Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 614. Hold Fast: Your Blueprint for Building a Resilient Organization - Brooke Richie-Babbage

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614. Hold Fast: Your Blueprint for Building a Resilient Organization - Brooke Richie-Babbage · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the good community.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So let's get started.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Hey Becky, what's happening?
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: One of our favorite humans on the entire planet is back in the podcast chair, so I'm pretty dang happy.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: And we're starting a new series.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, we just are coming out of Impact Up, hold Fast, and you know we didn't want the party to stop.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: You know we talk a lot about what starts here ripples, but one of our beliefs in that is the conversations that brought us together as a community that we went deep into in local meetups around the world.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: We want that conversation to not just go away.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: We want to like lean in and really walk through this together, and that's what this new series called Hold Fast is all about.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: We're going to go, you know, circle back with some of the people that really set the tone and led the way at the Impact Up gathering.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: We're going to answer questions that didn't get answered.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: We're going to kind of have a little bit of behind the scenes conversation, and so we got to kick it off with our friend BRB, who not only headlined Impact Up but she gave us all this exhale, this moment to say, man, we can lean into resilience in this moment when everything is changing.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: We can really hold fast to the things that drew us into this work in the first place, and so to have Brooke back in the house means the world to kick off this series.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: I mean this is, I think, brooke's fourth time to come back on the podcast.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: I mean I would come every week.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: If I could.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: You guys know how much I love spending time Right One day, every time, because I just think that they're.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: John, you're so diplomatic in this work and you never try to pick favorites, and I'm not sure what it says about me that I do.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: I'm like, yes, bring Brooke back.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: She is such a phone, a friend.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: But if this is your first time to meet Brooke Ritchie Babbage she is the founder of Bending Art Consulting and she is the goat of helping nonprofit founders and leaders launch, scale and lead their organizations with more clarity and confidence.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: And without the overwhelm man, brooke, I could have had you.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: If I would have had you 10 years ago, I would have been a new woman, I tell you.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah me too.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Both of us, we needed each other.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: But she's also host of the Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast and if you have not listened to that podcast, it is such an elevation of leadership, of strategy, of calm, of understanding and I really encourage you to go over there because she's helping experts move from overwhelmed to that clarity.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: And for the past 20 plus years she has had so many journeys.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: She's been an organizer, an attorney, a nonprofit founder and leader.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: She's been a professor of law, of social entrepreneurship and nonprofit leadership.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: She's been on boards and been a board officer many times over and I will put in here also she has also been such an incredible into mom and wife and friend and she's built the successful nonprofit from the ground up.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: She has managed a thriving team and raised millions of dollars to support a mission she believed in.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: She is so one of us and, through it all, what ties Brooks many journeys together is this deep passion she has for creating social change.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: So, BRB, welcome back to the we Are For Good house.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: Thank you for keynoting, giving us that exhale and we're about to take that conversation that you inspired everyone who came to Impact Up and we're about to take it to this airwaves because we want more people to feel that clarity, that less overwhelm.
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: Thank you for coming back and hanging with us again today.
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: I always really love talking to you guys, both on air and off air me.
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: I always really love talking to you guys, both on air and off air, and I am buzzing from the day and from the community that you guys helped bring together and I'm really excited to keep it going.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, the world is so bizarre, it is so chaotic.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: We are hearing every day from people in our community who are really trying to find that grounding and that hold fast.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: And I don't think you can go far in your email inbox or maybe a LinkedIn feed without seeing the word resilience.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: And when we talk about organizational resilience.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: I would love your interpretation, because this is really your bailiwick.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: What does that really mean, especially in this moment?
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: I'm really glad we're starting there.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: I think that so many people when they think of the word resilience, they think of grit, right, determination, pushing through, making it work, sticking it out all of these phrases that we use and especially now, with so much going on in the world and in our sector and in the communities that our nonprofits are in and working with and on behalf, that feeling of sticking it out, of pushing it through, feels really present for folks that that's not actually either all that resilience is or really at its root, what resilience is all about.
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: I think resilience is about holding fast.
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: I think that resilience the way that I talk about and teach resilience with the folks that I coach is that resilience is about thinking about the things at our core that keep us strong and steady and holding fast to those things that the world around us feels chaotic at least to me.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: Right now it feels really chaotic.
