Cense

Innovation to Impact

Surfacing Your Organization’s Identity

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Have you ever asked questions about your organization’s identity before?

Who are you?

What do you stand for?

What kind of things motivate you to action and direct your attention?

The answers to all of these questions shape what we do in our work. Organizations that have a clear sense of what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for tend to succeed. The reason? These organizations have greater alignment between purpose and strategy. In short: they have an identity.

Our identity — who we think we are — is a powerful guide for our behaviour. So how do we answer this question in our work?

Bulls Eye

A simple starting point for finding what matters and moves you is to use a Bull’s Eye diagram. A Bull’s Eye Diagram illustrates priorities through three layers of importance. All that is needed is a diagram of the ‘target’, sticky notes, and a space to organize the notes. The example below is done using the Mural tool and a pre-set template for ease of use..

A Bull’s Eye diagram can be used with individuals or groups. We often use this for a project when a client is struggling to identify what is both important and necessary for their work.

We also recommend that you use the Bull’s Eye diagram at the start of an engagement.

Once the items from the sticky notes are placed, it’s easier to see themes in the ‘data.’ This approach allows organizations to see what their members think are most important. It is the aggregate of these ideas that shape the culture of an organization and when you know what they are it’s easier to design with them.

With this knowledge in hand your organization can better design a purposeful strategy and make your identity aspirations a reality in practice.

We help organizations to design their culture for success. If you want help using this or other tools like it, contact us.

Using Timelines To Track Activities

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Just as parents will use pencil notches in a wall to track the height of their children as a developmental marker, so too can innovators and evaluators use timelines to help gather and track the development of programs and projects over time.

A timeline is a simple linear visual that gathers activities together that uses time as the variable of distinction.

What makes a timeline useful is that it provides a visual display of temporal relationships between events, activities and outcomes. It makes explicit what we might have in our heads, but are also prone to confusing and forgetting over time.

When to Use Timelines

Timelines are useful in a variety of situations:

  1. Projects with activities that can be organized into a sequence (whether planned or not). They are less useful for projects where there are many activities happening simultaneously.
  2. Projects with a long time horizon.
  3. Projects operating in an environment with many different levels of activities and influences. For example, when there are external factors like policy decisions that have discrete times attached to them and can influence a project’s course, this is a good use of a timeline.
  4. Projects that have a story to tell that involves a beginning, middle, and end.

A timeline can help provide anchors between project activities and events — whether those are policy-related, tied to human (or other) resource use, environmental disruptions, seasons, or cycles. They can help provide hypotheses between causes and consequences or explain mediators.

For example, one non-profit project we worked on had a planned roll-out that was moving along well until their funder abruptly cancelled the program that they relied on. This meant that the six-months after that announcement involved finding new sources of revenue, reductions in staffing, and changes in some activities, yet also persistence in trying to adapt to the situation and still execute the original plan. By showing the data on a timeline it helped explain what happened to project activities, outputs, and outcomes within a certain time period and how that related to the overall project plan.

Examples

Below is an example of a timeline that illustrates distinctive markers along the route. These are clearly defined events that took place on specific dates. The selection of events includes those deemed to be meaningful and significant to the project.

What makes a timeline a powerful tool is that there are many different ways to illustrate events. The example above is a relatively straightforward set of data.

Below is another example that involves much more data and in different forms. This example creates a hybrid of timeline and categorization exercise.

Creating Timelines

There are many templates and tools that can be used to help develop visual graphics. The examples above are from Lucidchart, however, tools like Miro, Mural, SmartDraw, PowerPoint, Google Draw, and many others have templates that can be modified to create useful timelines. These are all simple tools that can be manipulated easily so you’re able to build them as you go.

If you are looking to develop more sophisticated models, we suggest employing a visual communicator or graphic designer to take advantage of the many ways you can represent temporal data.

The result is something that is engaging and can easily be discussed or presented to diverse stakeholders involved in a project who might be able to validate, contribute to, or constructively challenge the arrangements. We find this to be a powerful way to organize our findings, refresh our memories, and recognize all of the activities that go into a project.

