The quality of life in our communities is hugely affected by the work of many, many small groups of people who give their time to make something better.

Over time, they attract community resources – volunteers, donations, gifts in kind, free use of community space. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the goal of our efforts to attract all those resources is the direct impact we intend to have in the community. 

Building strength for your organization is a means to community impact, not a goal in itself. Nobody ever started an organization in order to have a stronger organization.

The good news is that your organization can be more accountable for its community impact without spending a cent. You just have to thoughtfully, as a group, answer seven questions. 

Question 1: What is our shared vision of the “better community” we are trying to create?
If you can’t describe what your community looks like when it is “better”, or can’t agree, then creating that vision is critical. How can you take a single step towards your dream without knowing the destination?

Question 2: How would people who have never heard of us see our community as better because of what we have been doing?
Think about the secondary effects. Perhaps your group worked for better lighting and safe streets, and now you see many more people strolling about each evening.

Question 3: How well have we identified and addressed conditions for success in our community?
Needs just continue to grow, way beyond our ability to serve them, if we don’t address what conditions must change to reduce those needs and enable progress towards our vision. Conditions are often complex and interrelated—so identifying the conditions can be a wonderful opening for new collaborations and partnering.

Question 4: How do we know that all our efforts have been planned and carried out in a way that maximizes progress towards our idea of a better community?
Set and stick to priorities, or personal agendas, pet projects and well meaning but misguided efforts may greatly reduce the resources (especially time) available for what matters.

Question 5: How well did we communicate our plans and our actual results as well as resources to supporters and potential supporters?
A community impact or strategic plan is your best accountability document. Tell your community up-front what you hope to achieve, as well as explaining what happened in the past. They just might get interested in your plans and want to help!

Question 6: How well are we as a group and as individuals modelling the ethical values we want in our community?
When you described that better community, you almost certainly used terms such as respectful, inclusive and healthy. Do you treat each other and your staff, partners, clients, suppliers, etc., as you want to see everyone in the community treating each other?

Question 7: How well are we collaborating with others working towards similar goals to leverage all our efforts on behalf of our community?
One person or group can be the catalyst for change, but it takes many people to truly make your community better. We are all inter-dependent, so there is no point acting as if we are alone.

Act on the answers
If you are like every other group I’ve ever seen, you weren’t happy with some of your answers. It will take some work to make sure you are much happier as you revisit these questions each year.

These questions can be re-worded many ways, and customized to the language and culture of any group.

But these are not the only questions we can ask. What questions would you add? Please share the powerful questions you use to help groups think through their accountability for community impact, and your stories of what happened after such questions were asked.

Jane Garthson is a consultant specializing in governance and ethics. She is a graduate of Creating the Future’s immersion course, co-facilitator of our monthly #NPCons twitter chat to help consultants reach their highest potential as change agents in their communities. Connect with Jane at the Garthson Leadership Centre.

One of the most important skills of any changemaker is the ability to listen.

But what are we actually listening for? And what should we be doing with what we hear?

This Tuesday, May 14, Creating the Future will host a Flash Class webinar, “High Potential Listening.” And after the class is over, this post will be the place for asking questions, sharing aha’s, and digging deeper into what you learned.

High Potential Listening
Everyone talks about the power of listening. If you’ve taken a sales or marketing class, or even a social work class, you are familiar with terms like “Active listening” and “Reflective listening.”

High potential listening is not about any of that. Instead, it is about helping people discover their own inner wisdom – wisdom they didn’t even know they had. It is about creating an environment to help people transform fear and scarcity into possibility and potential.

High potential listening helps to explain why people who ask for advice often argue with the advice we give them – or simply fail to do what we suggest.

It is about reframing what we hear, to respond in ways that bring out the best in those around us. It is about transforming people’s frustrations and problems into motivating outcomes, by listening for what is possible – hearing the powerful clues they are sharing about their dreams and values and strengths… clues we fail to see when we are focused on what’s not working.

If you haven’t already registered, it isn’t too late – and at $9.99, you can’t beat the price. Info is at the link here.

We hope to see you there!