• 5:59
  Speaker 3: Right, it's bending and it's moving and the winds are around it and there's a storm, but it's holding fast to its roots, to the things that help it feel steady, and those things don't change.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: What is happening in the world won't change the things that will keep us resilient right, because it is about being intentional, about looking inward whether you're looking inward to yourself or to your organization or to your team and asking yourselves what are those truths, what are those practices, what are those habits or rituals that I can hold fast to.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: That won't change, that will be here when the chaos is over, that will keep me steady.
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: And then designing our institutions, our lives, our relationships so that we can center those things.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: That's where resilience comes from.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: Gosh, I love that so much and the word practice just like jumps out at me because I think it is a practice in a very active sense.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: You know, and as we build our life around those things, we do feel more rooted and grounded and we feel less shaken when the unexpected happens.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: You know, it's easy to think about how do we navigate individually as humans and like building these bedrocks of these things that we can come back to, these practices that keep us grounded, that keep our morning started in a positive light and keep us connected to the purpose of our work.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: In the same way, it's like thinking about that as an organization.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: How do you actually build a resilient organization?
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: It's gotta be the same same but different, right, brooke?
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, I would love to kick it to you Like how do we build a resilient organization in practice?
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: What are the kind of hallmarks for doing that?
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: One word I want to go back to that I said sort of in passing is design.
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: I think that resilience is about designing resilience right, designing the rituals and the practices and the habits, and so I love that you're asking what does this resilient organization look like?
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: Because it means that we are empowered those of us who are working in on behalf of organizations we're empowered to design a resilient organization, and it has, at its core, three elements.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: You want to look at these three elements in your organization and John is smiling because he knows I'm a structure of the work kind of gal.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Three things I love it Absolutely.
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: And so the first is clarity, strategic clarity.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: Resilient organizations are really clear in their core about not just their mission but their theory of change right what they believe is true about how their work mission.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: But their theory of change right.
• 8:46
  Speaker 3: What they believe is true about how their work works right, why they've chosen the strategies that they've chosen.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: I have a compelling theory of change.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: Resilient organizations have strategic plans, and I don't mean those wonky, boring 20-page shiny documents that when I was coming up, people paid you know, $50,000 to create and right and have on the desk.
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: Plastic laminate three-ring binder that never gets opened again.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: Exactly, that is not what I mean.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: What I mean is whether it's a three-year plan or, if you're a small organization, a new organization, even a one-year plan.
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: What's the North Star that we're aiming for together, collectively?
• 9:26
  Speaker 3: Do we all understand it?
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: Is it clear?
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: And how are we going to get there right?
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: What's our plan of strategies?
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: And really resilient organizations have a way of talking about what they do with the people in their community.
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: Their messaging is clear, right.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: Their messaging is clear.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: They their messaging is clear.
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: They know who they're talking to, they know who their people are.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: So that strategic clarity is really it's not more core than the other two, but everything I think you know the Virgo in me thinks everything starts with putting things in the right boxes right.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: The clarity.
• 10:01
  Speaker 3: The second piece that you want to look at in your organization is capacity.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: And when I say capacity, again, I don't mean the wonky jargony, capacity building kind of capacity.
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: I'm talking about people power.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: Right, do you have the people to drive the work?
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: This is your team.
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: Do you have the right people in the right roles?
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: Doesn't mean a big team, it means the right team.
• 10:26
  Speaker 3: Right, I have always had a small but mighty team.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: At every stage of my organization's growth.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: We were probably smaller than people would have thought as a team and we did amazing work together.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: Do you have boards, advisors, a network, a community of people that are in it with you, that are under the tent, that are moving you in the direction of your North Star?
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: So your capacity is really your fuel right to get you to your North Star.
• 10:54
  Speaker 3: And then the third piece of a resilient organization, the third element, is capital, money, resources, and not just money, money and resources.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: Do you have the time and the energy?
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: Do you have the in-kind resources?
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: Do you have an understanding of your finances?
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: I was a nonprofit founder multiple times and one of the things I love to say when I graduated from law school, I love to say until I learned I couldn't say it anymore, was I didn't get into this to do numbers.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: The reason I went to law school is so I didn't have to do numbers.
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: That was one of my favorite things to say.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I said the same thing as a public relations person.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: I was like I'm a writer, I'm not here to do the math.
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: I'm not here to do the numbers, all of us have to own the numbers.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: Yes, Exactly Right.
