LEARNING, ADAPTING, AND MAINTAINING INTERNAL

ALIGNMENT

I take issue with Auspos’s comment that

“there is no model for success.” My sense of the management literature is that there is a coherent picture of how organizations continuously improve and move toward higher performance and greater excel- lence. Auspos mentions pieces of the process (e.g., “Feedback, assessment, and learning need to be ongoing and con- stant”). While there may not be one single implementation model, there is a recom- mended process that looks something like the one outlined in the figure at right.

In this process, learning and improve- ment proceed through a cycle of stages that continually repeats. The process be- gins (Stage 1) with a deep organizational commitment to performance, excellence, and the core values and purpose of the organization. These commitments are in- grained in the culture of the organization and are palpable to all who work there. In Stage 2, organizations have systems for measuring and tracking performance. They utilize metrics not because their funders demand it but because they value the information as critical for their im- provement.

In Stage 3, the metrics (along with people’s qualitative experiences) become

the basis for analysis, reflection, and learning. Learning is oriented around the question “how can we do better?” Perfor- mance data are used not to assign blame but to better understand what is working, what is not working, and why. In Stage 4, learning is translated into action: strat- egy changes, innovations in products or services delivered, improvements in the systems for delivering services, upgraded staff skills, new talent brought on board. These changes should result in greater performance and more impact (Stage 5). Success reinforces the culture and com- mitments made in Stage 1, and the cycle repeats itself indefinitely.

Some community change efforts have

incorporated a learning cycle into their work. From January 2008 through April 2009, I was a consultant to the White Cen- ter Community Development Association (WCCDA), a small nonprofit organization

that served as the Seattle “Local Man- agement Entity” for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections ini- tiative. During that time and in previous

Culture of Performance: Deep Commitment to Core Values Metrics: Performance and Process Data Analysis, Reflection, Learning: How Can We Do Better? Innovations; Growth in Human Capacity; System Improvements; Strategic Changes High Performance: More Outputs; Greater Impact 5. 1. 2. 3. 4.

years, Casey made very large investments in metrics, including data collection sys- tems, reporting, and data interpretation. Casey required participating sites to build their annual strategic plans around the data and trained the sites on using data as a learning tool and paid for a consultant to conduct multiday reflective learning ses- sions with staff. Despite this commitment to data-driven improvement, my percep- tion is that the learning and improvement process never quite jelled, at least as of April 2009. The data collection systems were cumbersome, required high-level cooperation from many partner agencies, and the indicators may not have been “fine-grained” enough to yield meaning- ful insight. The reflective learning ses- sions did not tie back to the data and were a one-time exercise rather than a regular organizational practice.

Two problems stand out to me as even more fundamental. To my knowl- edge, Casey had difficulty communicating an overarching learning and improvement strategy (like the one pictured above), and I suspect that the WCCDA and its part- ners never fully grasped—much less em- braced—a path for getting to excellence. Second, and most critically, the cycle is absolutely dependent on Stage 1, the cul- ture of performance, which is very difficult to instill in a team that comprises people from multiple agencies, each with its own organizational culture. So, Casey was able to intervene with varying degrees of ef- fectiveness at Stages 2, 3, and 4 but was unsuccessful in conveying a picture of the overall process or cultivating a team cul- ture of high performance.

Toward the end of the initiative, the WCCDA got closer to a true ongoing cy- cle of learning and improvement. A ma- jor step was to bring data collection and

evaluation more in-house. Previously, they were conducted by a “Local Learning Partnership” that functioned somewhat autonomously, although not by intent or design. As the WCCDA gained more own- ership of the data, it saw the value of data in improving strategy and tactics.

In my experience, a culture of high perfor-

mance has to come from within the orga- nization; it cannot be imposed or dictated by an external actor, even one that controls the purse strings. It emanates from organi- zations that feel a deep urgency to accom- plish more, faster, and better. Usually the driving force is the executive director, but an unusually active board chair or board of directors can also fill that role. Collins and Porras describe this sense of urgency and how it becomes part of organizational cul- ture in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994):

The critical question asked by a vision- ary company is not, “How well are we doing?” or “How can we do well?” or “How well do we have to perform in order to meet the competition?” For these companies, the critical question is, ”How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?” They institution- alize this question as a way of life—a habit of mind and action.

I first thought seriously about per- formance measurement in 2002 when designing a set of metrics for ShoreBank Enterprise Cascadia, a community devel- opment financial institution with a mis- sion to focus on a triple bottom line (econ- omy, equity, and environment). The first and most significant decision we made was that the most important audience for the metrics was internal (staff and board

members) rather than external (funders and other stakeholders). The purpose of the metrics system was to hold staff ac- countable for impact, but it also had to provide information that enabled staff and the board to discern which activities were most effective in achieving impact and how and why they were working. The external audience, while acknowledged, was secondary.

