From Spoke to Hub

Background for the Project

Strategic planning and execution in nonprofits are key to framing and pursuing a future state that ranges from progressive to radical in terms of social change. While strategic plans are often described as living documents that educate stakeholders, guide decisions, and inform action, in many nonprofit organizations the typical scenario is that the strategy is compiled to satisfy an oversight agency or an accrediting body, then tucked into a binder and set aside for a year, rather than informing the day-to-day decisions and work of the organization. This occurs despite notable efforts (Mintzberg, 1994) to position strategy as a valuable process of learning that involves strategic thinking. The distinction here, in part, is that strategic thinking (which can result in a plan) is messy, spontaneous, and creative, not a document driven exercise. As such, Mintzberg contends that it should not be constrained by set meeting times and agendas that drive the completion of a document rather than a way of fostering vision and a new way of thinking. It seems to follow, then, that this process could benefit from a participatory approach. While a reform of strategic processes is, I would argue, called for across organizations of all sorts, the focus for this action research case study was a small, grassroots, nonprofit agency. Therefore, let us turn our gaze to strategic work in the nonprofit sector.

Recently there has been a push to “corporatize” nonprofits, pushing business process and measurement, for better and for worse, into their way of working in their communities (Landsberg, 2004). In my work with nonprofits at the local and national levels I was once a part of this push, but I have come to see that this approach meets with only poor to mixed results in nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike. This corporatization is not an adoption of strategy making as vision making, as Mintzberg (1994) prompts us to consider it. Rather, the dominant model is underpinned by Taylor’s (1997) principles of managing scientifically, which separate doing work from managing it, and consequently focuses on strategy making as solely a leadership and management initiative.

Part of the difficulty may be that nonprofits have been convinced to adopt both the intention and the style of business process, and especially in small agencies without national infrastructure, there simply are not enough hands to divide work Tayloristically. In the case of strategic planning this wholesale adoption translates into the inheritance of a process that is driven almost entirely by data, highly circumscribed, perhaps even secretive. It results in a plan constructed by and primarily known only to those with positional authority at the top of the organization. It is typically linear in nature (Mintzberg, 1994) and skips over vision creation.

Even in good faith efforts to tailor the process to the operating constraints that distinguish nonprofits from businesses (Ronchetti, 2006), the results have typically been replete with worksheets and templates modified to reflect the service nature of nonprofit operations (see, e.g., Allison & Kaye, 2003; Bryson & Alston, 2004; Stem, 1999), and short on counsel regarding ways of facilitating and enacting the process. The importance of the disparate constituents of nonprofits including community volunteers and underserved clients, the broad participatory culture that aims to democratize voice, and the shift that occurs when for-profit goals of generating shareholder value are replaced with social action and community service as desired outcomes are largely unrecognized.

The strategic planning literature focuses on the generation of a document, rather than a living, social process of creating the future. The facilitation literature in turn leaves the pivotal process of strategic planning largely unexamined. The intersection of presentational knowing and transformative learning has implications for a new way of approaching strategic visioning and planning by fostering strategic thinking (Mintzberg, 1994) and building connections that will strengthen the overall muscle of the organization (Kasl & Yorks, 2012).

An Alternative Approach

I believe that what is called for is an understanding of how a more organic, holistic, participatory, and creative approach can be applied to the facilitation of strategic visioning and planning. Such an approach could cater to the impetus and culture of social action by incorporating artistic or presentational ways of knowing (Heron, 1999; Liamputtong & Rumbold, 2008). These may include linguistic forms of expression such as storytelling, poetry, songs, and plays, as well as nonlinguistic forms of expression such as drawing, painting, music, dance, and so on. Combining these ways of exploration and expression in a polyphonic, collaborative process that acculturates can render the plan and its ongoing execution within the organization alive, accessible, and sustainable.

We can consider strategy, at least in part, as an assemblage of ideas and images about a future state, a vision. The process of “strategic assemblage” applied in the action research study intentionally grounds mosaic work in storytelling and drawing. Implicit here is the assembling of people, their voices and perspectives, which are expressed and “fit together” in new ways on the basis of the process. Their storytelling fosters presentational knowing both individually and organizationally about the possibilities for the future, and by extension creates the potential for transformative learning to occur (Tyler & Swartz, 2012). Drawing and mosaic work are nonlinguistic forms of expression that contribute to the physical assemblage of a strategic artifact. The assemblage nature of mosaic art—joining small pieces to form larger shapes—makes it a practical metaphor for the collaborative generation of the vision and strategic plan that can transform the organization.

