Open to Debate with David Moscrop :

• Change Motivation: Successful change in organizations often requires reaching a crisis point, but it's possible to motivate change earlier by establishing clear thresholds for action and engaging in ongoing discussions about necessary changes.
• Facilitation vs. Consultation: The distinction between facilitation (helping groups define their own goals) and consultation (providing expert advice) is crucial in organizational settings. Effective facilitation fosters collective ownership and accountability among team members.
• Accountability Conversations: Shifting the focus of accountability from past performance (praise or blame) to future decisions can lead to more productive discussions. This approach encourages learning and adaptation rather than defensiveness.
• Navigating Political Landscapes: Nonprofits must navigate complex political environments, adapting their messaging and programming to align with changing political priorities while maintaining their core mission.
• Competition in Nonprofits: Nonprofits often face competition for limited resources, which can lead to a focus on metrics that may not align with their broader mission. Collaboration with other organizations is essential to address complex social issues effectively.
• Mission Evolution: Organizations should be open to evolving their missions in response to changing societal needs, recognizing that permanence in their current form may indicate a failure to adapt

David Moscrop:

Hello, I'm David Moscrop. Welcome to Open to Debate.

The nonprofit sector is massive. According to Statistics Canada, in 2022, the non profit sector accounted for over 8% of GDP, contributing more than $216 billion to the economy. Nonprofits operate in many spaces, but they're essential parts of the healthcare, housing and education systems.

These organizations exist to serve communities and fill essential functions not covered or only partially covered by the state or private market. They're also sometimes in competition with other sectors, or at least in tension with them and with one another. It's complicated stuff.

And when you add changing technologies, trends, economic conditions, and domestic and geopolitical considerations into the mix, well, making a nonprofit work is even trickier. So how do nonprofit organizations work or not?

My guest on this episode of Open2Debate is Brooke Struck, strategy facilitator and founder and CEO of the firm Converge.

Let's start by sorting out what the non profit model is right now. Listeners may not be familiar.
You know, it's easy to take these things for granted, assume everybody knows what we're talking about, but a lot of times they actually don't.

I'm curious how non profits, broadly speaking, operate in Canada. Where do they get their money? Who do they report to? What rules enable them or constrain them?

Brooke Struck:

Yeah, so let's start with where they get their money. And there I refreshed a little bit of background research preparation for our conversation today.

And something that I found really helpful there is breaking down nonprofits into a couple of different groups. So one is like, you know, social and health nonprofits. There you think about people who are supporting local clinics and these kinds of things.

Like that's one group of nonprofits and the bulk of their funding is coming from governments, lots from provincial, some from federal as well, and large institutional donors. That would be, you know, getting, getting a big branch from a company or from a foundation or something like that.

Then a second group of nonprofits is like ones that run sports leagues or like, you know, business associations, these kinds of things. The bulk of the money for them is coming from membership dues. So, so that's the people who are like a member of the network are kind of in this pay to play model.

And then the third category that we can think of is religious organizations and that's primarily coming from individuals.

So for the purposes of today's conversation, what I really want to focus on is that first category of nonprofits that are delivering health and social services in the community.

David Moscrop:

And so does this particular group face any Constraints, or for that matter, do they have any enabling rules that change how they operate compared to others?

I mean, I'm curious how obviously every organization is going to be different, but I suppose the simplest way to put it is, you know, what, what would a day in the life look like? An organization like this?

Brooke Struck:

Right. So there are some constraints in how they're allowed to spend their money and also in how they're allowed to generate money.

So as a nonprofit, you're not supposed to be generating profit. Same thing for charities. And what that means is you're not supposed to be generating anything more than kind of a certain cushion over just your general operating revenue.

If we simplify it down to something like really, really straightforward, the idea is you're not bringing in any more money than you're actually spending to deliver your programming and run your organization. So how does that actually get controlled?

Part of it is through the tax returns that the organizations need to file each year. They need to report to a board. So the board has some governance and oversight role that they need to play there. There are audits that are done periodically.

Those are the kinds of checks and balances to make sure that that practice is being, is being respected. That like, you're not generating this kind of surplus. I'm just kind of like stocking away cash on site.

David Moscrop:

And this is a bit of an elementary question, but I think an important one because there's a lot of confusion. If I were to say what is a nonprofit?

I mean, it's. You've already distinguished them from charities. We know there's different varieties.