Documenting Innovation Development

Lastly, if you are developing an innovation where there is no clear ‘end’ known at the beginning, timelines are useful in telling the story of the project and documenting the different pivots, changes, adaptations, and their consequences. A timeline can be a powerful asset to Developmental Evaluation and a complement to the Living History Method that we often employ in those kinds of evaluations.

A timeline can honour all the work you put into coming up with your final product and can be an engaging way to get people involved in celebrating, documenting, and tracking what you do and create.

We use these all the time and can help you track and evaluate your project. Contact us and let’s talk about timelines, innovation and impact.

Predicting Next Year’s Top Story

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Foresight can involve complex data gathering, sensemaking, and design and also be something as simple as developing the headline for next year’s news.

This simple technique can get your organization started on futures thinking and provide a way to connect the present situation with trends that you are seeing in your industry and the world to strategy and aspirations. This technique gets you to imagine the headlines of the future (what people are writing or saying about your enterprise) and walking back from that or projecting forward to fill in the steps that led you to that outcome.

Setting the Stage

This is an activity that is best done as a group anywhere from 4 to 12 people and can be done in as little as an hour, although it can be done over a longer period of time in single or multiple sessions if you wish to go deeper into the assumptions and models for the future.

It’s important to frame the exercise by choosing whether you want headlines for the organization or a specific project or product. It doesn’t matter who these imaginary headlines are to be written by (e.g., journalists, industry professionals), however, it does help to imagine what context they are to be written (e.g., news media, business press, industry news outlets, professional associations, peers). Make whatever context you pick clear even if it is in multiple contexts.

Next, set a time horizon for the headlines sometime within the next 6 to 12 months.

Lastly, this is often used to frame positive outcomes. However, after you’ve determined what success looks like it is worth considering repeating the exercise at a later date (e.g., one week later) with the converse: focusing on headlines that report failures, disasters, or problems. This can help your team see threats as well as possibilities.

The materials you will need are pieces of paper (preferably sticky notes because they are easily portable and can be re-arranged) and a whiteboard or flipchart/newsprint sheets of paper and markers for a facilitator (who can be external or a member of the team) and the team/participants.

Activity

Individually, have participants brainstorm headlines they imagine for the time horizon you have set. Give them about 5-10 minutes and ask participants to strive for volume — lots of ideas — over quality.

As a group, post together (with stickies) or share the ideas that individuals have generated. This can be done by having individuals post up their sticky notes on a wall and then later organized or by doing successive round-robin reporting where everyone presents a single idea in as many rounds as there are ideas.

We suggest having the group vote on headlines that they like, elicit the strongest reactions (positive or negative), or are the most provocative. Aim for 3-5 headlines. With these headlines explore as a group some of the assumptions that are in place for this headline to come true. The aim is to answer the question: what would have to happen for this to become a real headline?

Why?

This activity helps you set and frame a goal for your organization, project or product. It can help elicit information about what kind of aspirations, assumptions, and ideas that your team has about what you are doing. It will also allow to identify what kind of relationships, resources, or facilitators are needed to get from where you are to where you wish to go over the time horizon you’ve picked.

If you do the negative case headline, this technique can help frame what kind of necessary activities are required for success and where they can possibly go wrong. it will allow you to identify threats and risks associated with what you’re planning to help account for that in your plan.

This simple technique is powerful and can be used in a single session, with multiple units, or as part of a planning exercise and the dividends are great. It’s fun, creative, and informative.

If you want to see more about what this can do, contact us and we’ll gladly help you set up a foresight scan and strategic plan for your project or organization based on this kind of futures thinking.

Simple Systems Scoping

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Systems thinking done broadly allows us to take into consideration the various factors — structures, activities, relationships, interconnections — that can influence our organization, market, and domain of inquiry.

One of the fundamental qualities of systems is that they have boundaries. For example, when we consider an organization as a system we need to place boundaries on that organization such as who to include (e.g., all employees? full-time vs part-time? paid staff vs volunteers? settings or sites? etc..). There is no correct choice, just a useful one. Your boundary choices are to reflect what you are seeking to understand and how you’re seeking to act.