• were more deeply engaged in your organization’s work
• had all the information they needed AND read it / understood it each month
• had critical documents such as bylaws at their fingertips (without having to haul around a 3-inch-thick policy binder).
• knew each other as people (rather than as “Bob – that guy who never says much – I think he’s an accountant. Or a stockbroker…”)

This Tuesday, April 30, 2013 Creating the Future will host a Flash Class webinar, “Using FREE Technology to Engage Your Board.” And after the class is over, this post will be the place for asking questions, sharing aha’s, and digging deeper into what you learned.

If you haven’t already registered, it isn’t too late – and at $9.99, you can’t beat the price. Info is at the link here.

We hope to see you there!

True confession time: the members of Creating the Future’s board of directors love our board. We lament when meetings are over. In fact, long ago when our meetings were only 90 minutes long, our board requested that we meet for 2 hours – yes, they wanted a LONGER meeting, not a shorter one!

Now that our board is meeting live online, you can not only see this for yourself – you can learn simple things your own board can do to energize, engage – and to actually enjoy your board meetings! (To watch our meetings live, or to watch the recordings after the fact, subscribe to our Walking the Talk blog.)

Here are just a few of the things you’ll experience at Creating the Future’s board meetings:

We talk about what matters
One thing you will notice when you watch our meetings or look at our agenda is that any report of something that happened in the past is NOT part of our discussion – because after all, we don’t have control over the past, so why take most of our meeting talking about it?! The board does indeed review the financials and the minutes and the status reports, but they do that as part of their work before the meeting, rather than waste our precious time together doing what each of us can do on our own. 

And to ensure we have even more time to talk about what matters, we use a Consent Agenda. 

Then at our meeting, we talk about things we DO have control over – the future we intend to create, for the organization and most importantly, for the world. We plan. We spend as long as it takes to get to the heart of the things that matter most.

By making those important discussions the reason for our being together, we assume the conversation will matter, and we make it so.

We Feel Prepared
When Creating the Future board members receive their agenda packet, they receive an agenda that fully prepares them for each item. Links to prior discussions. Links to blog posts or videos as background. And a list of expectations for the discussion – why we are discussing that item, and what outcome we need to arrive at.  (You can see a sample of our agenda at this link.)

As someone joked at one of our recent meetings, you would have to work really hard to arrive unprepared for our meetings.

We Know Each Other
Lastly, when you watch our board meetings, you will immediately see that this is a group that knows each other and likes each other.  Whether someone is new to the board or has been here for years, they immediately feel comfortable and appreciated.

And just like making time for deep conversation, with a board spread across 2 continents, 3 countries and a roaming target of time zones, our knowing and appreciating each other is no accident. In fact, we spend perhaps a full 1/4 of our time together getting to know each other. We begin each meeting by sharing something awesome that happened since we last met. We end each meeting (and actually, each discussion item) with reflection.

Why would we take so much of our precious time getting to know each other? It’s simple: people can move mountains and conquer the world if they know each other, like each other, respect each other, enjoy each other, value each other and want to spend time together. We have a board that can’t wait for its next meeting, the minute the last one is over. Imagine what your board could do if they felt that way about each other!

Give It a Try!
One of the many reasons our board’s meetings are live online for anyone to watch and be part of is that we hope you will find things you want to try for your own board. When you watch our meetings, what ideas do you take away for your own board? What have you tried? We hope you will let us know!

You’ll find more tips for energizing your board at this month’s Flash Class, Using Free Technology to Energize Your Board (a NON-Techie’s Guide). We are really looking forward to this session!

Photo Credit: I LOVE this image by Sean McGrath, via wikimedia commons. It was originally posted to Flickr by seanmcgrath at http://flickr.com/photos/52798669@N00/3643075893. It was reviewed on 19 July 2010 by the FlickreviewR robot and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

In plain English, the word “mission” doesn’t mean “something we do forever.” A mission is either accomplished or impossible. We either get the job done, or we go home.

Which means the most powerful question any change effort can ask is, “If we intend to accomplish our mission and actually change conditions in our communities, what should we be doing, and in what order?”

How to Prioritize Our Programs
That is the question we are facing right now at Creating the Future, as we fully intend to accomplish our mission within 10 years of having all our programs in place.

