Intentionally Changing Your Organization to Improve Impact
Jean-Marc Chouinard was closely involved in the development of the Lucie and André Chagnon Foundation since its beginnings in 2001, until 2022. He is known for his achievements in partnership development, public policy and strategic social and organizational transformation and now works as a consultant to philanthropic organizations. Jean-Marc is collaborating with DARO on a series of articles about creating intentional, lasting change in organizations and the nonprofit sector.
Intentional Change Requires Renunciation and Risk-Taking
Changing an organization is not easy, even though change in a big picture, contextual sense, it is inevitable. Sometimes your external environment will force abrupt and noticeable change onto you, but not always. When there isn’t strong external pressure to re-examine your organization, you might be changing in unintentional ways – passively accepting sliding aspects of your mission and services in the opposite direction of what you want. That type of change is, unfortunately, relatively easy. Intentional change that strengthens your organization and its social impact on the other hand, is not. How do you move in the right direction?
When it comes to intentional change that truly shifts or refocuses your direction, there are philosophical and emotional aspects that leaders tend to ignore or underestimate. Intentional change is a cultural shift that requires self-reflection, searching, direction, flexibility and pragmatism.
Renunciation is Necessary
To create and sustain change and not backslide your status quo, your organization will need to both renounce the things that are no longer working and take (well-informed) risks to establish new ways of doing things. Moving in a new direction, if it is really and truly new, means things will feel uncomfortable.
Renunciation can feel like failure and failure is unpleasant. The things that you might need to give up are things that conceptualize how your work fits into the broader world. Letting go of them means you are letting go of, in some sense, what makes your organization tick; they are components of your organizational identity. Which, of course, is entirely the point – to get rid of what’s not serving you to move somewhere new. But a loss is still a loss, and we have a tendency to downplay the emotional discomfort that accompanies shifting conceptions of “self” in organizations.
Renunciation could mean giving up pieces of:
Missions and audiences (e.g. shifting from a youth-centric organization to a multi-age organization)
Approaches (e.g. from an organization focused on clinical services to a partner organization focused on influencing public policy)
Structures, practices, processes, and certain skills
Approaches to decision-making (e.g. decentralized vs. centralized decision-making)
Roles within an organization
Stakeholder relations (leaving some employees/partners to favour others, etc.)
For each person in your organization there will be an emotional burden attached to different elements of change, including shifting power dynamics (both internal and external), and varying levels of willingness to give up different elements. Feelings of failure and frustration are not limited to upper management. To that end, there are no small steps or little decisions. While moving away from core elements of your organization you have to do it while keeping your organization afloat – each action you take contributes to the cultural shift you’re trying to achieve.
This shift is easier to make when you accept the emotional toll that renunciation takes. Acceptance validates the importance of your mission, approaches, and structures and how much they guide your organization, while imparting the signficance of setting a new direction. It helps you move from feelings of failure to a willingness to learn, and hopefully, grow in a way that better serves you, your organization and your community.
Taking the right risks:
In addition to renouncing what’s not working, creating intentional change also means embracing some (hopefully calculated) risks.
If you’re giving up ideas about your identity, you have to move forward into uncharted territory, without the comfort of what’s worked in the past. When you change core elements about your organization you remove some of the familiar things that you relied on to feel steady and guide your work, but if you’ve accepted renunciation, you can shift that loss into forward momentum.
In order to move forward, you have to embrace:
Not knowing the precise outcome of new plans
New and unfamiliar ways of thinking about the organization's role (e.g., from a contribution based solely on subsidies to an organization that places all its resources at the service of the mission, through its capital, its expertise in influencing, etc.) and of playing its role (from simply supporting to playing the role of a social player)
Investing new skills and abilities required to run your organization without knowing if they will pay off
Embracing risk is scary – the weight of responsibility for your role, your team, the people who use your services, is heavy. There are feelings of anxiety, doubt, and perhaps guilt and regret. Taking risks can require making difficult choices, like prioritizing a potential, unknown future over a familiar, but dysfunctional, past. These choices can mean disappointing people, both internally and externally, if they no longer recognize the direction you’re headed.
However, If you don’t take intentional risks, you'll slide back into the same behaviour, processes and approaches that were no longer serving you. You risk losing sight of the bigger purpose of your work, for fear of changing. Taking a risk is not just a business decision, it’s also an action of hope and perseverance – a belief that things can be better and you don’t need to accept a compromised vision or ways of working. This is important to remember as you work through discomfort.
Creating Intentional Organizational Change is Worth the Effort
The first step in creating change is deciding to do it, even if you can’t yet see all of its implications or where it will lead (sometimes you need external pressure or advice in order to make that decision, which we’ll talk about in subsequent posts). Taking that first step may be difficult, but when things aren’t working, it costs you more than just efficiency.
Unclear, broken processes or work that feels disconnected from a meaningful mandate means employees struggle to figure out day-to-day structure. This isn’t just a time suck, it robs your employees (and you) of the time and energy to be creative and innovative in approaching problems. Once people are able to direct their attention away from administrative process work, they can focus on what matters most.
There are no shortcuts, but undertaking organizational change is the cost of staying relevant, legitimate and effective. When you reach the tipping point in this process and you’ve actually entered into a new era for your organization, you will see and feel it, both internally and externally. The frustrations and daily challenges of running an organization will still be there, but your successful reorientation will become a source of pride for you and your staff. It will open up surprising avenues for how you do business and you will likely surpass your initial expectations and goals. Perhaps most importantly, it will give you confidence and a deeper understanding of how your organization operates. You can’t underestimate the value of this – it will help you and your staff recognize when things need to shift and how to make that shift happen in the future, when inevitably, you need to change again.