But focusing on that first group that you referenced earlier, what do they, what function do they exist to fulfill?

Brooke Struck:

Right. So they are providing certain supports and value propositions. I'm a strategist, so my brain is going to go into the world of strategy.

And so value proposition is the language that I naturally kind of reach for. But like they are creating and delivering a certain kind of value in society for which we don't have a for profit market.

So that might mean that the people who actually need that kind of support, who need the benefits and the value that's being created by those organizations themselves, are not in a position to pay for that sort of service that, you know, the folks, the folks who need it most, are not in a position to also be the buyers.

So this is where you have this kind of separation that pulls open between the people who are benefiting from the operations of the organization and the people who are paying for that to happen in a for profit Context, those two people are the same person. We call them the client in a for profit.

David Moscrop:

Yeah. And so for. Can you do a few. For instances, you don't have to name specific nonprofits, but what might they look like in practice?

Brooke Struck:

For sure. So, you know, some that I can name are like big, you know, big organizations that you think of across the country. So people like the Red Cross, people like the Heart and Stroke foundation, people like Kids Help Phone, these are like large national level nonprofits.

I think actually all three of those are also charities. Right. Charities being a subset of the nonprofit world, they all operate in this kind of model where they are serving people who are not directly paying for the services that they receive.

I want to dig now a little bit into the environment in which they operate, because nonprofits are competing in a sense.

David Moscrop:

So they're competing in a world of scarce resources, including time, investments, energy, attention, money.

Sometimes they compete with one another, sometimes they compete with, with the broader pressures, and sometimes to some extent, even the private sector.

And I'm curious how that competition works, because when you think of nonprofit, you don't necessarily think of cut throughout organizations who are out to maximize their revenue and their impact compared to their competitors.

But there is some level of competition there. So how does the competitive space work in the nonprofit world?

Brooke Struck:

Right. So at its worst, it actually can look not too different from the way that we might think about competition in the for profit sector. Right. This idea that's very much around there is a finite size of PI, and we all need to be elbowing as hard as we can to maximize our share of what's out there.

So that kind of dynamic certainly can find its way into the nonprofit sector. Where for instance, one organization might say, listen, there is this provincial program or this federal program that has this certain fixed budget, and we know that the funding request that we are putting in is competing directly against other funding requests.

We want to make sure that our request is successful, and we want to make sure that we are getting as much of that funding, kind of allocated funding as we can get. So that's one way in which this kind of plays out.

And that for me, often in my experience in working with nonprofits, that kind of thing often emerges when we get really bogged down in the weeds and we start to conflate the actions that we're taking with the big objective that we're looking to move forward. And this is something that in the health and social services sector, I think is really, it's really important to think about, because the kinds of Outcomes that are at issue there.

When we want to improve population health, when we want to help vulnerable communities with certain social barriers basic to full participation in our societies and our economies, these kinds of things, those are really, really complex issues.

And so it tends to be the case that none of these nonprofits operating in a vacuum will be able to move the chains substantially on these issues, except by working with others. Right. And so if we think about, like, a food bank, for instance, what is it that a food bank does?

They receive donations of food, they receive donations of funding. They've got kind of programming around receiving that food and, you know, sorting it, arranging it, packaging it, and then delivering it to families. They might be supporting a soup kitchen and a local community, these kinds of things.

It's easy when we're in the operational day today, to start to conflate the mission that this food bank exists to serve with how many tons of food did we distribute this year? You know, a soup kitchen? The same thing. It's like, how many hot meals did we put in front of somebody this year?

And the challenge there is that the worse the problem gets out here, the easier it becomes to do better on that metric. It's like the more people out there need a meal served to them because they are really food insecure, the easier it is to serve more meals.

So if we conflate, like, wanting to make sure that we have a society that's very food secure with how many meals are we serving this year? When we blur the lines between those two things, it becomes really easy to say, like, I just want to maximize my, you know, my one number that matters. I want to maximize my KPI. I want to maximize my OKR.

And that is just, you know, plate search. And when we do that, it's easy to then kind of lapse into that mentality of like, well, all I need to do is push as hard as I can on the thing that I do.

And in order to support that, when it comes time for funding and all these kinds of things, I should be pushing as hard as I can to maximize how much of the funding I'm bringing into my organization.

But the reality of that outcome that we carry around food security and society, that's so much bigger than what one soup kitchen or one food depot can do on their own. It really has to do with this coordination of a whole bunch of stuff that's going on in the ecosystem.