Dirkx (2006) helps us see the connection between presentational knowing and transformation when he suggests that “our creative, active imagination offers us, if we choose to see them and work with them, spiritual guideposts to our own growth, healing, transformation, and development of self-knowledge” (p. 32). This extrarational, spiritual dimension of transformative learning (Dirkx, 2006, 2012; Tisdell, 2012) resonates with the power of presentational knowing.

The Project

We can now turn our attention to the research project itself—the agency in which the action research took place, the questions that drove the case study, and the nature of the case study process.

Strategic Assemblage Process

Integrating artistic or “presentational” (Heron, 1999) ways of knowing into the strategic planning process was intended to open up new ways of thinking about the future of the organization and the community by upsetting the apple cart, shaking up people’s sense of what was possible, and as Grace and Wells (2007) point out, “to counter memories of bad experiences” (p. 99) with other attempts at strategic visioning and planning both within and outside of the agency.

The project opened with a typical process of entering and contracting (Cummings & Worley, 2008), in which relationships began to build. Conversations among MBK’s Executive Director, the Board President, and the researcher resulted in a set of agreements about the time frame and MBK’s commitment to the project.

A key agreement was that the process would include voices from outside the organization. The stakeholders at MBK comprise a network that extends far beyond the agency itself and the clients it serves. As Walker et al. (2014) point out,

The right of project stakeholders to have a voice in the shaping and development of project goals and objectives is being seen as an important . . . operational requirement as well as being an ethical and socially responsible requirement.” (p. 343)

A highly diverse group of participants came together that included the MBK staff, board members, other volunteers including students from a local high school, suppliers (e.g., the food bank), representatives from other adjacent agencies (e.g., the local hospital), as well as residents of the community and MBK “guests” who avail themselves of the services of the agency. As Grace and Wells (2007) point out in the context of their work integrating artistic ways of knowing into projects with young adults who identify as sexual minorities, “Social learning must be from the bottom up to engender consciousness-raising” (104), and inviting the guests to participate in the process was of particular importance to the agency.

A schedule was established for two large-group work events on weekends, and six evenings were set aside for board, staff, and a handful of key volunteers to work on actually generating the vision and plan documents. The study advanced through five phases, briefly described here and summarized in Figure 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A summary of the five phases of strategic assemblage for visioning and strategic planning undertaken in the MBK action research project.

In the Visioning phase, 30 people gathered at MBK on a Saturday. After an early breakfast, during which people gathered, made informal introductions, and signed consent forms, the morning opened with a prayer from the Board President, a Catholic Priest. Then, in a large circle, participants engaged in retrospective storytelling about MBK’s work, and their connection to it. This large-group retrospection help connect the participants to each other around their commonly held sense of the importance of the agency, and provided a foundation for thinking about future possibilities. Grace and Wells (2007), drawing on the work of Lipson-Lawrence (2005), suggest that art integration in learning can play an important role in expanding “possibilities for adult learning as a dialectical engagement between history and the present” (p. 100). Here the aim was to extend this notion to a history-future dialectic that included the present moment.

Following the retrospective storytelling, the participants organized themselves into pairs for prospective storytelling. They were asked to tell a story using this prompt: “It is 10 years from now. The Irvington community is flourishing. Tell the story of what the neighborhood is like, including the role that MBK has played in making it so.”

Next, participants continued to work in pairs to help each other select the most salient image from each of their prospective stories: “What is the picture that forms in your mind’s eye, when you tell or hear the story, that summarizes its most important point?”

With these images in mind, the group moved to the dining room where the agency serves the daily meal. The room was prearranged with clusters of tables accommodating four to six people each. There were place settings of three pieces of large sketchbook paper, two number 2 pencils, a gum eraser, one thick black marking pen, and two sheets of lined notebook paper. Participants were invited to draw the images they had identified in the storytelling space. This invitation met with the same eye-rolling and handwringing about not being an artist that Lipson-Lawrence (2005) describes in her graduate classes when introducing arts-based exercises. After some assurances that they would have more than one chance to work out their image (and after drawing their attention to the fact that they could choose to initially draw in pencil with the support of the gum eraser) the participants set about drawing their images—some in pencil and some with the black marker right from the start.

