How top leaders are preparing for the future…
In exactly two weeks’ time I’ll be hosting the tenth in a series of live conversations with some of my favourite leaders in the sector.
So far, each conversation has been inspirational, educational, and intriguing, in equal measure. And from them all, I’ve been trying to understand one thing: how they think charities need to change.
The next session will feature some fascinating insights and examples from my two guests, the CEOs of Crisis and Magic Breakfast (Matt Downie and Lindsey MacDonald) so if you’ve not yet registered, do it now and join us.
But from the conversations I’ve already had, there’s a consistent story emerging.
It begins with a growing recognition of the need to get serious about tackling the “systems” that create and exacerbate the problems our charities care about.
It’s not a new idea. In one conversation, both Polly Neate and Kate Lee pointed out that the tension between whether a charity should focus on supporting people in crisis or preventing them getting to that situation in the first place, is something that’s been around for as long as they’d both been in the sector.
But as others observed, for most of that time, the upstream prevention part has generally been looked at as “nice to have” or “side-of-the-desk” stuff, while service delivery took centre stage.
Which was fine when the money was there. When government grants and contracts more than covered costs. When philanthropy and middle-class wealth was racing ahead and fundraising was going through what now looks to have been something of a golden era.
But that’s changed – quite dramatically for many organisations.
Need is growing, costs are growing, funding is tighter than ever. Which probably explains the urgency with which leaders are now looking at how we seriously reduce need, rather than futilely trying to meet its near-exponential growth.
But what they’re finding is that, if you’re really serious about putting prevention or system change at the centre of your thinking, there are some big consequences.
In my conversation with her and Julie Bentley, Emma Revie spoke about the implications it has for strategy.
As she explained, if her charity, Trussell, simply wanted to do a bigger, better job as a food bank, its strategy would probably have been about growing, reaching more people, increasing their efficiency, trying to reduce the stigma associated with using its service. The “standard strategy” stuff.
But Trussell’s vision is for a UK without the need for food banks, not for them to become slicker, more acceptable, increasingly baked into the institutional fabric of society. They want to solve food poverty, not serve it.
That meant a fundamentally different approach to developing and articulating their strategy – one they’ve essentially had to invent for themselves, as many others are having to do.
In my very first conversation with Mike Adamson and Juliet Bouverie, we described this approach as starting with the question: “what would need to be true?”
Later in the series, in our conversation with Paul Farmer, Ndidi Okezie offered an even better version of the same provocation, demanding to know: “what would it actually take to achieve your vision?”
Many of my guests have worked through their own answers to that question, and three consistent themes have emerged.
The first is collaboration. System change is a team sport. Which means things like investing in relationships, building skills for influencing and conflict management, the willingness to put egos and ideologies aside and develop shared agendas, these all become critical competencies for the whole organisation.
The second is empowerment. Your people cannot genuinely collaborate with others unless they’re empowered to make decisions, to take action, to spend time and money where and how they need. So, creating the environment, the confidence, structures and guardrails, for this to happen in a way that manages risk, is equally essential for success.
And the third is leadership.
The leadership your organisation provides, through innovation, evidence, connecting, convening.
The leadership you develop and enable, especially within and from the communities you serve.
And the leadership you model yourself, as you shape and steward this growing collective with vision, passion and purpose.
Every journey is different, and this is not necessarily all that will follow for your organisation. But most of these things do, eventually, follow, from that choice to get serious about working upstream.
So, if we’re serious about making the world a better place, these are the building-blocks we need to start preparing for the future.