When we're able to take that step back and regain that perspective about why we're all here, why we're showing up to do this work, we start to see that in fact it's really important that we play a certain role in our ecosystem and that we'd be really integrated with other functions inside of that ecosystem.

And when that comes to funding, that can mean like sometimes we should be doing something that could seem counterintuitive, which is sometimes we should be lobbying for that partner over there to be getting the funding that they need. Because for the entire ecosystem to function effectively and efficiently in achieving the thing we want, they are the weakest link, not us. And so they are the ones who need additional support, not us.

David Moscrop:

No, I want to, I want to dig into that point specifically because I've heard it put this way before that, you know, nonprofit will say our goal is to ultimately not exist. Right. Or some iteration of that is that the mission is to not be needed.

I think if you're a food bank, you're. But you might say, well, ultimately we would like to not have to exist. We don't want to have to provide people with food because we want them to have food already. Which is great. And it's very encouraging to hear that. And I do not doubt for a second that there are people who believe that.

But at the same time, we know from institutional realities that once bodies come to exist, they start to want to continue to exist. Right. People want to keep their jobs organ. You know, the board wants to keep being aboard there. There are new interests that are introduced into the ecosystem and there's a sort of self sustaining interest in existing that might move beyond the initial mission and the goal of not existing, for instance.

And I'm curious how you manage that reality specifically, for instance, if you're working with a partner, which you do, or do you just say, oh, oh, you know, the problem's probably not going to go away, so we're just going to keep working on it anyway.

Or is there some self reflection there on the level of those that want to perpetuate for the sake of perpetuating?

Brooke Struck:

So that's a really, really good question. And this is indeed a very thorny, nuanced issue to deal with in conversations.

So the very short term reality is that the kinds of organizations that I've worked with, certainly the problem that they're dealing with is not going to go away in the next 12 to 24 months. So there is not a reality that they're facing that they might become obsolete and might make themselves obsolete.

So that's one piece of it.

A second piece is. And yet it's still really valuable to think through what would need to happen in order for the organization to become obsolete, because that's a very powerful flashlight to shine on what's missing right now that we can then start to invest in as kind of a next initiative.

And the third piece is really more kind of an attitudinal piece.

Having that conversation is valuable insofar as it helps people to start taking seriously that if we're talking about making ourselves obsolete in terms of designing programming, I also need to get my mind around the fact that the thing that I'm working on right now is not permanent.

And in fact, if it is permanent in a certain sense, that will be like a mark of our shortcomings, not a mark of our success.

So you're absolutely right in pointing out this tension.We want our society to become healthier, such that these kinds of supports are no longer needed.

With the institutional reality that an organization and a board and the people who work in it will all give it this life of its own that exists outside of just the boundaries of the mission, it's something that will start to perpetuate its own existence.

And we need to be very intentional about making sure that that doesn't happen. And I don't want to frame that as a negative thing like we need to put this kind of guardrail on, making sure that stuff doesn't take on this kind of logic and life of its own.

I actually want to frame that in a positive way that when we start to take seriously that finitude of the organization, we actually will unlock some insights that we wouldn't gain or would be very, very difficult to gain in any other way.

David Moscrop:

And on the other side of the crawlery to this, it seems to me that organizations also have the capacity to adapt. I mean, they can change their. I would assume as a nonprofit, you are constrained in what you can do.You have a mission, you have a board, you've got a mission statement, you've got all these things. But there are mechanisms to. To change over time though, right?

You get not. Not just to adapt to the changing nature of your core, say, oh, actually, we're going to move along and start to deal with a different core problem.

Do you find that that happens a lot in the industry?

Brooke Struck:

I'm perhaps not long enough in the tooth yet to have seen that. I see more of the. Our mission is kind of evolving to accommodate a changing ecosystem out there, rather than we've been working at this in a concerted way for the last four or five Decades and we're now getting close to actually solving the problem.

So some examples that come to mind for that might be something around disease eradication. Right. So if you think about, you know, smallpox campaigns, some of these kinds of things, tuberculosis campaigns, there is that, that thought of like, we will, we will encounter a step change or a phase change where we go from this stage of our existence where we're trying to reach these certain critical thresholds to something like a maintenance phase, which might not require its own organization.

Maybe that becomes a program that's nested under something else where we say we've eradicated this. And levels of vaccination remain so high that we haven't seen cases of this. We want to continue to do monitoring, we want to continue to make sure that levels of vaccination remain high and these kinds of things.

