BOLD MOVES > EFFICIENCY
It's not that there's anything wrong with efficiency.
It's that a particular focus on efficiency tends to lead us to bad decisions.
Rereading GK Chesterton's classic 1905 book Heretics, this morning, I stumbled upon this:
"When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world."
Chesterton, of course, is talking here about nations. But the same dynamic holds true for companies and nonprofits.
When organizations focus on efficiency, it's a good sign that they are shrinking or even dying. Or that they're about to shrink or die.
My main assignment as a freshly minted MBA at The Franklin Mint was business process reengineering to improve efficiency. Only two years later, they would be in utter freefall.
I joined Circuit City as a senior marketing analyst in their "Good to Great" era, made famous by Jim Collins. Three years later, I was getting out of dodge in the midst of a company-wide focus on "Six Sigma" efficiency. Their death spiral soon followed.
In the nonprofits and companies I've served in since, a strong focus on efficiency always preceded a decline in revenue, profit, impact, or all three.
Chesterton is right when, later in the same paragraph, he writes "The time of big theories was the time of big results."
Quite so. Organizations grow, not when they focus on efficiency but on great possibilities.
So what are these "big theories" for nonprofit organizations?
This: Grow your nonprofit by focusing on winning new audiences and enthusing your existing audiences through amazing new experiences. Enchantment for the new people. Reenchantment for the current people. Through caring enough to know them as people, designing amazing experiences for them (what they love, not what you love) and then executing with true artistic excellence.
Funny thing will happen along the way: you'll get efficient growth.
Our experience development work tends to yield ROIs around 10:1 over time.
That's pretty darned efficient. Especially compared to most scalable nonprofit growth strategies.
But you can't get there there by starting with efficiency.
We get there by starting with big ideas, huge imagination and a love for audiences as people … people waiting to be enchanted and reenchanted to your cause.
Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash