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: And so the capital piece is how are we bringing the resources in?
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: How are we being stewards of those resources?
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: Do we know what a budget means?
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Do we know what a budget to actual means and why it matters, right?
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: Do we understand our finances?
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: So, those three elements the clarity, the capacity and the capital you need them to be in alignment.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: Capital you need them to be in alignment.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: And, whether you are a big organization or a tiny organization, if you have a clear North Star, a good team right and the resources that you need, if you keep your eye on those balls, then you are holding fast to the elements that will keep you steady, irrespective of what is happening externally.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: I just think that you have a way of taking something that feels so chaotic and larger than life and distilling it down into a way that feels like, yes, I can handle this, I can do this.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: And I want to bring this full circle, because our very first impact up the topic that we took on was power, and how do we understand power, how do we recognize it, how do we share it?
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: And something that I am recognizing deeply in what you're saying, and it's really reframing the moment for me, is that you are giving each of us listening all of our power back.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: It is what we know.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: We have agency and understanding over our identity, over our narrative, over that theory of change that you've talked about, over the people that we want working in this, and I love how foundational it is that and I just want to say it out loud you have so much power in this moment to direct your mission, your community your narrative and your needs, and people are leaning in to listen, to see who is doing something, who is holding fast, who is standing strong, and you mentioned that you did this with little teams and small but mighty I
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: felt like you were talking about the.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: We are for good team over here, but I have such a heart and we do for the tiny nonprofit who is really trying to weather the storm and I think about it through the lens.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, I want to say the last stat I saw was like 85% of nonprofits are earning and raising less than a million dollars a year, so the vast majority of us are the small teams.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: So talk to this group, and what kind of advice would you have for organizations that have these small but mighty teams but they may lack, or they feel like they lack, the capacity to build resilience?
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: What would you say to that?
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: So the first thing I would say is no one lacks the capacity or ability to be resilient.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: And what you were saying, Becky, about taking our I won't say taking our power back, because I am not going to concede that anyone has taken it from us, but recognizing our power Right.
• 14:46
  Speaker 3: I think that if you are listening and you are a nonprofit leader, you are on a nonprofit team, you are on a nonprofit board.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: Understanding the power you have to design the institution that will have the impact you want it to have is almost more important than how much money you have in the bank, because when I was building my second organization, maybe nine months in, I had left my law job, I had borrowed money from my parents, I had given up my health insurance and I was sitting in a tiny office as the market was crashing.
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: I left my job in 2007 and then 2008.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: Yep, 2008 happened.
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: Yep, 2008 happened and every source of funding that I had counted on that I had been cultivating.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: I didn't even really understand fundraising, but I'd just been talking to people and be like this is the money I need and the people.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: I had two law interns who were going to come work for me.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: Everything went away and we had one of the most incredibly impactful years 2008 and 2009, in terms of actually transforming the lives of young people that I worked with.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: And I'm not saying this to like pat myself on the back about the work that we did, but what I always believed was that the impact comes from my belief that we can have impact right.
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: So your resilience comes from your belief that and I'm a bit woo, I will admit your belief.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: We are too.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: It's okay, right, I know we've talked about it, let's do it.
• 16:24
  Speaker 3: That you can design the institution you need.
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: And if you are designing it with $50,000, it's going to look different than if you're designing it with $5 million, but the design is the same, right?
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: So if you are a small team and you look at these three elements, right the clarity, the capacity and the capital For clarity, it's as simple as can.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: We explain our mission and our theory of change to a 10-year-old.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: Pull out a Google Doc.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: On that Google Doc, write this is what we do, this is who we do it for and this is why we do it this way.
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: And when you can write that, hand it to a 10-year-old and have that 10-year-old I'll volunteer my son, he loves doing stuff like this, he's 10, right.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: Have that person say back to you oh, I get it.
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: That's your clarity, right.
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: And then you take that and you sit down.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: If it's just you, okay.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: If it's you and your friends and family board, bring them along and you craft a plan for the year.
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: This is what we want to accomplish by the end of this year.
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: That's your clarity, right.
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: You can do that with one person.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: For capacity, we always think of staff.
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: I remember one of the most powerful conversations I had when I was building my team and you guys know I was part of my sustainable sisterhood executive director.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: I love your sustainable sisterhood.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: Me too.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: Me too.
