Non-Profit [& or vs.] Business

Non-Profit Resourcefulness

Working in a non-profit context often means wearing multiple hats and filling a wide range of roles.

While at times this may mean their technical skill with specific tools could have room for growth, it also means they’ve been able to succeed by creatively navigating constraints and making the most of the resources and tools at their disposal.

“An imperfect solution that exists outperforms a perfect one that doesn’t.” – Share Parrish

What skills do you hire for vs. what skills can you train?

Along the same lines, what is the difference between a capital “S” skill and a lower case “s” skill? (Think: the ability to drive a vehicle vs. expertise at driving a specific make and model)

Productivity, Efficiency, Processes etc.

Repeatable, Scalable, and Adjustable

A good report, model, or analysis is ideally all three of the above.

Can you efficiently repeat the report/model with new data or a variety of sources?

Can you scale it to different size data sets and outcomes?

How easily can you adjust the critical factors? Can you change what those factors are? Is is modular in that you can utilize aspects of the architecture from one project to the next?

In my opinion if you get better at building your models so that they are more easily repeatable it saves the time needed to invest in making them more scalable and adjustable.

Document and Duplicate

Processes should be documented and the knowledge and skills to complete them should be duplicated among team members.

This seems obvious but how may situations have you run into where it wasn’t done?

Good Process or Good Luck? Bad Process or Bad Luck? Causation or Correlation?

The genealogy of results can be tough to determine. It’s even harder when information/data gets changed and mislabeled or renamed along the way.

We took a trip to visit Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty some years ago. While Lady Liberty was interesting, going through the history of all the people who passed through Ellis Island was far more fascinating to me. It is also interesting to me that the common perception is that many of the name changes that occurred in the process of immigration and assimilation occurred at Ellis Island. Apparently that isn’t true.

While many name changes did occur, Ellis Island was not the inflection point for these changes. Many were done before or during the boarding of the ship back at its origin or later when immigrants were already in the United States. However, it was one of the central nexus points for scores of immigrants who entered the United States, many of whom did change their name, it just didn’t happen there specifically.

Sometimes you can find a single powerful inflection point that changes the course of a process and directly effects outcomes positively or negatively. Sometimes you might THINK you found the inflection point when all you really identified is a nexus point at which many streams flow through.

Often the more you dig the more you will find a range of factors that contribute to a result and will then need to weigh the perceived influence of each one alongside your ability to adjust those variables. A highly weighted factor over which you have no control is left to the realm of observation and mitigation while the true pursuit is to find the most influential factors over which you do have some level of influence.
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-island

Acronyms

GETMO or Diminishing Returns

Craig Groeschel shared the acronym GETMO a few years ago at the Global Leadership summit. It’s both catchy and effective:

G – Good
E – Enough
T – To
M – Move
O – On

You can literally “get more” done by determining the point in a project or task where it is “good enough” to move on. This idea pairs well with the reality of diminishing returns where there is a certain point at which for each additional unit of input, less and less is gained.

I remember listening to an episode of the Plain English podcast by Derek Thompson where he was talking with psychologist Lisa Damour about teens and achievement in school. The part that stuck out to me is that the way we grade and reward work in school often ignores the rule of diminishing returns and makes it more difficult for some of the highest achievers to succeed in “the real world” without a difficult level of anxiety. Careers can be hampered by the drive to “get A’s” on every work assignment when the level of effort required doesn’t have a good return on investment.

High quality work still matters and where the point of diminishing returns starts to make a difference varies based on the potential impact of a task or project but part of good judgement and prioritization is recognizing which tasks merely need to be completed and which tasks carry outsized impact on overall success.

The last little tie in for this approach to work is the Pareto Principle where 80% of the most meaningful results come from 20% of what you do.

If you can identify the most meaningful 20% of your tasks, use GETMO on the other 80% in order to avoid as many diminishing returns as possible, you’ll be free to give your best effort to the most important tasks. (Throw in the Four D’s of Prioritization and you’ll be a real productivity guru able to make Instagram stories about “multiple days in one day”, whatever that means…)

Sounds like an easy straight forward plan right?

Good in theory, hard in practice. I do think these tools help erect a good framework to use, but we’ll never get it even close to perfect in execution on determining exactly which tasks fit in which bucket. That in itself is a chance to apply some of these tools though…
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vGTqPbKpitQQDhCZ0H1R0

Decision Making

SME, SMI, SMA, SMI?

I may not be an expert in a given area, but I can make expert decisions. So can you.

It starts with an honest evaluation on which bucket you fall into regarding the topic.

Subject Matter Expert

Subject Matter Informed

Subject Matter Aware

Subject Matter Ignorant

Once you have determined the quality and quantity of your knowledge base, you can work from there with a combination of self-learning and leaning into the strengths of others.

The overlapping “I” could be avoided, but I actually like it. There is a danger point in knowledge acquisition where your confidence outpaces your true understanding. You start to get a grasp on the topic but don’t yet realize how much more there is to know. Thinking you know what you don’t can be as bad as being ignorant. Are you truly informed or are you just confident?

5 years ago – 5 years ahead

I have enjoyed history since I was a kid. While I think there is a lot of value in learning from the past in general and our own personal history specifically, it can also be easy to get wrapped up in what we wish we had done differently.

I wish I had started _______
I wish I had stopped _______

Recognizing those things is good, but then we need to move on and not ruminate on “woulda, shoulda, coulda”.

Instead of focusing too much on what we wish we had done differently, I think it’s more productive to look ahead through the lens of

“Five years from now, what will I wish I had done?”

We can learn from the past but we can’t change it.

We can change the present which impacts the future.

What will you regret 5 years from now? What can you do about it today?