So there's a little bit of tweaking and keeping an eye on things to make sure that it's still sustaining the situation that we've worked so hard to achieve. But you don't have this kind of active operations phase the way that you did when you were trying to reach that steady state.

I'll also point out that that kind of situation where it's kind of like done and dusted. Nailed it. Now we can put it to bed and we just keep our eyes on it to make sure it doesn't open back up. That is relatively rare.

That is an outlier in the way that social and health problems tend to work. Vaccines are a very special category of things.

David Moscrop:

And even that said, as we're seeing now, sometimes those problems then come back years later. Right. If you had said to someone decades ago, here's these diseases we've effectively nearly eradicated, at least in much of the developed world. Oh, by the way, they're back now with the deal, whooping cough again or whatever it might be.

Yeah, it shows you just how prickly, as you mentioned, some of these problems can be.

I want to talk about the institution a little more as an institution because I find it, the study of these things utterly fascinating. And one thing I'm, I'm caught up with is the capacity for organizations to change to changing circumstances or not.

Because organizations structurally tend to be not universally so, but they tend to be fairly conservative, even, you know, quote unquote, politically progressive. Organizations themselves, as organizations can often be conservative for a variety of reasons.

One, you might be risk averse, or there might be so many people that it's hard to change course or whatever it might be. But I'm curious Especially when you're working with people. How you approach problems of organizations that can't or won't or don't realize that they need to change with changing circumstances, changing technologies, changing times. I mean, how?

I ask this question in part because I think it's important to think about it for all kinds of organizations, but particularly nonprofit world. Where do you even start with something like that?

Brooke Struck:

Yeah, that's another great question and one that I want to unpack in a couple of different layers. The first thing I want to call out is that I have a non representative sample that I'm working from. Right. So the fact that I'm working with a client in this space is already indicative of them having more appetite for change than the norm. Right. So I'm arriving on the scene at a time when people are already kind of coming to grips with the reality that staying the present course, sticking to our current trajectory, is actually worse than the pain of change. Right.

So I think my baseline mental model there is like things inside of institutions and organizations will stay the same unless something forces them to change. And I'm often showing up on the scene just at that moment when people have acknowledged, like, we can't turn a blind eye to it anymore, like we can no longer talk our way out of it in a reasonable way.

Like, the thing is as bad as we've been kind of talking it down from over the last however long. So that's an important piece of context in interpreting what it is that I have to say. And that flows right to the core of how it is that I practice with clients.

So you and I were talking a few minutes ago about the differentiation that I draw between facilitation and consultation. And just, you know, as a simple kind of first pass for me, consultation is telling people what to do. Facilitation is helping people to tell themselves what to do. And I'm very much in that category.

Like, I'm not here, I'm not showing up with clients, I'm not showing up with you here today to say, like, I'm an expert and I know all of these things. Rather, in the client context, I'm showing up to help pull a certain kind of conversation out of a group of leaders.

I'm helping them to define together what it is that they want to accomplish and helping to create a sense of collective ownership around that outcome and a sense of accountability to one another and to their stakeholders rather than a sense of accountability to me, there's a danger in working with leadership teams and trying to coach those Conversations that you kind of end up like the kindergarten teacher that you show up and you're wagging your finger and saying, now, now, now, this was your homework.

It's like in a certain sense, if the leadership team is showing up without having done the things that we had discussed, know that we had agreed they would do by the time the next meeting comes around, for instance, like the problem is not that they have let me down, like they don't show up for me, I show up for them.

The problem is that they're letting each other down and they're letting, you know, they're letting their constituencies down. There are a lot of people who are counting on them, who need that to, you know, that work to be getting done. Who need that to be done right.

So there's a conversation to unpack there around like, well, why are these things not getting done?

And this kind of non judgmental approach of not wagging the finger and saying, you didn't do your homework, little Johnny kind of thing. To me that's just a very unproductive conversation to have.

Rather it's approaching it with more curiosity and trying to understand what is it that was pulling your attention instead of these things and are those things that are pulling your attention, let's once again get curious about those things.

Like are we seeing here a signal about other stuff that actually is more important than this that we just haven't landed on yet. And so we need to kind of reopen that conversation of where are our priorities anyway? Or are we pretty comfortable with the priorities that we've set?