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: There's still amazing, wonderful women in my lives.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: But as we were all growing our organizations and this was, you know, the maybe early 2010s I met them A lot of folks in the nonprofit sector still thought about staffing in terms of how many full-time employees FTEs do you have on your team as a sign of like success?
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: And so every time you thought about capacity or your team, you thought how am I going to afford another full-time person?
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: And so it meant that you grew a lot more slowly than perhaps you needed to.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: And I remember having a conversation where and something just shifted for me and it's still what I coach on we were talking about everyone in our communities that cared about our mission, that could help us achieve what was in that one page annual work plan.
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: Some of those people were paid as team members, and some of those people were advisory board members.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: They were board of directors right.
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: For those of you who run organizations, you're like what the heck is my board supposed to do this, right?
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: So your team, your capacity, your people power may not be, if you are a small organization, just the people that you can afford to pay.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: Think creatively about advisors, mentors, volunteers, partner organizations that have capacity you don't have where you can bring the content.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: So, thinking about all of the people that care about your mission and when you're small it will often be unpaid connections right, your leverage network is what I call it.
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: And then, third, your capital.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: When you're small, think relationships right.
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: You want to be building relationships, building a community.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: I have a lot.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: I get a lot of pushback from folks about building individual donor bases because it feels shmarmy to some folks what I will say, especially now.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: I have just been like touting this horn since January.
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: Now is the time to be talking to your people, to the people in your community who have an affinity for your mission, and especially if you're small, now is the time to say we have to do this together.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: Will you support what we're doing?
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: This is a time to get on the phone and talk to funders and say you have pots of discretionary money.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: How can we talk about leveraging those pots of discretionary money for X, Y and Z end goals?
• 20:18
  Speaker 3: How can we work together?
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: So they're the same questions for a small organization, but understanding the sort of scope and scale of that clarity and capacity and thinking creatively about capital is really how it might look different for small versus larger organizations.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: I just got to lift this because we kind of geeked out for a second about this idea of belief, right?
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: And how it like is so central and I think, once you have the strategic clarity and people can rally around something, that's what you need to be able to build believers in a mission.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: And we've been talking about this, because it's one of our core values, is that it's not always about the donors, it's about the belief, and I get that.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: That that's a way that you can leverage and pump, you know, way, way above your weight class, or lift way above your weight class, because you can leverage people that believe in something or want to see the change that you want to see, and I think that's beautiful.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Lens to that Like what?
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: What could your board bring to offer?
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: What could your partners bring to the table?
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: How can we do this creatively?
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: It's not always about the resources in the traditional sense of that, so I love the way and I will also say you're, when you think of capital, yeah, like, get only money out of your head, because it's not just money, like especially in this moment, right now.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: Here I go back on my soapbox, where it's like people have so much that they could give without it being monetary.
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, we want you to ask for that monetary gift.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: We need to have capital in the bank, but we also need the capital of connections and network and story and opening doors and canvassing in whatever way.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: I just I think that there is so much that you're helping reframe in what someone can give in terms of capital, specifically for small shops, but big shops, you got this too, I mean.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: I just think we reframe it.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: So I think this is so good.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: Capital.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: Think resources right.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: When you look at your North Star plan and you rally the team that you've built, the people power, you want to ask yourselves what resources capital R do we need?
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: And some of that's money and some of it's connections, and some of it.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: Some of that's money and some of it's connections, and some of it's in-kind and some of it's space and some of it's food.
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: Right, yeah, absolutely.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that was so good.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, this is the point of the podcast, that if you're driving, you need to pull over, because we want to get you active, we want to get out our pen and paper and, brooke, you're so great at getting us moving and taking action, and so I know you had thought about an exercise that maybe a few prompts that could lead us into deeper reflection of how do we actually get started in some of this stuff?
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: Where would you take us in implementing some of these ideas?
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: So I have a methodology that I have just recently started teaching.
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: I've been honing this over.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: I said the number out loud the other day and it was crazy 27 years I've been doing this work.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: I know I need your skincare routine.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: I don't see it.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: But it's one that I'm really excited about.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: So we talked a little bit about what a resilient organization looks like, and I think that some folks their brains can explode a little bit when they think, but wait, how do I get there?
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: Where do I start?
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: So this methodology I call it the core methodology.
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: It's really a four-step process for moving from wherever you are starting to the design of a resilient organization.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: So core stands for the C stands for chart, the system.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: So the first thing you always want to do is baseline when are you starting from?
