Designing nonprofits for impact with Julian Chender
11/4/2025
“We’re building shrinking models, which is also strategic plan-led. What is the minimum viable strategy for our organization? What is the minimum viable structure? What is the minimum viable organization that we can float to still have measurable impact on our mission?”
In episode 135 of Nonprofit Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton talks with organizational design consultant Julian Chender about how nonprofits can move beyond simple restructuring to intentional organizational design that aligns strategy, structure, and process.
They discuss:
how organizational design is not the same as restructuring
how design choices impact effectiveness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability.
the pitfalls of designing around personalities,
the importance of strategic clarity when facing downsizing or merger decisions.
The conversation offers nonprofit leaders practical insights into building organizations that are resilient, adaptable, and positioned for impact.
Episode highlights:
The Why Behind the Work
[00:08:08] Julian shares how his grandmother’s refugee experience, supported by a nonprofit, inspired him to dedicate his career to helping mission-driven organizations do their work better.
Defining Organizational Design
[00:13:53] Julian distinguishes between restructuring (shuffling boxes on an org chart) and organization design—aligning work, strategy, and structure for greater impact.
Structure, Silos, and Collaboration
[00:14:41] Every organization needs silos, but the key is designing them intentionally and creating “interaction models” so silos collaborate effectively rather than operate in isolation.
Common Mistakes in Nonprofit Design
[00:18:23] One major pitfall is designing around people instead of strategy—creating structures to avoid conflict or protect roles, rather than aligning to mission.
Balancing Human-Centered Values and Strategy
[00:20:40] Participation is critical. Julian stresses engaging staff across levels to co-create design solutions, ensuring buy-in while staying aligned to organizational needs.
Downsizing by Design
[00:24:36] Rather than simply cutting positions, Julian describes “downsizing by design”—revisiting strategy first, then reshaping structure and work to ensure the organization remains viable and impactful.
Participation and Ownership
[00:23:32] Julian explains how cross-sectional design teams engage in the process, preventing top-down decisions that lack ownership and ensuring the design reflects reality on the ground.
Benchmarking vs. Mass Customization
[00:30:01] He cautions nonprofits against benchmarking peers too closely—emphasizing that each organization requires a customized design rooted in its unique context.
Strategic Plans Require Organizational Design
[00:37:40] A new strategy almost always demands a new organizational design. Without redesign, nonprofits risk creating plans that sit on the shelf, impossible to implement.
Mergers and Strategic Alliances
[00:41:21] Julian discusses how performing arts organizations are navigating mergers and partnerships. Successful mergers require integration of strategy, structure, culture, and processes—not just financial efficiencies.
Examples of Successful Mergers
[00:44:16] He highlights the merger of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center, and other performing arts alliances, as cases where integration spurred innovation and sustainability.
The Key Question for Leaders
[00:47:57] Julian closes with the fundamental question nonprofit leaders should ask: What is my organization? He reminds leaders that organizations are always designed to produce the results they’re getting—if results aren’t aligned with mission, look at the design.
Guest Bio:
Julian Chender is the founder of 11A Collaborative, an organization design firm focused on creating healthy society through healthy organizations. In his early years, Julian was an internal consultant at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) under Tony Fauci during the agency’s response to the global Ebola and Zika crises. From there, he moved to external consulting, eventually joining Accenture’s Operating Model & Organization Design practice shortly after its acquisition of Kates Kesler. Through 11A Collaborative, Julian has consulted to purpose-driven organizations across sectors. He is a Certified Organization Design Practitioner and an ICF-Certified Coach who holds a master’s degree in Organization Development from American University and a B.A. in History from Swarthmore College.
Important Links and Resources:
Downsizing by Design: A Guide for Nonprofits
Candid Social Impact Staff Retention survey
Board Source Purpose Driven Leadership
Related Episodes:
131 When the Stakes are High: Centering People in Tough Nonprofit Leadership Moments
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Carol Hamilton: My guest today on nonprofit Mission Impact is organizational design consultant Julian Chender. Julian and I talk about how nonprofits can move beyond simple restructuring to intentional organizational design that aligns strategy, structure, and process. I appreciated how Julian linked organizational strategy with its structure and how those two need to be aligned.
As we discussed, many organizations at this moment are facing downsizing, but how do you do that intentionally with strategy in mind, rather than just looking at a list of salaries and letting go of your highest paid staff? Answering the question, what is our essence and what is it that we need to focus on now that will move our mission forward?