But people are in a situation where they feel that it's difficult for them to set a boundary and say, as interesting as this is, as much as I would enjoy doing these kinds of things, that's just not part of the plan right now.

I'm not saying it's not a good idea. What I'm saying is that's not the direction that we're moving. And if I as one leader within that group start to go off in a different direction, then I'm going to be eroding what it is that we all as a whole will be able to accomplish, but only if we all row in the same direction.

I've got to stick with the group direction because the group as a whole will be more successful if we do that, then if the individual members are all kind of flying off in different directions.

So for me, that's more of the facilitative model, the consultative model is more like, I am a subject matter expert. There's something that I know that you inside of your organization don't know. And so you're paying me to come in and bring that expertise.

At its worst, that looks like you're paying me to come in and tell you what to do.

David Moscrop:

Okay, so say when, when there needs to be change, how do you motivate that change?

I mean, we all know I don't want to pathologize this by talking about it in pathological terms, but we, But I'm going to do it anyway a little bit. In some cases, you got to hit rock bottom before you. You can accept that there needs to be changed.

You sort of intimated as much earlier is that at some point when organizations can no longer ignore the crisis, can you motivate successful change before that?

Brooke Struck:

So I don't think that you can motivate successful change.That's the pessimistic kind of top line is rock bottom is necessary before people are ready to change.

The more optimistic and more nuanced story, though, is that what people consider to be rock bottom is not fixed. You can set the bar for where you say, like this far and no further beyond here. We just won't allow it anymore.

And so the way that I found to motivate change earlier and to not get kind of sucked into that pessimistic view is to say there really is a lot of mileage that we can get out of having a very, very rich ongoing discussion about what we would need to see before we say, that's enough now. We need to very seriously consider a change of direction.

And one of the things that I found most helpful in that respect is trying to articulate clearly what would we have to see, what would the world look like?

And then we can be a little bit more kind of honest with ourselves about saying, okay, we've in a certain sense, pre committed to what would force us to take certain actions, and now we're just going to go and monitor those things rather than waiting for time to unfold and waiting for events to unfold and then really relying on how we feel. Right.

Because the challenge there from a, like a cognitive perspective is we as humans are really good at just adapting to new circumstances. If things get worse, we can push the threshold down really easily for what counts as rock bottom. Right. What I thought last week was totally untenable.

This week, as I kind of gradually worked my way down, it's like, well, you know, it's not as bad as I thought it was. I can deal with a little more. And so we can just keep doing that quite a bit and push off this moment of change.

Whereas if we commit ourselves early on and say, like, this is a frontier that I will not cross, and then we're diligent about keeping an eye on where things stand, at the very least, it triggers a really helpful conversation when that frontier is crossed to say, is there a specific mitigating circumstance that makes me think now that I don't need to act when previously I had decided that in situations like these, action would follow?

David Moscrop:

There is so many parallels with other aspects of. Of life that's me thinking of. I think in part because the cognitive tendencies that you discuss are unique to, to nonprofits. They're just true of not at all human beings, and therefore they're true of the institutions that human beings populate.

I want to speak about something else relevant to that point which is being captured.

I wonder this about all kinds of organizations, nonprofit organizations, political organizations, my God, even, even some businesses. There's always a risk of being captured by a certain audience or a community, or in this case, donors.

And I'm curious about how organizations navigate this risk is that you've got a mission, you've got a goal, you're in competition to some extent with the broader world. And those who have the money often have significant influence on what you do, either directly or indirectly, because they've got the money.

How do nonprofits navigate that? Or rather, what's the best practice, I should say, perhaps, for navigating that.

Brooke Struck:

One of the ways that things get captured. This is a rather kind of boring and banal way. There's no cloak and dagger stuff going on behind the curtain. Nothing untoward is happening.

And yet lots of nonprofits get caught in this trap of essentially getting made accountable for a certain performance indicator, a certain metric, and then they need to do a bunch of things to go and perform well on that metric.

And many of those things just pull them away from what it is that they need to do and what many people inside of the organization very openly acknowledge they need to do in order to actually move the mission forward. And part of that is well intentioned, right?

So if the contrast class to that is, well, we're not going to put any metrics on anything and we're not going to hold anyone accountable, that's clearly bad. We don't want that either.

And so the question then becomes like, how do we have our cake and eat it too? How do we create the accountability that we're looking for while also making sure that the incentives are aligned for People to do the things that they need to do that they know that they need to do when those things are hard to measure.