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: So the question you want to ask is and if you are a small organization, you know, like when I first started, it was just me I would set a timer for an hour and just go deep into my head.
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: Maybe I'd pull in my sister or my best friend.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: If you have a team, do this with them.
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: Maybe I'd pull in my sister or my best friend.
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: If you have a team, do this with them.
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: The first question is do we have a clear picture of what's really working, what's missing and where there are points of friction and bottlenecks?
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: So what's working, what's missing, friction and bottlenecks and you want to look across your whole organization.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: One of the resources that I use for charting the system is something called an organizational design map and it breaks your organization down into nine building blocks and each of these are it's not just for nonprofits, it's an organizational design, which I am a student of organizational design.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: These are across any institution.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: They're made up of the same nine building blocks structure, purpose, workflows, information, authority, et cetera.
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: And if you sit down with this chart I can make it available to you guys for folks to download.
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: If you sit down with the chart and you ask what's working, what's missing, friction and bottlenecks in each of these nine blocks, a picture starts to emerge of where you need to lean in, where there's clarity missing, where there's capacity missing in each of these buckets right, so you'll understand what you actually need to focus on.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: That's step one chart your system.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: Second step is organize right.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: So once you've seen where you actually have to lean in and actually I'll say one last thing about charting it can feel like everything's on fire in your organization.
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: Thank you for that.
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: Right, we know that as folks growing our own institutions.
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: So another amazing day, Right exactly, and one of the things that comes up most frequently with the executive directors that I coach is they don't know what to look at next right, which of the things that feel like they are going wrong should I actually be focusing on now and what can I afford to let go?
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: So this is a focusing.
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: This next phase, this next step organizing is about focusing.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: This is a focusing.
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: This next phase, this next step organizing is about focusing.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: So, where there are problems, where you have realized there are bottlenecks, frictions, things missing, you want to ask yourself what systems and workflows and roles within those areas do we have documented and which do we not have documented?
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: So how can we look at where there are gaps and points of friction and bottlenecks and actually write down, document how we close those gaps?
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: And it is always about roles and workflows and systems.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: Who needs to own this piece, how do they need to work together and what systems and infrastructures do we need?
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: I am not talking about building them now.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: I'm just talking about naming what needs to be in place right to close these gaps.
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: The third is where you redesign for scale.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: So, now that you've illuminated the gaps and the points of friction, the bottlenecks and also the resources.
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: You have, what's working and you've organized your system, your institution, right so that you can.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: You are clear about the roles and the workflows and the systems you need.
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: Now you can intentionally redesign those areas using the roles, workflows and systems that you've identified.
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: This is where you say okay, team, we had to restructure.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: Our role map is what I call an org chart.
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: Our role map, let's figure out who we need to hire, let's figure out whose role needs to change.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: Let's move those roles around.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: Okay, team, we've realized that there's some bottlenecks here.
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: What needs to be automated?
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: Let's get those workflows that we've designed built.
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: So this redesign is where the meat and potatoes are or, my son is a vegetarian.
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: He's asked me not to say meat and potatoes, the nuts and bolts, right.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, perfect.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: Tofu and potatoes.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Exactly Tofu and potatoes.
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: He loves lentils.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: We'll say the lentils, the lentils too.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: But that's where the work really happens right.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: And this is you've set yourself up for intentional redesign because you've slowed down, you've sharpened your axe to cut down your tree.
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: You've actually said where do we need to focus?
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: What do we need to build?
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: Okay, now we're going to build.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: And then the last part is equipping your team for success, equipping your backbone.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: Once you have designed or redesigned your system, what habits, rhythms and culture do you need to put in place to sustain them?
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: Right, how, as a team, as a community, do we need to protect this institution we've now designed.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: So that is not a quick process, right, it's not something you're going to do in one day, but starting with charting, going to organizing, going to redesigning and then looking at sort of the backbone, equipping the backbone over six to nine months will walk your organization through the building, the design and building of a resilient institution.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: When Brooke says it, it just feels like someone has taken your hand.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: They're like gently leading you through it.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: It feels so just like what's possible and I hope for you that's listening out there.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: That was so helpful.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: You just got that for free.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: You got the BRB playbook for free.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: We will definitely drop that resource into the show notes because I do think a framework is so helpful in grounding in purpose in North Star, as you're talking about, and so I love that so much.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: Again.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: I just wish that I would have had Brooke 10 years ago, john, when we were in healthcare philanthropy.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: Can you even imagine?