Most effectively is really key to this. And as organizations are doing this, I would put forth another recommendation. Ensure that what you decide to do with your resources you do have, the resources you do have truly reflects.
Ensure that what you do decide to do with the resources that you have truly reflects what is possible with those resources. I have been in too many instances where the go-to approach when somebody leaves is to simply redistribute their work between the remaining staff. We often joke about having too many, many hats as a nonprofit leader, and sometimes we hold that as a badge of honor.
And I really think we need to let this go and let go. The notion of doing more with less, I'm gonna say something that may seem radical. Let's instead do less with less. Now, it's really hard to say that with such great and growing need in the community, yet our goal should not be to have our staff so poorly paid that they also cannot pay their bills.
What work can you do to move your mission forward and you pay your staff a living, if not a thriving wage? The assumption for too long in the nonprofit sector is that we just have to make due that sacrifice is essential to the mission. I would posit that while none of us are going to or have even been seeking to get rich doing this work, we should also not be living under constant economic insecurity.
I don't really think this serves anyone. Candid recently completed their second survey for their social impact staff retention project, and the recent survey from Fall 2024 found that seven in 10 nonprofit employees are thinking of leaving their roles, they're planning, or in the process of looking for new jobs.
And the top two reasons nonprofit employees cite for leaving are consistent across their two surveys from 2 20 23 to 2024. Too much work and too little support, as well as inadequate pay and benefits. And only one third of respondents plan to definitely stay working in the sector. And this is down from 2023 results.
These patterns of too much work and too little support for too little pay and poor benefits. There's nothing new in that. But they're not a given. They're a choice. When you know how big your budget pie is, resist the temptation to just give everybody a smaller piece. Instead, ask the question, what is it that you can reasonably accomplish with these resources?
How can you support your staff so they themselves can live healthy lives? How can you put your and your staff's oxygen mask on first? In these challenging times? How can you put your and your staff's oxygen mask on first in these challenging times? Julian and I also talk about how organizational design is not the same as restructuring.
How design choices impact effectiveness, collaboration, and long-term sustainability. The pitfalls of designing around personalities and the importance of strategic clarity when facing downsizing or mergers. If you're facing the need to rethink your work or your structure, this conversation will give you a rigorous framework for how to think through the challenging decisions you're being faced with.
Welcome Julian. Welcome to Nonprofit Mission Impact.
Julian Chender: I'm so glad to be here. I've been following the podcast for a long time, so it's interesting to be on the other side of the chair.
Carol: Oh, it's nice to have a, have a fan on, but also fellow, fellow consultant and yeah. So let's, let's start out with a question that I always ask everybody, which is what drew you to the work that you do? What would you say motivates you or, you know, fundamentally what
Julian: To.
Carol: Is your why in doing the work you do?
Julian: So my, my why is actually my grandmother sda, who was a Holocaust refugee fled Mussolini and Hitler and came to New York at 17 penniless, and she was helped by HIAs, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. And if it weren't for a non-profit organization doing refugee work during the war, she wouldn't be here.
The rest of her family perished except for her father, who was also helped by HIAs. So. There, the business is actually named after her 11 a collaborative, 11 A was her apartment number. And so we have a story on the website about her, and, and she is kind of the driving force behind it. What got me to actually take the leap to do it was that I really wanted to learn organization design as a craft.
Like you, I have an organization development background and organization design I see as a kind of a specific niche and adjacency. It's a little bit of both, and I found one of the best org designers, the side of the Atlantic, and started studying with her, and then her company got acquired by Accenture.
And the idea of working for a big consulting company was the farthest thing from my mind. In fact, I had sworn it off multiple times. But the only way to apprentice with her was to work at Accenture. And so I had a three and a half year apprenticeship, which is amazing in this field. But it was with the Fortune 500, and especially the moment that got me to switch, was working in the Fortune 10 pharmaceutical industry.
So one of the 10th largest companies in the world. By, by revenue, and. We're doing the best combination of org design and org development I've ever done. And I'm so proud of the work. I'm working terrible hours, but I'm thrilled to be waking up at 5:00 AM to work on slides that are gonna make a difference to how this organization runs.
And then they announced that they're changing their name and I think, oh cool. That's wonderful. You know why? And I Google it. And the first 10 hits on their old name are opioid lawsuits. And the rebrand is lovely because they bought a lot of companies, so they're all under one business and now we need to rebrand.
