April CLT Monthly Meeting Summary - "Navigating Industry Disruption and Driving Organizational Change in a Risk Averse Environment"
See the deck here. Notes from the meeting and chat below.
We opened with Katie Blum’s framing of her burning issue:
We shared some context and best practices for engaging stakeholders from Catalyst Constellations.
We then broke into small groups to discuss and share insights. Some of the highlights of those discussions:
Understand Your Stakeholders: "Build stakeholder maps and make sure you really understand all of your stakeholders—Who are they? What are their priorities?" This insight ensures a comprehensive grasp of the landscape before formulating strategies.
Prioritize Retaining Revenue and Donors: Not all stakeholders are equal. "Be clear on your sources of revenue today...have a very strong plan in place to retain existing revenues and donors." Retention is emphasized due to the difficulty of acquiring new support.
Building Trust is not All Roses: "Trust is a currency." Emphasizing trust underscores its importance in fostering productive relationships and facilitating change. However, when sharing outlook and feedback, do not make it all positive. “Share the thorns and the roses,” to build credibility.
Read the Room: For effective communication, focus on leadership tone, organizational mood, and grassroots buzz. "The tone at the top, the mood in the middle, the buzz at the base."
Building Support with UBAD: Leverage supporters for insight and course correction. "When you find people who are your supporters, you can lean on them to help you course correct and see your blind spots."
Dig into Support and “Buy-In” with UBAD Model:
Understanding
Belief
Advocacy (what people say)
Decision-making (what people do)
Psychological Safety: Establish psychological safety for open communication. "Create that psychological safety." Fostering an environment where individuals feel safe to express their thoughts and concerns promotes collaboration and innovation.
Understand Perspectives: Use sentient mapping to understand individuals' perspectives and effectively facilitate organizational change. "Have people literally put themselves on a wall...and then ask them if you wanted to change what must happen." Understanding diverse perspectives enables tailored and effective change management strategies.
Continuous Communication: Humans must hear things at least seven times to absorb them. "It really is going to require a degree of communicating, over-communicating, and testing the waters." Consistent communication and feedback loops ensure clarity and alignment throughout the change process.
Anticipate Future Changes: Employ foresight practices to anticipate future changes. "Looking into a practice called foresight...scan the horizon for signals that point toward future change." Anticipating future trends allows organizations to adapt and thrive proactively in dynamic environments.
Pause and Center: “Its important that you create moments to take a breath … to focus, reflect, outside of the day-to-day noise; schedule focus time so we can workshop the changes we want to see and then be more intentional.”
NUGGETS FROM CHAT:
Book Recommendation: Never Split the Difference
“Difference between Yes/No/You’re Right — “Yes” means I go along, but, “You’re Right” means I agree.”
Podcast recommendation: Introducing Trustonomy. From Dennis: An entertaining podcast on organizational traits, using case studies of lost trust.
Keep an eye on the layers that can advance or hinder your agenda
The tone at the top
The mood at the middle
The buzz at the base
Give your allies permission to tell you if you’re on the path and how to be more effective.
Actively manage and watch for trust currency
Trust impacts speed to value and speed to change
Create opportunities to understand and build trust
Look into Foresight Practice — Institute for the Future. Identify signals that are pointing toward futurist change. What are the signals now that are pointing toward forces of change. Forces combine in interesting ways. Helps you draw the line from what’s happening now to what’s coming in the future.
I really appreciate the call out for "in person" especially in this distant and disconnected world we are in post-pandemic!
The remote/in-person challenge is really crippling one of the teams I’m working with right now.
Start small. I loved Shakeya’s note in the breakout about doing something and how people react.
Also, important that you create moments to take a breath … to focus, reflect > outside of the day to day noise; schedule focus time so it encourages time to so this … focus and think so that we can workshop the changes we want to see and then be more intentional in the day to day
From Ralph: A couple of ‘phrases’ that help summarize some of these points.
1) it makes sense to them (i.e. people don’t show up to be difficult; it is your job to understand where they are coming from)
2) what chapter are they on (you may be through most of the story/book, but they may be at the start of the journey… and is this even a genre/journey they want to me on)
3) change is a contact sport (you have to interact with people 1:1 and often, you have to constantly check in etc.
4) Build on common ground (resist the temptation to jump into the vision and strategy work which you may not have alignment on, often it is good to start with the problems as most people see those clearly and can align there, then start talking about options to address these sort of like a dentist poking around for cavities, if you find a soft spot maybe save it for later until you have built on more of the aligned work)