But how do you tell? We share with you a remarkably simple, but powerful way to scope your systems and determine if you have set the right boundaries.

Two Criteria

If you set your boundaries of inclusion in the system and find that you are lost and struggling to identify, map, or monitor the various interconnections, actors, actions, and outcomes within a system because there is too much to focus on then that is a sign you have bounded your system too loosely.

If you’re continuously finding yourself trying to explain what happened in the system by things outside of the boundaries, then you have bounded your system too tightly.

That’s it.

It may take some experimentation to get your boundaries right, however these two criteria can tell you if you’re on the right track or not.

Systems-informed strategy, mapping, and evaluation can be complicated, but understanding the boundaries does not have to be. This simple strategy has consistently allowed organizations to focus on what matters and avoid getting lost. The key is to make sure you have the ‘just right’ amount of detail and focus to allow you to make a meaningful sense of things and guide your action.

If you want help implementing a systems strategy for innovation and change in your organization or network, contact us.

Acting in Complex Times

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The complexities and complications of circumstances tied to the COVID-19 pandemic represent a hyper-exaggerated version of situations organizations find themselves in moments of disruption due to economic, social, and technological shifts. It is a moment of innovation.

What makes the current situation distinct is that the issues are global. Usually we have safe refuge in a new market, region, or setting, but now we don’t. How can we develop or implement strategy when things are continually changing for us and our partners, suppliers, and customers or clients?

Smallest Visible Systems (SVS)

Systems thinking helps us to understand how things are connected and structured, while complexity science can help us appreciate the challenges associated with how to understand the nature of the problems that present themselves. What both can teach us is that in times that are truly unprecedented in their complexity and scope it can be difficult to know what to do and how to act.

The temptation with systems approaches to strategy is to look at the whole system, but that is dependent upon whether we can see the boundaries of the system to help us understand the range of activities we need to consider in developing a model to guide us.

  1. Coherence is what we are seeking. In order to achieve coherence, we need to take some kind of action (often called a probe) and then see what that does. This helps us to examine how the system is behaving and how an action generates reactions and where (or whether) coherence forms. Coherence is basically a way of saying that things go together with some manner of alignment where
  2. Seeing or creating coherence is about meaning and meaning is context-dependent. What is meaningful for us depends on our circumstances, but it also provides us with a means to focus our attention amid the various signals we’re getting. Various patterns, relationships, interconnections and signals that we see that align together and create something meaningful are coherent.
  3. Coherence also provides us with a language to communicate. When you observe coherence it begins to create a language you can use to communicate to others about what you’re seeing. When we look at what is happening at a societal level, its difficult to find what coherent narratives are actionable. At a smaller level, we might find them and this allows us to communicate more fully with others and this will allow us to scale and grow our learning.

This is the smallest visible system (SVS) in which you can make a difference. Once you can act wisely on this system, you can expand the boundaries and scope to work larger.

Acting on Systems

What this means for action is this:

  1. Pay attention to what is going on around you. Ask yourself: what is important and meaningful to me?
  2. Be systematic, but not rigid, in how you pay attention. This could mean looking at sales numbers, social trends, meeting minutes and observations from everyday life. If you’re working in teams, ask people about what they are paying attention to and what has meaning for them. What things are they organizing their work or life around? Reflective journaling can help, too. This is data.
  3. Gather the meaning. Bring together those things that offer some coherence to see how they make sense for what you are doing, seeking to become, or what you wish to accomplish. This is a social process called sensemaking. By guiding yourself through the data it’s possible to see patterns and what is called emergent properties — new forms of order arising from what might seem unordered.
  4. Start to act on this new coherence narrative and then repeat the cycle from step 1.

This will help you to determine what is useful and not useful for you in whatever context you are operating in. It’s a simple, but powerful means to start the journey toward a greater understanding of your present situation and help you see how and where you can act, whether that is in a time of massive upheaval or something merely disruptive.

Keep safe and know there’s more that you can do than you realise.

If you need help in setting this process up, implementing it, and making sense of it all, reach out. This is what we do.