Yeah, sure. And I said to myself at that moment, what do I want on my headstone? Julian helped the rich get richer on the back of the American people. Or Julian helped people doing good in the world do it better. Similar skillset, different application.
Carol: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. There are those moments when you have to kind of make a decision about things in life and sometimes they're tough and their losses there, but I really appreciate that. And so you talked about organizational design, it is something that is kind of a, as you said, kind of a subset or maybe adjacent, you know, there's some Venn diagrams with organization development, but I don't think it's something, even though I have been in the nonprofit sector for probably when I was inside organizations at least 25 years, and I need more than my two hands to count the number of times that I've been reorganized. Probably without a lot of intention or with some really misguided reasons behind it. It's not that organizations don't do restructuring, don't. You know, and, and inherently every organization has a design, whether they're being intentional about it or not.
But can you say a little bit more about what that practice is and kind of, you know I love that you were able to do in apprenticeships, 'cause that's such a rare that, that's a whole other podcast, but,
Julian: It is.
Carol: a rare opportunity in our field.
Julian: It really is.
Carol: A bit about. What is organization design?
And, and if there's any unique elements that are, you know, that nonprofits need to be thinking about when they think about it.
Julian: Absolutely, absolutely. Stop me if you have questions along the way. I think the first thing to do is draw a delineation between restructuring and organization design.
Carol: Mm. Okay.
Julian: So restructuring is moving boxes and lines on an org chart. It's moving where people sit in the organization. That happens within an organization design, but that is one of the least important things.
Carol: Mm.
Julian: Actually working off of an org chart to change your organization is probably the biggest mistake you can make in organization design, because an org chart has.
Carol: feel like I felt that one a couple
Julian: Okay. Okay. Yeah, because an org chart has so little information, it tells you a job title, it tells you a reporting structure.
Carol: Right.
Julian: Organization design is actually a lot more about aligning work to strategy.
Carol: Okay.
Julian: So it's a decision. Science is what we call it. It's about making trade off choices aligned to your strategy so that your organization can be aligned to meet the goals that you set forward. So what I say is that on one hand their strategy for a nonprofit, and on the other hand there's impact, and in the middle is the organization.
Carol: Okay.
Julian: Bringing organization design to nonprofits is, is, is a pretty foreign concept. It's well understood in the Fortune 500, if we have a new strategy, a new leader, a new market we wanna get into, we have to design differently here. I say, what's your organization? And a lot of what I get is, well, we have programs and we have staff who deliver the programs.
And that's, and I say, so what are the pain points around staff delivering programs? And I get a list of anywhere from 10 to 150. I say that's the organization that needs to be designed.
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: what it is, is aligning strategy to structure. And when I say structure, again, I don't just mean an org chart. I mean the structure of work, how work flows,
Carol: What do you mean by that?
Julian: like big groupings of work, like departments.
So I have a client who went from doing a kind of low level tech education to wanting to do economic mobility. The work is actually different for the new strategy.
Carol: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Julian: Like they wanna teach tech for economic mobility. Okay, well you need a different organization. It's not just moving people around. You need a different structure of work.
You need an advocacy organization. You need a fundraising body that you didn't need before because your work was self-funded. It,
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: know, the what the work is, the, what we call strategic groupings is actually the foundation of the, of the reporting structure. But if you just work from a reporting structure back, you're missing where the groupings of work are and how those pieces fit together, which is the most important part of work design, which is what we call process and governance, which is that every organization needs silos.
Everyone says we're gonna break down silos. And I, I, I chuckle to myself.
Carol: Every, every consultant I've talked to, every leader that, oh, we're gonna reorganize to get rid of all the silos. And it's like, no, you just created new ones.
Julian: Exactly, because
Carol: any of the other things that help people talk to each other,
Julian: Exactly. So structure is designing the right silos for your organization. So there's strategy, then there's structure, which is designing the right silos for you. And then there's process and governance, which is designing collaboration across the silos. And a lot of people say, let's co.
Carol: That? Because I think that's the piece that gets missing in the conversation,
Julian: Right, because a lot of people say, let's collaborate more and let's have a collaboration workshop and let's bring in someone to do, you know, some, some fun games and, and help us work together. They're better. But if there's not a designed methodology for collaboration within the organization, it's not going to happen.
So this is about what kind of meetings do you have and how often do you meet and what do you discuss and how do you structure those meetings? This is about how you get work done across different silos. So let's say there's an arts organization and they wanna do community engagement. Well, you can say, Hey, that's the community engagement team's point of view.
