Strategic Thinking and Organizational Architecture: A Snapshot

1. Strategic Thinking and Organizational Architecture: A Snapshot

2. Strategic Thinking: The Basics • Use limited resources to have big impact • Articulate, develop and test theory of change • Focus resources on high-yield activity • Help staff understand and commit to the Organization • Clarify the organization work to external allies and clients • Explain programs to donors and publics • Create basis for learning from experience • Build base for managing rapid change

3. Elements of Strategic Action • Social Vision: The “reality to be” • Organization Mission: “Reason to be” or purpose • Change Theory: Desired outcomes and pathways • Strategy: Concepts for implementing change theories, choosing programs and allocating resources (“No’s”) • Organization: Programs, architectured, alliances. • Results: outputs, outcomes, impacts vs. stories vs. institutional positioning • Learning systems: Integrate goals, performance indicators for operational and strategic learning

4. Defining Public Value • No strategic coherence without well-specified goals • Specification means: • dimensions of value defined • tensions and conflicts identified • priorities determined • (Well-specified ≠ rigid)

5. Snapshot of SGE tools

6. Strategic Management : What is it ? • “The design and implementation of integrated strategies that creatively use the range of management tools to fulfill the mission of the agency and achieve the Organization goals.” • To develop a strategy for an organization, senior managers must bring three elements into alignment: • A strategy should be substantively valuable, meaning producing things of value to overseers, clients, and beneficiaries. • It should be legitimate and politically sustainable , meaning able to keep attracting authority and money from the authorizing environment. • And it should be operationally and administratively feasible, meaning being able to be accomplished by the organization. • Senior managers need to improve and develop an organization’s capabilities in order to make a strategy feasible and the need to develop support to make the strategy sustainable. • In public organization, the judgement of political sustainability is based on the examination of the values at stake in the organization’s work; the interests of legislators or other elected officials; and the views of interest groups. • To judge operational feasibility, senior managers should use feasibility assessments among other tools. • In a democratic society, analytic tools such as policy analysis, program evaluation and cost-benefit analysis can be used to inform elected leaders about what the public will is and what can be done to create public value.

7. The Strategic Management Triangle • The Triangle can be used in an ongoing basis to: • Monitor support: Scan the authorizing environment for changes to the collective, political aspirations that guide operations. • Monitor Value: Search for emergent problems to which an organization might contribute part of a solution. • And monitor operations: Review operations for new programs or processes that could improve performance. Value Capacity Support

8. Context for Strategic Management • As the number and diversity of interacting organizations increase: • Strategic equilibrium becomes: • More complex • More challenging to structure • Less stable • (While potential for productivity, flexibility, and innovation can also rise.)

9. Strategic Equilibrium and Disequilibrium • Organizations with little or no change in • goals • authorizing Environments and • operating Capacity • are in strategic equilibrium • Change in some elements + • stability in other elements = • strategic disequilibrium

10. Strategic Equilibrium and Disequilibrium • Strategic equilibrium can be recovered by: • restoring the status quo ante in the element(s) that fell out of alignment • or by revising the other element(s) to be compatible with the destabilizing change • or by a combination of the two adjustments

11. Strategic Equilibrium and Disequilibrium • Deliberate strategy change as special case • Consciously alter definition of public value • How progress happens • But imposes obligation to accordingly: • reconfigure operating capacity • restructure, renegotiate, or otherwise revise base of legitimacy and resources • reconfigure operating capacity

12. Authorizing Environment Authorizing Environment Authorizing Environment Operating Capacity Operating Capacity Operating Capacity Goal Goal Goal

13. Strategic Triangle Legitimacy and Support Creating Value Strategy Operational Capacity

14. The Assessment Process

15. Organizational Architecture Inputs Activities Results Environment Structure Outputs Outcomes Impacts Strategy Tasks Leadership People Culture Partners, Allies

16. Strategy & Stakeholders • Legitimacy and • Support • Regulators • Donors • Publics • Creating • Value • Clients • Governments • Targets Strategy • Operational Capacity • Board • Staff • Allies • Supporters

17. Theories of Change • Imagining success: Plausible, sustainable future • Focus on outcomes and impacts • Process involves many stakeholders • Mapping pathways to outcomes • Design back to preconditions for outcomes • Map pathways to accomplish preconditions • Eco-intelligence and sustainable systems • Identify actors and dimensions of systems change • Develop multi-actor alignment and collaborations

18. Strategy, Organization & Learning Vision Social Impacts Mission Organizational Learning System Client Outcomes Change Theory Organization Outputs Legitimacy & Support Creating Value Strategy Architecture External Allies Operational Capacity New Strategy Programs

19. Organizational Configurations Simple Federation Confederation Functional Divisional Network/Movement

20. Organization Design Process • Generate design criteria • Generate and evaluate grouping options • Generate coordination requirements • Identify and evaluate linking mechanisms • Impact analysis and first choice design • Identify issues for operational design • Identify implementation issues

21. Network Design Process? • Convene parties relevant to issues • Articulate shared values and definitions • Explore what parties bring to action • Negotiate strategic directions • Authorize leadership for joint action • Agree on who does what to implement • Develop expectations for monitoring progress and adapting to change

22. Architecture Themes • architecture emphasis • Values based  Architecture elements key? • Organizational growth  Architecture change? • Social change missions  Architecture emphases? • Alliances/networks as Org configuration • Emerging forms: associations, movements, confederations, federations, partnerships • Constructing interorganizational values and stories • Bridging leadership as emerging capacity

23. Scaling Up The Org Impacts • Expand coverage impact on more people • Increase activities horizontal/vertical integration and deeper impacts • Indirect influence  change behavior of other actors to widen impacts • Organizational sustainability: entrepreneurial  task teams  project org’n  program instit’n

24. Indirect Scaling Up • Integration via government program adoption; • Joint ventures with other actors to expand; • Training others so they deliver programs via other channels; • Delegation and deputation  share staff, ideas; • Spin-offs that create new organizations; and • Organize local demand and community-based organizations to pursue self-help or advocacy

25. Issues in Scaling Up Impacts • Multiple approaches to scaling up: Which most appropriate to organization and context? • Scaling up challenges for Os: • Internal: new capacities; culture changes; leadership demands: emerging stories? • External: alliance building; change theories; relations to constituents; accountabilities; measuring impacts? • Social change and demand for re-invention  primacy of organization and leader learning