Strategic Planning – Board Input Survey

If any of you brave hearts are about to embark upon your next cycle of strategic planning, I share with you, below, a Board Input Survey we co-created with the help of our strategic planning consultant, Michela Perrone of MMP Associates. The survey worked extremely well and helped us all get clear, real, and focused on exactly what we need to do over the next 3 years.

Several features of the survey, and the process itself, contributed to some very honest feedback. It helped distill the ensuing discussion down to the very essence of our purpose and mission.

The Likert scale is unique and captures movement across all attributes of the organization. The open ended quesitons encouraged thoughtful feedback. The completed surveys were submitted directly to the consultant, Dr. Perrone, who prepared a general summary in her own words of the results, without individual attribution. And the outcome was a concise strategic plan across four distinct “Critical Areas of Engagement” that captured the very essense of our work.

Click “Read more” for the entire text of the Board Input Survey.

Design Thinking for Social Innovation - Post # 3

This is the last post on an article entitled Design Thinking for Social Innovation by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, which appears in the current (Winter 2010) issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

My primary take away from the article is this: Always prototype an initiative to solicit feedback from the constituents you seek to serve. Rely on local expertise to uncover local solutions that work, then help scale up the solutions. This bottom up design model insures that you are using your constituents’ very best ideas to help design a lasting solution to meet their actual (not perceived) needs.

As a foundation leader, I see opportunities for applying design thinking to strategic plan initiatives. The design thinking described in this article has been codified by IDEO, a global innovation and design firm, into the “Human Centered Design Toolkit.” It is available as a free download from www.hcdtoolkit.com.

Design Thinking for Social Innovation – Post # 2

This is the second post on an article entitled Design Thinking for Social Innovation by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, which appears in the current (Winter 2010) issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In design thinking, inspiration is the first step of the process. It embraces the problem or opportunity that motivates people to take action. What struck me most about this phase of design thinking was the authors’ statement that focus groups and surveys rarely yield important insights because all they do is collect data on what people want. Rather, the authors suggest a better starting point – go out into the target area and observe the actual experiences of your constituents. Observe how they move through their day and improvise their lives. Get out there, do “homestays,” and shadow locals at their jobs and in their homes. By becoming embedded in the lives of the people for whom you are designing, you have a much better chance of success.

Ideation is step two. The authors suggest a process of idea development that discourages the “devil’s advocate” and encourages vocalization of many ideas, among which the best simply rise to the top. The authors quote Linus Pauling, a two time Nobel Prize winner, who said “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.” With a diverse group of people with multidisciplinary training, a strong and varied base of ideas can emerge.

Finally, implementation can occur. At the core of implementation is prototyping your designed solution. Testing, iterating, and refining.

Design Thinking for Social Innovation - Post # 1

This past year I read Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind.” Pink makes a very compelling argument that success in the coming decades depends on a work force that is trained in both left brain and right brain thinking. In particular, he highlights the need for design thinking. Jobs that can be reduced to a formula, mechanized, or shipped overseas are already gone from our economy. But design thinking will always be in demand, no matter what the business or industry. When I realized what he was saying, I immediately gave a copy of the book to my 17 year old daughter and 19 year old son, hoping it would sway them to incorporate some “design” elements in their college or post graduate education.

In the current issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, an article entitled Design Thinking for Social Innovation by Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt brings the very same “design thinking” approach to large and complex social problems.

The authors describe design thinking as an integration of both our (right brained) ability to be intuitive and to recognize patterns, and our (left brained) ability to be rational and analytical. It describes design thinking as a process that goes through three spaces, inspiration (the problem), ideation (the process of generating, developing and testing ideas), and implementation (the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives). And movement through the three spaces is never linear. The build in feedback causes looping and reiteration. But the process, while chaotic, produces very effective results.