But you're missing so much opportunity when you do that if you don't bring in development and marketing. But if there's no structure for, we wanna have a new community engagement process, how do we bring in development and marketing? How, who owns the decision for this? How are we collaborating on the decision and how do we make the final decision?
Then you just end up with a one-off community engagement thing that does nothing to bring in new, new audience or new donors. So it's really about designing those intersections. We call them interaction models.
Carol: Okay.
Julian: the different silos actually work together, needs to be designed, and that's much harder than designing the silos.
And a lot of people stop at the structure.
Carol: Right.
Julian: And structure is a very blunt instrument. You'll, you'll change a lot, you'll get a lot done. The organization will look different, but that doesn't mean it's gonna function.
Carol: Right, and, and in my experience, well, I'm sure there were, you know, from the leader's point of view, many good reasons for, for whatever reshuffle we did. But, you know, sometimes what got done was paralysis because suddenly we were having to learn who our new teammates were, who our new boss was, what we were actually supposed to be doing now, and a lot of time and energy we were waiting for it all to happen.
Gossiping in the hallway
Julian: Yep.
Carol: Did you hear what's gonna happen?
Julian: Yes, and, and all for why is it aligned to the strategy? Is it helping you increase your impact? Is always the question I ask.
Carol: And what I, what I've also experienced is the reorganization to not deal with a personnel issue and suddenly that person doesn't have a job. And their job is very different. They no longer supervise people, or, you know, lots of different variations on that. What are some of the other mistakes that you see people making in trying to implement or design, even though they may not know much about it, but they have to do it anyway?
Julian: That is actually one of the things that I would say is more unique to the social sector than the corporate sector is designing around people. And it is the first in organization design. A lot of people are, we're, we're such a, we're such a, what's the word? Community oriented field. We're such a collaborative field.
We want to get along with everybody. We want to connect, we want to feel good about our connections, and we all are human beings still. And so instead of dealing with the conflict, people design around the conflict. So you'll have, you know. Two marketing offices that do different parts of marketing because the two marketing heads don't get along, but we can't fire one because we, you know, she knows where the bodies are buried or whatever it is.
And really what, what the thing is, is that designing around people is the opposite of designing around strategy. And it might sound crass, but. What we see more and more in the way work gets done post COVID is that people are interchangeable and that's not what we want to think in the social sector.
That's not what we wanna feel, and I don't think that's true. I think everyone has a unique skillset, but some things are fit for the organization's direction and some things are not. And how people grow into, I always work on growing people into their new roles. Like that's, a huge part of the org design is how do we upskill and grow the team.
We have avoided as many layoffs as possible, but there's always that part where you probably need a new hire. Not necessarily a replacement, but just the job didn't exist before. And so designing around people is the biggest mistake because it totally undercuts the idea of designing for strategy.
Carol: So if you have, if you wanna be of a human centered organization with a healthy organizational culture and, you know, value your, your people, all the things that, you know, we, we, we want for organizations, how do you balance that? And this idea that if you're built, if you're structuring around and people often say, you know, we'll build around your staff strengths and, you know, help them align to what they're really good at. How do you reconcile those, those things?
Julian: Participation.
Carol: Okay.
Julian: My work is
Carol: in, in my myself, getting laid off or
Julian: That has happened. That has happened. That's for real. People will design themselves out of a job. I've seen it happen. It, it's, it's, it's not a joke. I mean, when, and.
Carol: had somebody on the podcast, I don't think the episode has come out yet, where she described one of her, part of her journey towards consulting was when the organization needed to, you know, downsize, she raised her hand. 'cause she knew that given where the organization was going, she wasn't as good a fit as she had been when she had started 10 years before.
So,
Julian: And that's a brave move, and I respect that.
Carol: Yeah, yeah.
Julian: And that's the, for the best for you and for the best for the organization at that point.
Carol: Right,
Julian: I mean, I've done down, right now the field is in downsizing and merger mode,
Carol: Right.
Julian: That's the majority of my org design work. I have one growth orientation, but that's mitigated by financial strains.
So growth impacts less, less money. So either way, we're dealing with resource constraints. And I think in a field that is always going to be dealing with resource constraints, and especially now, like existential threats are very different this year than they were, I think 12 months ago. The field looked very different.
When I entered it, when I, when I made my jump into full-time 11 work, you know. 345 days ago, it was a very different field with a lot more ease. And now there's a rush to react to constraints. And in doing so, we often can lose some of that human centered part of ourselves.