What we intend to accomplish: We intend to see social change-makers skillfully putting their potential into action. We intend to see people aware of what it takes to create the healthy, humane world we all want. And as a result of all that, we intend to see conditions in communities actually making huge leaps forward in changing for the better.

So then, if we intend to accomplish our mission, what should we be doing, and in what order?

Interestingly, our quandary is not about the first half of that question. While we have not yet developed our complete community / global impact plan, we have a pretty strong sense that accomplishing our mission will require programs in these four areas:

• R&D
• Education
• Demonstration
• Convening and Engaging

It is the second half of that question that has stopped our program development efforts. Which programs will we develop first? And that question has raised far more questions than answers!

Which is why Creating the Future’s board will be taking up this issue at its April 8th board meeting.

What Normally Happens
In most organizations, pretty much all programming decisions are left to the staff, as the board assumes the staff understands more about the nuts-and-bolts of programming than the board (which is true).

But prioritizing is one area where board input could be invaluable. Prioritizing has nothing to do with how we execute programs, and everything to do with the “why” question: Which is more important, this priority or that one? And any caring, committed board member has valuable experience and wisdom to share about those types of questions.

The Prioritizing Quandary
Here are some of the issues Creating the Future is facing as we consider which programs to develop first.

What will accomplish the mission?
If our main priority is to accomplish our mission, we will prioritize programs that help ensure that social change efforts quickly reach a tipping point, where effective and skillful means for accomplishing change are the norm among change efforts.

The mission-focused priority would therefore be early adopters – the disparate and not-so-easy-to-find leverage points who can create rapid shifts in norms.

What will be most compassionate?
Prioritizing key leverage points – that small group of widely dispersed individuals who are ready and willing to try something new and transformative – ignores the fact that most people are not ready for that degree of change. More importantly, it ignores the fact that many people doing social change work are struggling – they are struggling to survive, struggling with frustration and perhaps even burnout. For years and perhaps decades, they have been using the systems they have been taught to use, with little result.

The compassionate priority would therefore be to help people who have been beat up by systems, by burnout, by their own frustration. Because people in these circumstances feel they have tried everything and nothing will work, taking the compassionate route may not be the easiest route by any means. People will need to build considerable trust before they will take action, as they long ago moved beyond believing that anything will change.

What will pay the bills?
Then there is the practical reality that if we meet people where they are, with exactly what they think they need, there is a market for that. People want a magic pill – the magic board pill that will energize their board (or get the board off their back). They want the magic money pill that will make all their resource issues go away.

The business priority would therefore be to focus programs where there is a ready market.

What We are Realizing
The more we thought about the pros and cons of each priority, the more we realized that these same questions are at the heart of prioritizing decisions in every organization and enterprise, whether they are openly acknowledging that or not. AND that these often unspoken priorities are what are determining the degree of change any organization or enterprise actually accomplishes.

Let’s use a Food Bank as the counterpoint to Creating the Future’s programs.

Should Creating the Future prioritize educational programs that will lead to the greatest change happening as quickly as possible? (Food Bank: Perhaps “Should we prioritize our resources to focus on ending poverty?”)

If Creating the Future chooses this priority, the relatively small market for our educational programs would need to be identified and nurtured and built. For a small nascent effort like ours, the investment of time and resource in identifying and cultivating that market is a very real concern. But if we DON’T do this, we will never accomplish our mission – we will be doomed to just keep providing educational programs forever.

(A food bank would need to make major changes if they were to prioritize efforts to end poverty over efforts to feed people – both to their internal systems and to building relationships for funding and partnering.)

Should Creating the Future prioritize educational programs for people who are dedicated and caring, but who have been burned by dysfunctional systems? (Food Bank: Perhaps people who have been through job training, only to be stuck in the loop of working poverty – people who have tried everything the system has suggested, and they are still struggling.)

If Creating the Future chooses this priority, we will spend a lot of time building trust – helping people regain their emotional sense of what is possible while simultaneously showing them how small steps create immediate results. This will take time and patience and will have even less potential for revenues. But if we do NOT do this, we will never accomplish our mission.