So that's one of the big things.

As I mentioned earlier, the outcomes for social and health charities are often, you know, the confluence of a whole bunch of factors. They're working in very complex ecosystems. There's very little that they can unilaterally take credit for and say, you know, 20% fewer people got sick with X because of the awareness campaign that we ran around this. It's extremely rare that any such simple story is on the menu, much as we might want it. Right. Because that makes accountability really easy.

You said that you were going to make this thing go away or a certain chunk of this thing go away. You did your programming, and we've just traced the very linear causal story from your programming to that thing happening. You have now demonstrated that you handled yourself and your finances in your organization effectively. And therefore we feel that you have been accountable for what you promised to do.

End of story, and everyone's happy.

In more complex cases, there is no such simple way to trace this linear causality from this program caused that outcome, because there are all of these other things that also need to be in the mix for that to happen. So what do we do?

Well, generally, the way that that happens is there's some kind of agreement made about an indicator that everyone acknowledges is imperfect, but at least it's neat and tidy. So we say we can't measure the thing that we really care about, or we recognize that we don't have full control over the thing that we really care about, and therefore we're skittish about on, you know, on the side of the nonprofit or skittish about being made accountable for that thing.

And on the side of thunder. Like, we recognize that it could be unfair to make you accountable for that thing when you have only partial control over it. But there's this thing over here that we think is more reasonable to make you accountable.

For us, we'll choose some kind of intermediate indicator that has progressed in many corners that has progressed beyond just programming of, like, how many people attended our workshops or our information sessions or these kinds of things.

A lot of the discourse has evolved beyond that, rightly, because while that is definitely something that is within their control, it's actually not an outcome that is worth caring about.

If your information sessions don't actually have any effect on people's behavior and help them to. If your programming, for instance, is about an addiction treatment, you can have a whole bunch of information sessions and different kinds of workshops and supports.

But if those things don't actually move the needle at all in terms of people's addiction behaviors and the downstream impacts of that on themselves, their families, their communities, et cetera, like, we don't care whether you do the workshops and the sessions. We care about what those things are supposed to bring about.

So we've moved beyond the, like, we're just going to count the beans of, you know, the simple stuff that was totally within your control that we don't care about, and we're going to stay away from the stuff that we really care about, but that you don't have control over. So it's this messy nibbling of trying to find an indicator that is reasonably meaningful, but also reasonably fair to assign to the organization. And there's a big kind of shell around that, which I like to pull up for explicit conversation, which is about accountability.

What happens if someone doesn't hit their metrics?

Is that the end of a conversation or is that the beginning of a conversation?

If that is the end of a conversation, then for sure people are going to be very risk averse in the way that they choose metrics. They're going to be extremely conservative in the way that they go after them. They're not going to deviate from them. All of those kinds of things are very reasonable.

Well, they're very rational behaviors that flow from the idea that if we don't get our numbers, we're going to lose funding, we're going to encounter whatever bad outcome it is from not being able to hit that accountability. But there's a different conversation to have.

And that different conversation is we see that we're not, you know, we're not hitting our numbers here. And again, this is a conversation to have, like in dialogue between the nonprofit itself and its funding bodies, likely more than one.

That's part of what we can discuss.

But to use that as the beginning of a dialer, like, this is what we're seeing in terms of hitting those numbers and we want to bring that to you not in a way that, like, we're going to arrive with a million good excuses for why it is, that it's not our fault.

We're going to arrive with these numbers to open a conversation about, like, what are we seeing out there in the ecosystem? And that's a very, very valuable thing for both the nonprofit and for the funders to undertake because ultimately it positions them to make much, much better decisions. And what hangs on that is what people want out of that Accountability conversation.

If that accountability conversation is about giving someone gold stars or a slap on the wrist for something that they've already done, that that approach of openness and curiosity to say this is a moment when we are really going to learn something important about our ecosystem, that approach of curiosity holds no value if your idea of accountability is like this kind of praise and blame gold stars or smacks on the wrist.

But if your approach to accountability is to say, I actually don't have any decisions to make anymore about the past, I only have decisions to make about the future. And so to inform those decisions, I want to understand as well as I can this complex ecosystem that we're operating in.

That is a completely different posture for the conversation between the funder and the nonprofit that allows them to go in and say whatever it is that just happened, we are going to learn something valuable that's going to help us to be much, much better in future than we were in the past.