Because of this, the threat puts us in fight or flight as leaders. Right. And so we're trying to, we're trying to keep the organization afloat. We will, you know, I, I kind of saw this as saving the children in the US is like, they cut and diced everything and there wasn't much of a strategy behind it.
It was kind of like a lot of downsizing is done in the way of like, who's expendable, who's expensive, what can we do without? That is a survival mentality, not a growth mentality.
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: The idea is that yes, we have, you know, three three and, and change more years of this at least, but how are we trimming so that we can regrow?
How are we trimming so that we can still have an impact on a smaller scale? And that's where strategy becomes the driver of an organization's design. I did a 60% downsizing for a social justice organization. That is not the work I wanna be doing,
Carol: Right.
Julian: if I hadn't done that work, they would not exist. So 60% less is better than nothing in my mind.
And
Carol: Every time I've been in an organization where they've lost people, it's just been okay. You're doing we're gonna split up Susie's job and Carol's gonna do half of it and Joe's gonna do the other half. And there's never any reconsideration of the work. Talk to
Julian: Yep,
Carol: how you help organizations through those decisions.
Julian: That was the star. So I'll tell you this down. I call this downsizing by design, which is. Intentional structured and strategy driven downsizing, which is we had a number of salaries that we had to hit to stay afloat based on fundraising projections.
Carol: Sure.
Julian: They don't need me to get to that number. They have an HR person.
They can say, who's expensive, who's expendable, you know, let's, let's, let's cut the budget. What they're left with is the same work. They haven't rethought the work, which means they haven't rethought the strategy. So the strategy for a 40% size is different from the strategy. For a hundred percent size, you can work on 11 issue areas.
Carol: size was probably trying to actually do 150%.
Julian: Right? So now we have to think about Absolutely, Carol. Absolutely. So now we have to think about it. What is our reduced strategy for the time being? Where can we be most effective? What is our essence? And they said, our essence is not useful right now because our essence is really policy and we're not passing legislation for the next 18 months.
So what can we do instead? And then how do we need to change things instead? So we got rid of entire departments that are not necessary, that could be necessary again in three years,
Carol: Right, right.
Julian: But right now it is not necessary. But if we hadn't done that strategy talk, we wouldn't know where to cut to regrow.
Carol: Yeah, I, I'm thinking we, I, we just had some folks help us. We have a very large, what was, what had turned, what was supposed to be a rain guard, that, that just turned into a jungle. And we had some gardening folks help us get it cleared out. And one of the things that they did was that the one thing that had done really well in that garden was all the.
All the shrubs and they did a lot of pruning. And yeah, that whole process is to help the plant regrow.
in a healthier way.
Julian: Yes. I, I, I told them this is like working with a bonsai tree. Very precise, very delicate, very slow regrowth.
Carol: And, and you talked about participation. I have never participated or been invited in when I was at a staff level into any of these kinds of conversations about how to redo the organization. It's always been top down, done to me and all of us around, you know, at my level. Talk about how, what that looks like and how you engage the organization to really have conversations, not just at the leadership level.
Julian: Absolutely. So all of my work starts with a diagnostic, an assessment. And that's where we interview. Senior leaders and then a very well curated cross section of staff at all levels of the diversity, tenure position. And we ask all of the same questions, which are pretty simple questions.
You know, what's the strategy? Can everyone name it? Can, does everyone have, is everyone on the same page? 'cause if not, that's where we have to start.
Carol: Right,
Julian: How are things working or not working? That's a structure and process question. What do you measure? How do you know metrics are so important to us in the social impact sector in terms of MEL, but we don't think about staff metrics as much.
And staff metrics are the things in organization design that drive collective behavior. So,
Carol: Can you say, can you gimme some examples of what those might be?
Julian: So if fundraising is measured on dollars raised. Marketing is measured on clicks. What are their shared metrics so that they can be working together? And this is part of, of, of solidifying the process of cross-departmental, cross silo organizing, but what their shared metric is, click per dollar or dollar per click rather.
So marketing might be doing great click wise, but it's not bringing in the dough. Development may be bringing in the dough, but it has nothing to do with marketing. So you're working completely separately on different things that make no impact together. What could you do together to triple that impact?
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: So if we have a shared metric for the head of marketing, the head of development, all of a sudden they're friends.
Carol: Right.