(A food bank would have to dedicate tremendous resource to outreach and engagement, just to get people to trust the food bank AND trust the thought that things could actually be different for them. Once the outreach and engagement had built trust, the food bank would then need more resource (or time to find partners) for case management, to help people achieve their potential to move beyond where systems have led them…)

Should Creating the Future prioritize educational programs that go where the money is – giving people what they think they need? (Food Bank: People already donate – and funders fund – for feeding hungry people.)

If Creating the Future chooses this priority, we will be absolutely meeting a need that exists, which will also be working from a place of compassion. It will also open the door to talk about the next step of what is possible. But if we do this, we will also be likely to become reliant on the safety of this business model, as we know it is where the money is. We will build all our systems around DOING our mission vs accomplishing it.

(And we know what this has meant for not just food banks, but all organizations that have been doing the same work for years, watching the need increase rather than decrease…)

What to Choose?
It becomes clear that there are no easy answers here. There are only so many hours in a day, and prioritizing one area means de-emphasizing the others. Do we emphasize mission, or do we emphasize money? It is the rare board that talks about the extent to which programming decisions are deeply rooted in this values-rich decision.

Aiming at what is possible is risky in many ways – financially as well as reputationally (what if we aim and fail? No one has tried this before! It’s so big, so scary!).

However, in the global scheme of things, isn’t failing to aim at what is possible more risky – putting our communities at risk of never changing, and then putting them at further risk of losing faith and trust that change is even possible?

Then again, if we have no resources to do our work, how can we accomplish our mission. And…?

This is what Creating the Future’s board will be discussing at our April 8th board meeting. We invite you to join this conversation – not just watch, but join us to ask questions and share your opinions / experience / thoughts. Info on how to participate in that meeting is at this link.

We hope that our discussion generates discussion in your own organization or enterprise – to link your leadership to your results with the most powerful tool leaders have – the power to decide what is the most important thing to do.

Community benefit groups of all kinds – traditional nonprofits and government offices and social enterprises – are all taught the benefits of running social change efforts like a business.

But what happens when we throw all that out the window and run those efforts like… hockey?

In this month’s 3 minute video, Creating the Future board member Gayle Valeriote – a Canadian, of course – talks about what it makes possible when we view community work through the lens of the Canadian national pasttime.

So much of our power to create change lies in the questions we ask.

Questions can encourage and invite what is possible – or they can shut down conversation in an instant.

Questions can bring out the best in everyone in the room, or they can set an entire roomful of people’s teeth on edge.

Questions that inspire, that bring people to their best – those questions are about raw potential. To be about raw potential, they must be open-ended, but not every open-ended question invites raw potential into the room.

Here are 3 questions we have found that do just that. When you are in a meeting that isn’t going well – or if you are in conversation with someone who is closing down, becoming more and more negative – try these questions on and see how they fit.

• What would it make possible if __________________? (Bonus question: What would it take for that bigger possibility to be a reality?)
• What if it turns out those assumptions are not true?
• What’s the worst that can happen? (Bonus question: And what would that worst thing make possible?)

The next time you are in a meeting, and you feel the lump in your throat, warning you that fear has taken over the room, try these questions, and see what happens.

And please, add your own Questions that Change Everything to the list in the comments!

Ask people what power they have to change the world, and the answer is almost always, “Me? I’m just one person – and not an important person at that…”

At the end of February, a group of those average, ordinary people gathered to learn together about creating change “from the middle.” These were not leaders by title or position – on the contrary, some of those in attendance are embedded so deeply within a bureaucratic system, that they identify themselves simply by their level in the system. “As a 2, I only have so much authority…”

And yet, upon their return to their everyday lives, here is what they found:

I met with my new supervisor today. As she was sharing her frustration with the departments being in silos, I asked what it would make possible if that wasn’t true. Her whole tone changed!

and this…

I thought it would be difficult – that it would take some work to ‘position’ conversations, especially since I’m not a decision-maker at the organization. But it’s just fallen in my lap. It’s easy to see that “What would X make possible?” is a much more unifying line of discussion than “That’s wrong and silly and here’s why!

When we see ourselves as having no power, we have no power. When we are taught that power comes with the bequeathed authority of management levels – whether that lesson comes from Management School or from the school of hard knocks – then we give away our power before we even see we have any.

