Yesterday's thinking won't solve today's problems

The landscape of doing social good is undergoing significant, profound change. The explosion of social media, changing social values of individuals and organizations, and the shift from “contributing” to “investing in” social enterprises are just a few of the forces at play that are driving socially minded enterprises to experiment with new ways to organize and mobilize stakeholders, raise money, promote their causes and address social needs. 

A colleague and I talked with more than 75 nonprofit leaders across the country, asking them what they see is the biggest shift taking place in the nonprofit world. What we found most interesting was what people said was NOT changing: how people are responding to change.

One executive director said, “I see a lot of people going to conferences, talking about how much the world is changing.  But I see pretty minimal change within the organizations in response to that change. What I see are people doing pretty much what they’ve always done, only more of it and working harder at it.”

Does that sound familiar?

The challenge is not how to keep up with what's going on. Rather, the tougher task is how to make sense of the forces at work and determine which ones have the greatest implications for what an organization is doing today and aspires to do tomorrow. As Peter Hutchinson, past president of the Bush Foundation in St. Paul, said, “What can we do to get people to imagine different approaches, different solutions to these problems? . . . It’s really thinking differently.”

As Albert Einstein said: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

To produce a tomorrow different from the current state requires a change in behavior and thinking today. We must challenge our assumptions about the present and open our eyes to how the world around us is changing and affecting our organization, funding sources, clients, donors and volunteers. Only then can we begin to anticipate and shape a different path going forward rather than just reacting to the present.