• 30:24
  Speaker 2: I'm like in my head I'm thinking of friction yeah, thinking about where's our roadblocks and friction and they were so obvious, so I really love naming them and putting in a path.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: So okay, Brooke, as we're winding down, we got to end with a one good thing and we're hoping you're going to tie it maybe a little bit to this topic and so tell us what's kind of lifting for you in the spirit of resiliency and getting organized and owning who we are in our narrative.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: What's lifting to the top for your one good thing?
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: So I'm going to go in a different direction on the topic.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: I'm going to go back fully into woo for this one, because I've spent a lot of time, and it is in my nature to spend a lot of time on the how, right, the okay, let's do it.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: I often am told that I will go right from the beginning of a meeting to the work plan without saying how are folks doing?
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: You know, just hi, let's breathe for a second.
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: And you know, it's my superpower.
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: And, if I'm honest, what animates me isn't the how, it's the why, and so my one good thing is resilience is about design, it's about holding fast to the things that keep you steady, and my advice is, as we continue to navigate this hopefully not long period of chaos in our society, building a practice ideally daily, but even just weekly of setting a timer for 15 minutes and reconnecting through silence to your why.
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: Reconnecting through silence to your why, and it can be as simple as a mantra reconnect to my why.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: What should I be doing?
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: Please connect me to my purpose.
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: Whatever the mantra is, I find that being able to tap into that silent space is where the energy comes from for the how.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: So that would be my advice.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: It is wild.
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: You just said that because I just finished reading Untamed Glennon Doyle's book.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: And she has a practice of going into her closet, which is also my sanctuary, is the floor of my closet and doing this as well, 10 to 15 minutes.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: She calls it like find your knowing.
• 32:50
  Speaker 3: I call it be still and listen.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, Find self.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: Okay, I am receiving the universe telling me I need to do this in my life.
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: I hope you are when you hear it twice three times.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: Synchronicities are very important Done, done.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Brooke.
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Brooke, you're just the right person that's leaning into their gifts in this moment to walk with us through I'll say your words back to you complete chaos.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: You know I feel such a calm being in your presence, so I want to connect our listeners to your work.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: I know you've been developing a lot of resources.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: You've been spending a lot of time on this.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: You're always sharing it on your podcast too.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: What are all the ways to connect with you, like, point us to how people can join your mailing list and all the things.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, so definitely follow me on LinkedIn.
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: I post and share a lot there.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: My newsletter is, I'm going to say, pretty awesome.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: I'm a big fan.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: It is so awesome.
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: It's called Leadership Forward 321.
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: It's always a mini lesson on a strategic theme.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: Three lessons, two resources and something that I hope is inspirational and folks can get there at brickwithcheapadvagecom.
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: Backslash leadership forward.
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: And then the last resource that I'm also really excited about is what I call my game plan, and it's the you know, it's the action part of me, but it is a six question assessment for busy nonprofit leaders who are trying to figure out, sort of going to this core methodology that are trying to figure out why are we stuck?
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: They've been growing but they're not seeing the impact.
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: It's feeling too chaotic.
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: They want to get unstuck.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: Six questions and they will get a game plan report from me that says at your stage of development, this is probably why you're stuck.
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: This is what you should focus on.
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: You can ignore these other things and here are some resources so folks can get that at brookwichybabbagecom.
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: Backslash game plan.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Amazing.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: What a hell of a resource.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: I mean truly.
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: There's got to be somebody out there who's saying that is me, that is me.
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: I feel stuck and I think that's why I appreciate you so much, brooke, it's why I appreciate our listeners People who come into this space.
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: They don't want to just talk, they don't want to just listen.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: They want to be a part of activating the change that we want to see in the world.
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: So thank you for these incredible resources.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: We'll also drop some into the show notes.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: If you want to grab them in one place, please check out Brooke's podcast.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: It is unbelievable.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: It is such good fuel and growth for the week and just adore you, friend.
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: Thank you for being in my sustainable sisterhood.
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: Thank you for keynoting Impact Up.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: Thank you for bringing us back to calm and to center.
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: I just love being in this space with you and thank you both for the work that you do and the community that you build.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: I think that's what's going to get us through right, that's true, yeah, we're in it together.