In foundation-driven initiatives, the external audience becomes primary. But externally driven performance measure- ment can change the conversations that are so crucial for learning, because the re- lationship between learning and account- ability is delicate. Measurement for the purpose of accountability leads to defen- siveness and “spinning” of the numbers for public relations purposes, especially when funding decisions are at stake. In contrast, learning requires openness and honesty, which only happens in an envi- ronment of trust. High-performance orga- nizations have to manage this tension be- tween trust, accountability, and learning.

In 2009, my colleague Jennifer Frois- tad and I had the privilege of conducting site visits to four organizations that serve deeply impoverished rural areas: Southern Bancorp in the Mississippi Delta; Moun- tain Association for Community Economic Development, and Federation for Appala- chian Housing Enterprises in Appalachian Kentucky; and Four Bands Community Fund on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. Our research was part of an international study of “hybrid orga- nizations,” so called because they bring together unusual combinations of anti- poverty strategies by the Ford Foundation Rural Livelihoods Learning Group.

All four organizations (along with ShoreBank Enterprise Cascadia, which

directed this project for the Ford Founda- tion) are community development finan- cial institutions but view their missions much more broadly than offering loans or providing financial services. Each is a place-based organization with a deep analysis of poverty that encompasses lo- cal economic, political, social, and cultural factors. Their strategies attack poverty at multiple levels, from the individual to broader systemic and policy change. They operate in partnership with other orga- nizations that provide complementary services and institutional strengths. They are actively engaged in their communities and, in different ways, seek to empower residents or cultivate local leadership. They deeply respect the community resi- dents with whom they work.

In sum, they have much in common with community change efforts. Each ar- rived at strategies and activities on its own, responding to community needs, rather than at the behest of a funder or other external stakeholder. The commit- ment to community change is embedded in each organization’s DNA; they are per- manent, not transitory. Moreover, each organization has a learning and improve- ment cycle similar to the one described above and is skilled at translating learning into action. They have absorbed manage- ment principles related to learning and improvement and have instituted them in their organizations.

These experiences suggest that the inter-

nal alignment challenge is really only the first stage. We want to move the commu- nity change field beyond issues of inter- nal alignment to the pursuit of excellence. Beginning with Peters and Waterman’s book In Search of Excellence (1982), the management literature over the past 25-

plus years has explored many dimension s and pathways to excellence in different settings and from a variety of perspec- tives. I sometimes feel that the field of management has been the ugly stepsister among the disciplines that contributed to community change—never appreciated and infrequently consulted for the insight it could lend to these efforts. I am con- vinced that a critical examination of com- munity change efforts through the lens of the management literature would yield insights that could make future endeavors more sustaining and more powerful.e

Response Essay

by Frank Farrow Center for the Study of Social Policy Washington, D.C. Community change efforts are tough to

manage in many ways. They are com- plex undertakings with multiple partners and ambitious, varied goals. Aligning the many ingredients necessary to improve the odds for success requires a high de- gree of management skill, intentionality, and creativity.

This commentary amplifies several themes in Patricia Auspos’s chapter on the management structures and systems that constitute internal alignment. Build- ing on my experiences with the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s ten-year Making Connections initiative—one of several community change efforts that are place- based and strongly “results oriented”—it reflects specifically on the challenges of “managing for results” for children, fami- lies, and communities.

Cities participating in Making Con- nections work to build capacity in select

neighborhoods to achieve better results for children and families in the areas of im- proving family earnings and income (e.g., helping parents acquire good jobs with benefits, boost earnings and incomes, and develop and keep assets) and ensuring that young children are healthy, prepared to succeed in school, and successful in the early grades (as benchmarked by reading proficiency by the end of third grade). We call this a two-generation approach to ad- dressing poverty.

For at least the past five years, Making Connections cities have pioneered man- agement processes, structures, and tools that allow unusual alliances to manage by results. In so doing, they have developed results-oriented forums for community planning, invented new tools for tracking performance, and joined together around new “tables” where progress is assessed and strategies revised.

Efforts to develop a “culture of re- sults” were jolted by the national reces- sion, which forced participants to reevalu- ate strategies for helping families achieve economic success. Nonetheless, local leaders persevered with a continued focus on the core results. The fact that economic trauma reinforced local commitment to results instead of derailing it underscores the potential benefit of beginning with the end in mind and sticking with efforts to achieve that goal. Managing by results can sustain commitment to critical goals for children and families when many oth- er factors conspire to erode it.

PROCESSES, STRUCTURES,