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Recession Forces Nonprofits to Consolidate

Some buzz on various mailing lists has followed the publication of this article in the Wall Street Journal, by Banjo and Kalita: Recession Forces Nonprofits to Consolidate. Despite my own reputation for "business-like" processes, there are a lot of pernicious concepts that arise when we enter the realm of civil society as seen from the world of business. For example, in this article, the notion of the "weakness" of certain organizations is tossed about freely, when what it really means is financial weakness. But in the world of business (and the Wall Street Journal), that's the only weakness that counts. More significantly though, this article raises the cliched notion that there are just "too many nonprofits". (It's funny how nobody ever says that about small businesses in general.) Now I think there is plenty of silly turf preservation out there and I have managed many a nonprofit merger. But I tend to think that we need to direct our attention to the structure of the sector as a whole. How can we structure things so that, like in the world of small business, it's a good thing that people want to start small organizations doing good works? How can we make that sustainable? That said, I think this article is a valuable reality check in today's economic circumstances. Social service organizations are being hurt the worst and that has real meaning for people's lives, in the here and now. And it too raises structural issues as to how such services are best delivered. I keep wondering what we can learn from the social democracies of Europe and how those models of success might be blended with the social entrepreneurialism of our American civil society. Til then, there are people that need real help, right now. And they aren't getting it. Posted: 2/8/10; 5:55:38 PM #

The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy

A great many of my communication and planning engagements can be classified as some kind of "knowledge management". Thus I often run into the now classical hierarchy of data-information-knowledge-wisdom (each one is presumably a refinement of the former). But Dave Weinberger points out the problems with this model. Just like "knowledge management" was this fancy-sounding (but empty) bucket into which sales operations could toss just about anything, the DIKW hierarchy lacks the sort of rigor that actually leads to good planning. The term "knowledge" is bad enough. When you get to "wisdom", you know you are no longer in a place to agree on terms. Some people like it that way, since it allows the appearance of agreement. I have to say I'm with the author. I don't. Posted: 2/8/10; 5:43:43 PM #

The Small School's Technology Planner

I'm teaching a new Technology Planning workshop soon - from the You're Doing it Wrong series - and I am still pretty disappointed with many of the planning guides out there. The Small School's Technology Planner is a great exception. It avoids the common tech-centered flaws of most such guides, embraces user involvement (but not in the "survey and shopping" list sense of the term), and makes a strong case for pilot projects as a part of planning. This isn't just for schools. Posted: 2/8/10; 5:31:53 PM #