Whereas if we go into that conversation believing that it's either gold stars or not, it's more budget cuts, then the nonprofit will arrive fully armored up.

They're going to have, you know, in the, in the management consulting world, it's like you're going to, you know, you're going to show up there with your 120 slide deck that like you are ready to defend to the absolute depth, right? And what you're pushing for is more funding or at least you know, maintaining your level of funding.

There's a lot of like performance and posturing. Then it's all very scalar. It's like more or less, you know, dial up, dial down. But that's a really, really limited conversation to have.

Everything has been flattened down to this like one dimension of are we getting more money, less money or just kind of hosting with the money that we have?

David Moscrop:

I have lots of follow up thoughts, but we're closing in on time.

So I want to finish off with really, I think one of the most core and important issues that sometimes gets ignored or forgotten, which is these organizations also exist in a world in which politics also exists.

And I don't mean office politics, I don't even mean politics between organizations. I'm talking about the, the politics of an issue, especially in, in, in a healthcare space where you mentioned drug use earlier, extraordinarily politicized space where people can have good faith, disagreements and bad faith disagreements.

Data driven disagreements and not data driven, you know, culture war, data driven disagreements. These organizations are not express political organizations, but they are political in a different Sense, they're out there in a world in which you have to make choices about what to do and what not to do. Choices that are some driven by data, but also driven by values.

And I'm curious how an organization in this day and age, which is extremely partisan, extremely polarized, extremely precarious, and often uncertain, navigates that space.

We've got about two and a half minutes, so I don't expect you to solve the problem. But I'm curious if you can provide some insight into how an organization navigates that terrain, because it's utterly fraught.

Brooke Struck:

Yeah. So knowing that our time is a little bit short, the thing that I'll highlight that I think is the most kind of productive track to get on there is in those conversations where suppose you've had a change of party in power and now you as a nonprofit are going back to the government and seeking your next few years of funding for the work that you're doing.

Something that I want to highlight to help get unstuck is getting into a very clear brass tacks conversation.

When we talk about changes in political priorities in the context of our programming, as this nonprofit that we are, do we need to be changing things at the level of messaging only, or is there something about the programming itself that you feel needs to change? Like, are there different aspects that we need to be highlighting and foregrounding in our messaging? Right.

So it might be around cost reduction. You know, if you go from a government that's looking more at harm reduction, another one comes in as Marvel cost reduction. Both of those stories can be true for a given set of programming.

And so going into that conversation saying, I know that you have different priorities from the previous government, and I want to work with you to advance your priorities. And I'd like to do that in kind of two layers.

The first is looking at those things where the programming that we're already doing is delivering the value that you want to be created, but that's not the way that we're talking about it.

And the second thing is opportunities that we see to tweak the programming itself to lean more into the values that you're looking to advance.

Again, in this example, like cost reduction versus harm reduction, Many, many times, like these issues like cost reduction and harm reduction, they often go together. Right.

Like when people are harming themselves through addictive behaviors, that is driving costs. Right. The thing that drives down the costs is also the thing that drives down the harms, and vice versa in many cases.

There are certainly highly visible, highly politicized Examples where that's not the case. Right. So if we think about gun control, that's more than just a messaging issue, though I would also emphasize that the values and priorities of people on different.

I was going to say different ends of the spectrum, but on different places on the spectrum around gun control are often much closer to each other than the public discourse would have us believe. No one should have any guns. Everybody should have completely untrammeled access to guns.

Very few people hold either of those positions. There's lots of stuff going on in between.

And so, in fact, there are many, many more opportunities for those wins around, like messaging and program adjustment. It's not going to be this kind of like scorched earth.

You were doing something that was highly prior, you know, highly prized by a previous administration. Now this administration is in and you are going like, completely cut. That kind of thing is actually extremely rare.

David Moscrop:

Well, I could ask a dozen more questions, but even in the era of the Internet, time is the scarce resource. But I think this will have answered a lot of questions. People have and will have been salutary for.

Salutary for a lot of people who now without better understand the space, and I think outside the space, may better understand themselves with their own organization after listening, because this goes beyond the nonprofit world.

So I appreciate that very much. Thanks so much for joining me.

I really. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Brooke Struck:

That's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

David Moscrop: 

And as always, my thanks go out to Carolyn Smith, Ross Clark and Aisha Jarrah, who make the show not just possible, but infinitely better than it would be without them.

And of course, to you for listening. We'll see you back here in two weeks.