Julian: But we don't think about our staff metrics as much as we think about the impact metrics, which are very well thought through. So, I've kind of lost the thread on the question. I'm sorry.
Carol: I have
Julian: Participation. Participation,
Carol: participation, that's
Julian: how does the participation work, so.
Carol: what does participation
Julian: So the assessment gets fed back to the organization, putting the organization in conversation with itself. And it's really very simple. What are the problems we're trying to solve with a new organization? Design.
And those problems could be anything, but they're unique to the organization. The whole point here is that benchmarking doesn't work because.
Carol: About that. 'cause I feel like a lot of organizations get caught up in that.
Julian: So let's say you run a Head Start program in Houston and you're looking at the Head Start program in Portland, Oregon, and you want a benchmark, great benchmark away, but it's only gonna tell you what's working for the organization of Portland. It's not gonna tell you what you need in Houston. It's not gonna tell you what your funding streams are like.
Yes, there's federal funding for that, but it's not gonna tell you what your local environment is or where your relationships are, or how you need to organize your organization to be effective in Houston. Or maybe you're benchmarking against Headstart there, but you do Headstart and a food pantry. 'cause you're kind of a broad service organization.
Well, that's a different design. So the only thing benchmarking does is tell you what your friends in the field are doing, but it doesn't tell you what you need. So what we call organization design is really mass customization. The process, the, the theory is the same, but every organization is gonna have a different strategy.
If you have the same strategy as the one in Portland, but you're in Houston, it's not gonna work. 'cause Houston's different from Portland. So you have some geographic dynamics here that you need to take into account. And so we need to take that into account in your strategy. And so when we do participation, it's about bringing all of the voices in the, in the, in the organization and we get a cross section.
We always include senior leaders, but then a cross section of staff, the representative cross section of staff is like, I can see someone who's like me doing the work. So I don't go into what I call the McKinsey Cave and take the assessment and say, here's your new design. Because no one would own it.
They would've no idea how to implement it. It would be my best thinking, which is close to useless because I don't know the organization, and it would be a beautiful design that is probably difficult to implement.
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: So what we do is we get a design team. Depending on the size of the organization, eight to 15 people.
And we run them through the design process and sometimes we switch up the design team halfway through to see, get new voices in and you know, okay, we did structure with this team, now we're gonna do processing governance with this team. 'cause we need the heads of departments and we need different voices from lower down of how the work gets done to actually say, yeah, that process isn't gonna work.
Because when I file that report. It doesn't work that way,
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: And we don't know that unless that voice is in the room. So we can design all the processes we want with the highest people living. But if we don't have that, that boots on the ground point of view for process and governance and how those decisions are made, we don't have the right voices.
So I consider myself an org design Sherpa, which is, I've hiked this mountain many times. I know where the pitfalls are, but you need to hike them out. I'll carry your bags. I'll tell you where, where the missteps are. I'll guide you. I'll set up the frameworks. I'll teach you how to do this, but you need to make the decisions.
And ultimately the executive director is the one who has to sign off on it. And usually they then take it to the board. But
Carol: Yeah.
Julian: there is a, i, we, we call, I call it participatory, but not democratic.
Carol: Mm-hmm.
Julian: It's not like the organization gets to vote on the design. They get to give their best thinking and make up proposals.
The executive director is the one who lives or dies by the strategy. So they need to be the one to say, this is the way we're going. But if they were just to sit in a room with me and design the organization, it would be pie in the sky, useless.
Carol: Which is what I've experienced many times, and they weren't sitting with anyone who actually knew how to do it. So it was a total, totally different thing. But I love the Sherpa metaphor. I've called myself a sheep dog, a midwife. A doula. I like Sherpa better.
Julian: I love sheep dogs. I feel like sheep dogs have a great time. All the all the out, all the outdoors great scenery.
Carol: Yeah. Yeah. But. I
yeah, that's the point, right? You, you pull people through a process, but it's ultimately their organization, their decisions. They have to see themselves in it. They have to want to do this, it's all, you know, it's, it's what people always complain about. With strategic plans, it was like, great, we did all that work, but now it's sitting on a shelf.
Well, who actually did the work and how did it actually get done? And was anyone excited about it when it was finished?
Julian: Exactly as Dick Axelrod says, people support what they help to create.
Carol: Exactly. Exactly.
Julian: And the thing I'll say about strategic plans is, it is kind of interesting about the social impact sector. Different. You asked kind of what's the difference coming from, I mean, most of my, most of my life wasn't in corporate, most of my life was in public service in the federal government, a few years in corporate to get my apprenticeship.