Drawing was an iterative process in three rounds. After generating an initial image, the group was invited on an “art walk” of the other drawings in the room. At each image, they would write on the lined notebook paper one specific, appreciative comment for its creator (So, not simply, “Looks great!” but rather, “I like the boldness of the arrows” and “The way you’ve drawn the knot is really good.”) When everyone returned to their own drawings, they reviewed the feedback they had received, and considered how they might like to experiment with a second version of the drawing based on what they had learned from the feedback. This process was repeated after the second version was completed, such that a third iteration was also created based on information from the second art walk. Before leaving the drawing room to return to the large-group circle, participants picked their favorite version of their own drawing, the one that would be included in the collective mosaic.

Back in the large circle, every member spoke about his or her image. Each explained what it symbolized and why it mattered, and then answered questions from the group. This reveal of the drawings moved around the group in a process of “pinging”: At the end of each image presentation, the participants were asked to consider whether their particular image had any connection to the one just presented and, if so, to consider volunteering to present next. This pinging process uncovered synergy between the images, and the participants quickly became skilled at identifying them, sometimes even vying with one another to be the next “ping.” At the close of this process, the participants were familiar with the full compendium of drawings, and with the connections between them.

When all the images had been discussed, the chairs were pulled back from the circle to clear out a 16 × 4.5 foot rectangle that had been taped on the floor. (This was the size of the available wall space where the mosaic would be installed in a series of panels. See Figure 2.) The images were laid out on the floor, and participants were asked to silently position and reposition the images until, without speaking, they agreed on placements that “made sense” to them. These placements formed natural clusters that could then be labeled. This layout became the design of the MBK vision mosaic. Participants quickly noted that they had created six “vision clusters” that formed an inadvertent but unmistakable arc, beginning with Inspiration (with its 100 W lightbulb), and moving through Dream, Unity, Energy, Community, to Achievement (with its 50,000 W lightbulb!). This arc was enthusiastically embraced, and these cluster labels later became the underlying schema for the strategic plan document.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

MBK vision mosaic, installed in the hallway that leads to the dining room where the daily meal is served.

In the second phase, Image Synthesis, an “inner circle” of board, staff, and key volunteers, worked with scans of the original drawings as a source for articulating strategic statements and brainstormed associated activities, obstacles, potential support, resource requirements, and so on over a series of evening sessions that included homework assignments. The intention was to complete a cogent, initial first draft of the strategy document, verifying the efficacy of the various images and clusters, prior to rendering them permanently with tile and cement in the mosaic.

In Phase 3, Collaborative Expression, the original large group reconvened to make the mosaic. After a brief lesson on the fundamentals of breaking and setting tile, they set about mosaicing their images, which had been previously rendered onto a series of panels (see Figure 2).

In Phase 4, the inner circle reconvened in evening sessions to create the Operational Plan (matching strategic elements to tactics, sequencing, time frames, and assignments). The images continued to provide fuel for focused and creative conversations about what was possible.

This brought the group to the final step, Phase 5, Finalizing, where the group worked on refining, agreeing, and readying the plan for communication and action, so that it could be presented to the Board for a vote. At this point, the action portion of the action research study came to a close.

Findings

This discussion is organized by the research questions underpinning the project, integrating pertinent literature, observations from the action research, and emergent themes and outliers from the case study interviews.

Implications for Practice

This study supports the notion that there is value in infusing presentational learning into adult learning environments where there is an interest in fostering transformative learning at the individual and organizational levels. In the interest of space, I will focus on three practical constructs that feel essential: the value of polyphony, patience with participant resistance, and time as a liberating structure.

The work of the group was nourished by the diversity of the participants with regard to both their life experience, social/economic/political perspectives, and their orientation and connection to the agency. This diversity manifested clearly in their stories and the resulting images. This meant that participants experienced the themes that surfaced, the natural connections, and the significant differences, as interesting, authentic, and worthy of consideration. There was no need to guess what “the other” might say, draw, or believe, because “the other” was right there in the room. In a midpoint interview, one participant, when asked how the process might be improved if we were to do it again said, “There’s just one thing. I know there were a lot of different people there, but we could have used even more ideas, from more different kinds of people.” I agree. Any time I do this work in the future, I will think outward from the agency in sets of concentric rings around it. Who influences the agency? Who is influenced by it, perhaps without even knowing it? How far out do the ripples stretch? Including people from every ring will provide the “alternative perspectives” (Mezirow, 1991, p. 198) that underpin the possibility of transformative learning.

