any rules. Often there is so little governance in place that when there is conflict and power struggles, as can happen with any difference of opinion, the parties to the conflict be they board members or collaborative members don’t know what the rules are or have none in place, so that the conflict is managed and resolved.

The rules that guide decision making and guide the resolution of conflict are found in a governance framework not only for governments but for all kinds of organizations. A governance frame work includes things like decision making processes, organizational assignment of powers and authority and guidelines for decision making called policy. I am writing a new book that provides a guide to creating an effective governance framework for collaborative organizations. Difficult issues and power struggles are as inevitable with collaborative organizations as they are with governments. Stay tuned as I talk about the topics of collaboration and governance.