But everyone asks, everyone sees me now as corporate transitioning into social impact and I get a lot of pushback for that. And I, my point is it's, it's not that different because your product is impactful. So if you see your product as an impact, then, then you can make that transition. But really the thing I was trying to do, I actually forgot what I was trying to say.
Carol: You, you were gonna, I you were gonna say.
something about strategic plans.
Julian: Oh, strategic plans strategy in corporate is so often done by consultants and closed doors, and that works there because it's cascaded, which in our human centered world of social impact. Cascading doesn't really work if people aren't bought into the mission and the strategy. They're not bought in.
I mean, they're not doing this work to get rich, so,
Carol: no. They're sacrificing a lot to do this work, and
Julian: Right.
Carol: need to see themselves in it. Yes, I have. I have been in places where I have been told to do that, you know, and it was called enrolling people,
Julian: Yes. We don't,
Carol: I'm like,
Julian: mm-hmm.
Carol: them I have no control over whether they are bought into this
Julian: Right. And so there's one client where we did a strategy and, and we, we kept doing full te the team was 25 people. We kept doing full team feedback sessions and the first strategy was 25% received by the team, and they had a lot of edits. Then the leader went back next time, 50% received, and then they finally got on board because it was their strategy.
It had been rewritten so many times by them.
Carol: rather just have people write it themselves from the beginning so that you don't have to
Julian: Right.
Carol: painful process
Julian: But at least.
Carol: leadership team finesse it at the end rather than at the beginning.
Julian: Exactly. The point I'm trying to make is that any strategic plan in corporate or in social impact requires an org design because if the strategy is anywhere from 10 to 20% or higher different, the organization that got you here is not the organization that's gonna get you there.
Carol: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Julian: The amount of change will vary depending on the amount of change in the strategy.
A lot of what we see is so much emphasis on strategic planning and participatory strategic planning and stakeholder engagement, which is wonderful. I love it. And then a one page Gantt chart roadmap for rolling it out over the next three to five years. And I just, I, I pull my hair out and I say.
There's no way they can do this. And this is also not necessarily like, this is where, this is where the org design starts. We have to actually now design the new organization for this strategy if it's gonna last five years. We need a five year organization to probably grow into this strategy. It's probably not gonna start from day one.
We're probably gonna grow into achieving this over five years. You know, you have your every year benchmark. We need to build a growth or growth model. Right now we're building. The growth models. We're building shrinking models, which are also strategic plan led, which is what is the minimum viable strategy for our organization?
What is the minimum viable structure? What is the minimum viable organization that we can, we can float to still have a measurable impact on our mission?
Carol: Yeah, I was at a conference earlier this year probably about in, I guess it was in April, and folks were talking about, you know, the impacts that are gonna, were already happening. I mean, organizations have disappeared overnight because of all the stuff that's going on. But then, you know, the, the, the ripple effects.
And one person looked back to the depression and said, well, what happened to the nonprofit sector during the Great Depression? And. It was a lot of organizations that did not, did not survive the, the period and then, you know, many transformations. And so I love the idea of, know, for, for the, because there's so many leaders that are facing these challenges of what, how do we do this?
How do we do this? We wanna do it humanely, we wanna do it well. But I really don't have a framework for how to proceed. So the idea of a minimal, minimally viable, how, what did you call it? A minimally viable
Julian: and structure, and they have, they have to, and they have to meet, they have to match. If you just do the minimum viable structure without a minimally viable strategy. You're, you're gonna, you're gonna sink your organization. 'cause you now have 10 people doing 40 people's jobs with the same goals and the same approach.
Carol: you, you still organizations that they, they, they pivoted during the pandemic. And now they're expecting things to go back to the way they were before the pandemic. It may not be happening, especially in the arts space and, and you know, where performance is happening and all of that.
And, and I think, yeah, folks haven't really grappled with what the current and future realities really are
Julian: Yeah.
Carol: What, how do they need to align to those?
Julian: Yeah. I would say good. Third to 50% of my work is in the performing arts because my wife is a musician. And we just finished writing with a colleague, an article that we were pitching to Stanford Social Innovation Review about how the performing arts needs to transform. And it's really an org design article.
Around strategic partnerships, mergers and alliances, and how to design those effectively. Because what I see a lot of happening is desperate mergers, which end up being, you know, at best you know, acquisitions or asset sales. We'll sell you these programs that are funded and we will close our doors for a dollar.