In the United States, perhaps in the West, making art seems to have become something “artists do” rather than a dimension of reflection or communicating in daily life. And as pointed out earlier, the nearly universal initial resistance to drawing in particular was ultimately one of the elements of the process that helped reach across the diversity of the group, creating allies in their suspicion of making art. Participants were happy enough to tell stories, and even ferret out the most salient image, but when it came to drawing these images, there was a collective groan. Many exclaimed that they “were terrible at art” and couldn’t “draw a straight line to save my life.” I have encountered this resistance in other contexts—it is not unique to this group—and I have learned that it only requires persistence and patience to work through it. Humor helps, pointing out that fortunately their lives are not in danger, suggesting that if straight lines are too difficult, they leave them out of their drawings, and so on. I point out that they all have an artist within them but that it needs help awakening. I cajole participants to just give it a try, to notice how common these feelings are across the group, and remind them that there was a time in their lives, perhaps very far back now, when they did not feel this way.

Critical to success at MBK was the process design that allowed experimentation with three iterations of images, supported between “rounds” by appreciative feedback, and an awareness from the outset that they themselves would choose from their images the version included in the final mosaic. Balancing the authenticity of the images with an aesthetic that would make for a good visual experience was a tension, and in the drawing activity, it was necessary to continually remind people that they should think in terms of simple images, and avoid the use of labels. Ultimately some images did need to be simplified, and I checked in with the image creators to ensure that they felt the integrity of the image had been maintained. Where the participants lacked skill, they compensated with enthusiasm. As Clover (2006) suggests, “Going public demands a certain quality . . . but the underlying assumption is that so-called ordinary people do not have that skill, and it is simply not the case” (p. 58). I agree, but it takes time.

Participant resistance to art is only one reason that time is a critical consideration. This work, like storytelling itself, is extremely efficient, but it is not fast. As Alhadeff-Jones (2010) points out, “Time is at the core of any learning” (p. 7), but there are “antagonisitic rhythms” with which both learners and educators must negotiate (p. 5). Time is the most difficult resource to obtain, but practitioners doing this work should insist on a commitment from clients/partners to provide sufficient time for the process to unfold, for ritual openings and closings, quiet reflection, focus on task, robust and possibly contentious conversation, discovery, casual bantering, helping one another, and surprise. This corroborates the notion that transformative learning requires “sufficient time for collaboration, action, reflection, and integration” (Schapiro, Wasserman, & Gallegos, 2012, p. 359). As one participant noted, “It wasn’t at all what I expected . . . We didn’t hurry up to get something done and then move on. It was fun.” Remember, he is talking about strategic planning. He said “fun.” But this was “strange” work, and it would not likely have felt fun if participants were forced to complete it fast.

Limitations

This study is a highly contextualized single case, and was treated as such through a series of interviews as the action research project unfolded. While it is not possible to generalize from the study as a qualitative case study, this article is intended to spark the thinking of those who would like to integrate more artistic ways of knowing into their educative and organizational practices.

This project did require expertise in mosaic art to properly and safely construct a large-scale mosaic installation sustainable over time. The mosaic is a powerful metaphor for this particular work of organizational visioning and strategy making, and this metaphor of assemblage has potential applicability to other organizational processes as well. For practitioners who do not possess mosaic skill, it may be possible to bring in an outside mosaicist for the technical aspects of the art.

Mosaic is not the only form of internally generated art that can support transformative learning in organizational settings. Practitioners are encouraged to pursue forms that cater to situational circumstance. Indeed, mosaics are labor- and time-intensive. Where it is difficult to secure adequate time, practitioners should consider less labor-intensive approaches (e.g., muraling) that, while they may not be as metaphorically potent, will allow a process that results in a complete and sustainable artifact.

Conclusions

From a practical standpoint, this research informs our understanding about the integration of arts as an exploratory and synthesizing process that can create novelty and new meaning in and for nonprofit organizations. It further reinforces the elements of Yorks and Kasl’s (2006) taxonomy for expressive knowing as a way of fostering transformative learning. From a theoretical standpoint, the integration of theory about multiple ways of knowing, adult learning, and nonprofit management, into key organizational processes supports the development of new ideas related to strategic social change. Furthermore, there are implications for studies that might loosely replicate this one with nonprofits, as well as in other milieu such as for-profit organizations across a full range of types and sectors.

The process undertaken by MBK has been described in some detail here, in the hope that it will provide a malleable architecture for others who would like to engage in similar work that can make an important difference, in real ways, in real time.