In the last few years a number of people in community service organisations have said things are changing so fast, what’s the point of having a strategic plan? We don’t know what might happen 12 months from now, so we definitely can’t plan five or ten years ahead. It’s definitely true the community service sector […]
Speculation about the future of the ACNC came up at a recent Board meeting, and again at a business gathering on Friday. No need to speculate any more, the Coalition has stated it will roll back the establishment of the Australian Charities and NFPs Commission and accompanying reforms, if it forms a Government. The Coalition’s typically hyperbolic claim […]
‘Reducing red tape’ has been a hot topic between not-for-profits and government agencies over the last couple of years. The Western Australian Government has been driving a ‘free market‘ approach to encourage NFPs to be more entrepreneurial and innovative in the way they deliver value to the communities they serve. Similarly, the Commonwealth Government has […]
Last year I had a couple of experiences highlighting why social researchers suggest people are becoming disengaged and cynical about government, and also why people often say rude things about public servants. To me they are very powerful examples of organisational culture. The Tax Office I recently received an email purporting to be from the […]
In the ongoing search to understand business and help organisations be more effective, I’m currently researching a framework to describe the fundamental nature of all businesses in the smallest logical number of categories. I’m thinking of this as the ‘periodic table’ of business. If we break all businesses down to their essential, atomic particles, how […]
Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) has released a research report today, 5 October 2011, looking at measurement of social capital in young people. This may be relevant to anyone working to help youth overcome an inheritance of socio-economic disadvantage. Some key points: “High levels of social capital in young people are found to enhance engagement, […]
Look back at earlier posts on risk management: [Part 1] [Part 2] Part 3 Risk management vs risk avoidance In some circles, especially in non-commercial sectors, ‘risk management’ is commonly confused with ‘risk avoidance’. And you don’t have to be a genius to realise avoidance and management are not same thing. In fact, avoidance is pretty much the […]
More on risk management: [Part 1] Part 2 [Part 3] Risk management plan One common approach to risk management is to create a risk management plan. The process of creating such a plan can be fun, as a whole bunch of subject matter experts meet together in a room for several hours and continuously ask themselves […]
Risk management and other buzzwords ‘Risk management’ has joined the growing lexicon of management terms being bandied around to make the speaker sound impressive and knowledgeable, while the original meaning has been steadily eroded. When people start latching on to words or phrases and just throw them in sentences randomly to sound smart, if the […]
I love measuring things. Maybe it’s because I was deprived of good quantitative data during my formative years studying a liberal arts degree. Or maybe it’s because the first thing I ever seriously tried to measure was my own work performance. I was designing a marketing campaign and I wanted to find a way to […]
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC), created by Arthur Schneiderman and popularised by Kaplan & Norton, is a commonly used framework for setting organisational performance measures along four dimensions: How do customers see us? What internal processes must we excel at? How can we continue to improve and create value? How do we look to shareholders? Potential […]
The story so far: part one described an application of Open Space Technology for community consultation on the subject of mental health. Part two proposed a thought experiment: wouldn’t it be great if the mental health profession could cure all mental health problems so successfully that the industry wasn’t needed any more? Part three examined […]
Parts one and two described an application of Open Space Technology for community consultation on the subject of mental health, touched on possible vested interests within the structure of the mental health marketplace, and proposed a thought experiment: wouldn’t it be great if the mental health profession could cure all mental health problems so successfully […]
I just came across a short article by Sharon McGann, with a consulting firm called A Passion for Results (which is a great name, isn’t it). The title of Sharon’s article is: ‘Teaching our kids life literacy – we owe it to them’, and she’s writing about meeting some adults who are working to provide […]
The timeless wisdom of Scott Adams. This is going straight on the wall.
Troy Ginbey, from Tune in Tokyo, and I have been having a debate about the Minds at Work website. I kind of like the way they’ve tried to incorporate a sense of what they do and how they do it in the interface for their site. Troy, while he appreciates the cleverness, thinks the interface […]
‘Part one’ described a very impressive application of Open Space Technology for community consultation on the subject of mental health. Chatting with participants at the forum, it seemed I was one of a relatively small group of people in the room who was not a ‘consumer’ of mental health services or a ‘mental health professional’. […]
This is really intended as a side-bar to draw together a few related concepts: Gaia theory, fractals, and complex adaptive systems. If you’re already familiar with all three, you may want to skip this post and go read this, instead. Fractals [ted id=909] Benoît Mandelbrot famously coined the term fractal in 1975 to describe shapes or patterns […]
Sometimes being human can be overwhelming, especially if we care about the planet and the people on it. So here are two reasons to be happy: 1) Action and change is happening all around you, all the time. Think about some of the progress human beings have made in the last 200 years (in some […]
Back in 2008 the Health Department hosted a day-long community consultation forum, seeking input on the following question: ‘What can we ALL do to better the mental health of ALL West Australians?’ My interest in the event was three-fold: As a communications practitioner, I wanted to observe the technical aspects – how the forum was […]