But when we're really looking at merging, so many people in the field do the upfront work. You know, you have sea change capital, you have LaPiana doing all of the upfront merger work. No one I can find is doing the backend merger work, which is okay. We've just merged now what we have to. Integrate our strategy.
We have to integrate our structures. We have to integrate our processes, we have to integrate our cultures. We have to, and we have to figure out how do we make one plus one equal three?
Carol: Right,
Julian: It's 'cause so much of what I see as one plus one equals either they're not engaged completely, so they're still 75% if you're lucky.
Yeah.
Carol: I couldn't do the math right then, but yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and it's been so interesting that for me, I've always been very curious about mergers and there seems to be so much trepidation in the field about those. I mean, I'm sure part of it is that, you know, we actually, we have a top 20% of the sector. That's very large and you know. And then we have the other 80% where they're tiny and their little mom and pop organizations, and oftentimes the founder or the next generation founders are there. And there's the people inside the organization who are so identified with the organization as it is, especially because you know they're there because of the mission and all of that.
They see it can, I think those are some of the things that get in the way of organizations' thinking. How might we band together? I mean, partnership Sure. But the full merger and it's been interesting, I was reading recently with Board Source there talking more about purpose-driven boards where the, the board is to, to focus on the mission, the purpose of the organization in the wider ecosphere, not just keeping the organization afloat. So keeping that mission going may be really. Strategic about how you approach a possible merger?
Julian: That's how I see it.
Carol: success stories in that area or is that just an untapped arena?
Julian: No, I've seen success. I've seen success and it's,
Carol: A story about success.
Julian: I.
Carol: end on a high note.
Julian: They're, they're two I can tell. And they're both performing arts. They're from the article that will hopefully be published. One is the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center where they played, they merged to form one governing body called Ensemble Arts Philly.
It happened because both organizations were crunched by a pandemic. The head of the Kimmel Center was retiring and there was no coordination between their main programming, which was the Philadelphia Orchestra and the center itself. And so the merger actually. Made for one leader who could program the Kimmel Center around the Philadelphia orchestra schedule, who could ask the Philadelphia orchestra to change their schedule if they have a big something to perform at the Kimmel Center, who could integrate the same marketing development, HR departments, and deduplicate all of the work that was being done there.
So there's efficiency, there's cost savings, and there's innovation. Because now there's the question of we have this combined organization, how do we do more? And so renaming Verizon Hall was a big deal for them, and that was something that was really, really, really wonderful. And it led to. Growth for the organization and all of these things they're doing arts wise are because they've combined.
And so it's not just that we're de-duplicating functions, it's we're actually leading to innovation and that's the bonsai tree and of a merger. That's the part that is, you need strategy alignment. You need structure alignment. You need culture alignment. You need process alignment, and you need to integrate and feel like you're one organization.
And that's where the vision comes in. Like a compelling vision for a merger is the most important thing in the world. The other is Toledo, Tampa, I think it is, or it's, it's the Toledo Art Center and it's opera, ballet, jazz. And they were all in Toledo, all competing for similar audiences with the same functions and structures.
And they got under one umbrella with the center and they were able to actually. Work together to schedule, work together to grow marketing for all, work together to grow. And then there's people like the Ordway Center, which is in Minnesota, where the Opera Ballet have their, and an orchestra have their own functions, their own, their own artistic planning, but they share backend functions.
So that's an alliance. It's not a merger. They're still separate organizations, but they share her, they share marketing, and all of that is a cost savings in a field that is ballooning in cost because it's human work. It's not automatable. And so, the arts will always be more expensive than everything else.
Carol: Yeah.
Julian: I hope that's a high note to end on.
Carol: Well, last question just to close out, what's one question that you wish nonprofit leaders would ask themselves when thinking about being intentional for their organizational design?
Julian: I think the really fundamental question is what's my organization? I think it's taken for granted that the way they're designed is the way it's always been and the way it always should be. I think critically interrogating the design is the first step to understanding if it's matching to the strategy.
So,
Carol: The thing you said before, it was like, what is the essence of what we're doing?
Julian: Right, because if you're not getting the results you wanna get, I tell you, your organization is always designed to get the results it's getting. So if your results are off, look at the design.
Carol: Okay. All right. Well thank you Julian. Thank you, so much.
Julian: Thank you, Carol. This was lovely.
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