What is your social purpose?

I believe that every business, every organization must prove that it represents synergy.

Every organization takes three resources from the society, the communities it serves. Every organization absorbs land meaning, when you occupy a space, a footprint on the ground or an office in a tower, no one else can use it.

The same goes for human resources – when they are working or volunteering for you, they are taken from other enterprises, family life, and more. When organizations pull capital from the community, it is no longer available for other investment or spending options.

Organizations process those resources to produce products and services. Here is the first evidence that the organization is accomplishing something.

Sales and advertising efforts generate output, the point when the customer takes the products or services. This often means revenue to the organization. The output stage often defines success to people in organizations.

Yet, the return of customers depends on outcome, the realization by the consumer that the products and services actually made their lives better. If an organization does not generate an accumulative outcome that exceeds the cost of the inputs of land, labor and capital, the organization will collapse and die.

The highest level of planning, strategic planning, deals with outcomes. Where are the needs in the world, the US, your state, the communities you serve that are not being met? There are needs out there. If your organization can identify a need and make a difference, and it made sense based on what you already do well, shouldn’t you look at it carefully?

Analyze the broad market place on a regular basis, not just your niche but broader. Prove your worth by producing outcomes that benefit the communities you serve.

Boards Bury Visioning in Concrete

We have attracted good people to be on credit union and nonprofit Boards. They are almost all left-brain dominant who like to do concrete things like solving problems; they prefer not to have free-flowing discussion about intangible things, such as vision statements.

Therefore, in large measure, our leadership boards remain involved in management-level planning and decision-making. First, let’s understand about our two brains. Actually, two parts of our brains. We have a right-hemisphere that is simultaneous, and a left-hemisphere that is sequential. Daniel Pink suggests we see it this way, “the right is the picture, and the left is the thousand words.” We all use both hemispheres all the time, yet one side dominates how we think and act.

Here are observations and facts to consider:

• The majority of humans are left-brain dominant. That’s been good for much of human history, helping humans adapt to life on earth through the rigors of science, the industrial revolution, and pyramidal organizational structures.
  Boards of nonprofits are more left-brained than the average population. Maybe it’s because in the early days, Boards did all the work, getting satisfaction from completing taks.
• Left-brain dominant directors (and managers) prefer to work with familiar problems and solve them. Board agendas bring such decisions to the board. Those decisions keep out the strategic and visionary discussions that may keep their organizations relevant: Relevance = survival.
• Boards are accustomed to examining monthly, questioning recent activities, and making management-like decisions because many of them are managers in their vocations. Making decisions on concrete issues is intrinsically satisfying to left-brained dominant folks.
• Discussing issues with no immediate and concrete answers frustrate left-brain dominant people, and people naturally avoid frustration.
  Strategic thinking is more a right-brain activity. Since right-brain activities are random, unplanned, scattered, artistic, creative, and often off-the-wall, they don’t quite fit the traditional Board agenda.

You get the idea. Read Daniel H. Pink’s, 2005 book, A Whole New Mind. He makes the case that we’re passing into an era in human history that favors right-brained skills. [ buy the book here ]

Restructure Board activities and agenda to focus on strategic and big-picture issues. Recruit directors and more managers with right-brain tendencies and skills.

Get creative or perish. If you don’t believe perishing is a real possibility, you’re not seeing the long-term picture, and I can’t fit in the thousand words here.