But when instead we see the power each of us has to create more effective, productive, creative conversations – conversations that change everything for everyone involved – we realize that every single conversation holds the potential to create ripples of change.  When we change the questions we ask and the way we listen, and others learn by our example and change their own questions and ways of listening, we are changing the world simply by (yes, we’re really going to say it) BEING the change we want to see!

Some more re-entry thoughts…

For me, it was about understanding the part I can play in the whole process…defined not by a job description or the expectations of others, but by listening to what others are really saying, and then asking questions around shared values. This can happen anywhere, at any time, with any conversation.

and

What stood out for me is that anyone can listen. Anyone can ask questions that inspire. As I move into my new position, I am already asking simple questions about what is possible.

and

Being able to reframe problems to outcomes, and conflicts to values gives me a way to figure out what the outcome is I am looking for and what values I have around that problem. This allows me to step back from what I think might be the only solution and see a variety of ways I might accomplish the outcome.

These are everyday people, doing everyday work in everyday organizations – small grass roots groups and huge, layered government bureaucracies. Through their eyes, it becomes clear – we can choose to see ourselves as powerless, or we can choose to see the power each of us has to change a conversation, and another conversation, and another. 

We can choose to see ourselves as powerless, or we can choose to see that every interaction with another person holds the seeds to creating a different future from our past.

We can lead from wherever we are if we invite others to inspire and build together.  “What could we accomplish together that none of us can accomplish on our own?”

We can choose to see ourselves as powerless, or like the six people who gathered here last month, we can choose to see the raw potential in every conversation – the power to change how we see things, to be the future we want to see, right here now.

Immense gratitude to Nancy Iannone, Beth Matthias-Loghry, Karen Smith, Timalee Nevels, Kendra Davey and Erin Tierney, for contributing not only to this article, but to the wisdom in the room.

At its August 2012 board meeting, the board of Creating the Future therefore discussed the talk it wants to walk. The question posed to the board was this one:

“What conditions – including values and beliefs – need to be present in others, if Creating the Future is to accomplish its mission?”

Here is some of what board members shared:

• Basic fundamental needs would need to be met – health, community infrastructure, education – and we would all need to value that.
• People would need to value a sense of belonging, strong relationships
• People would need to value communication and information sharing – sharing rather than hoarding knowledge
• Respect and acceptance that we are all equal and contributing something of value
• People would need to value critical thinking
• People would need to value and appreciate other’s ideas. A community of trust, honoring different ways of seeing things
• “My success is our success, and our success is my success.”
• People would need to live in gratitude and gratefulness
• People would need to remain open to possibilities.
• People would need to value mutual respect, compassion, and a core belief that we can accomplish more together than any one of us can on our own.
• People would need to “believe in our collective power to live well, effect change, honor the past and create the life we want for everyone.”
• People would need to value taking more time to reflect and honor the process of slowing down & thinking
  

After brainstorming this list, the board discussed the fact that this was not only a list of conditions the organization would seek to create outside in the world; it was also the checklist for the board’s own decision making.

To be the change we want to see in the world – a world where all beings live well, individually and collectively – we will do everything in our power to ensure every action we take as an organization walks the talk of the values we want to see in others.  These will be the touchstones for our own decisions, the starting point and ending point for every action we undertake.

Which leads to this question for your own work:

What values and assumptions do you want to see in others, to bring your own vision to fruition? And what will you do to ensure you are walking that talk yourself?

The planning framework we use at Creating the Future turns most other planning frameworks inside out.

Instead of beginning with today and moving forward to create goals (planning in reactive mode, responding to today’s issues), we instead begin at the future we want, tethering our plans to that future, and reverse engineering back to today. That back-casting thought framework creates a critical path based on cause-and-effect, paving a solid path of conducive conditions that will lead to the future we all wantt.

The power of that causality-driven planning (vs. idea-driven planning) is discussed in numerous articles and books and videos, including this TEDx talk.

Whenever or wherever this framework is taught, one of the most commonly asked questions is about the use of data – the environmental scans and SWOT analyses and needs assessments and other research that is typically done prior to planning.   When we tether a plan to the future, rather than reacting to the present, where is the place for all that data in such a plan?

We hope this short video helps answer that question for you. And we’d love to know what your experience has been with this approach!