Strategic Agility: A Key Capability of Transformational Charities

Strip any organization down to its simplest essence, and you’ll find that fundraising and operations are the heart and lungs of any charity. Fundraising pays for staff and supplies; operations delivers programs and projects. And in the Transformational Charity, operations liberates strategic agility, organizational culture, and community engagement.

Junxion’s Transformational Charity framework sets out a range of operational structures and performance standards for contemporary charities. At the centre of the framework are five ‘Key Capabilities’ that guide the Transformational Charity to be more resilient and impactful. We wrote about Empowering Leadership in a previous post. The second Key Capability is Supportive Operations.

While ‘strategy’ can be complex, it doesn’t need to be. We distill the definition to ‘a plan of action to achieve a desired goal.’ The ‘plan’ is singular—so the whole organization must be aligned. ‘Action,’ because this is actually about doing the things that will drive progress. And a ‘desired goal,’ which is more often than not the organizational vision.

Responsive to change—whether driven by emergency or purposeful management. And discerning about allocating energy, capital, and other resources across the organization.

So the real question is how the Transformational Charity creates the conditions for strategic agility. Here are four essential factors.

Monitoring the Context

The work of social purpose organizations, and especially charities, is deeply intertwined with the conditions in the communities they serve. So strategic agility requires a deep and regularly renewed understanding of constituents’ needs, close working relationships with donors and others supporters, and anticipation of meaningful changes that may be on the horizon (like shifting regulations or laws, for example). Add to this the operations of the organization: what risks does it face? What influences might arise from the actions of others in community?

Absent this monitoring of the context, decision-makers will struggle to make objectively sound decisions. They’ll instead argue from diverse, subjective points of view—all informed by individuals’ limited experiences of the context—somewhat like the old adage of the three blind men tasked with describing an elephant. None will be wholly right, and collectively, they’ll be slow and potentially wildly off base. In contrast, if decision-makers maintain a clear-eyed understanding of their context, they’ll more quickly align on how to act.

Consider the work of Citystudio London, which we helped by aggregating insights from multiple stakeholder groups so they can more deeply understand their context and the value of their work. Due to the evaluation work we completed, “they have much greater ability to analyse the data and gain deeper insight into how their programmes are performing” and which were not, enabling them to make changes that accelerate their progress toward their vision.

Embracing Responsiveness

Accelerating progress is what responsiveness is all about. Transformational Charities embrace the opportunity to make changes in response to shifting conditions, new learning, and insights into the efficacy of their programming and operations. However, this isn’t all about having the right information at their fingertips.

Decision-makers must also have the personal resilience and capacity to respond. In a recent LinkedIn post, Emily Murgatroyd McCann, a long-time friend of Junxion and a partner at Ivy Group, suggested five factors that contribute to leaders’ resilience—including pattern recognition (spotting issues early and reacting to them) and decision-making under pressure: does leaders’ “judgment hold up when the stakes got high?” 

No organization can be responsive if its leaders aren’t resilient, ready, and working together to make wise, informed decisions.

Aligning Culture

Another precondition for strategic agility is an aligned culture: if teams need to work together to make great decisions, then their alignment in shared values is imperative. Only through cultural alignment can teams behave against clear and explicit guiding principles, make decisions together in line with codes of conduct, and maintain a focus on the best interests of their constituents and organization.

We worked with the immensely impressive Immigrant Services Society of BC to help them articulate organizational values (link to case study), during a recent round of strategic planning. Not unusual work—but it was the next step that really helped to align the culture: we helped them measure organizational adherence to the stated values and the guiding principles that underpin them. Our work helped ISSofBC identify opportunities to cohere their culture across their many programs and multiple offices, and to liberate the leadership capacity to be responsive.

Collaborating with Peers

Finally, Transformational Charities overwhelmingly tend to have high ambitions and lofty visions of success. Typically, they’re visions that cannot be achieved by any one organization acting alone, so they’re comfortable striking partnerships and working in collaboration with peers. This is imperative to truly strategic agility.

Strategic Agility is the third of five Key Capabilities we’ve identified as crucial to ensuring charities remain effective, sustainable, and impactful in a rapidly evolving world. It can be incredibly challenging for smaller nonprofits. Let’s talk if you’re keen to learn the fundamentals.

Interested in transforming your charity? Read our Transformational Charity Framework, an outline of the contemporary imperatives and capabilities charities need to develop to thrive for the next decade (and beyond.) We’ve also created an assessment to help your organization identify strength areas and improvement areas.