Answer nine questions for a glimpse into your durability.
The questions touch on three capacities that make durability possible: a clear organizational direction, the ability to earn and sustain trust, and accounting for the benefits an organization creates.
1. Can people throughout your organization explain what makes it special, beyond the services it provides? Yes / No / Maybe
2. When circumstances change, does your organization have a clear enough direction to know what to preserve and what to change? Yes / No / Maybe
3. Looking across your organization, is there a clear sense of coherence among its projects, programs, and decisions? Yes / No / Maybe
4. Can people throughout your organization explain the assumptions—the bets—behind its most consequential decisions? Yes / No / Maybe
5. Do the people your organization serves understand its work well enough to trust it, even when they disagree with its decisions? Yes / No / Maybe
6. When describing the value your organization creates, do its people use language that stakeholders themselves would recognize and understand? Yes / No / Maybe
7. Does your organization judge its effectiveness by the benefits people receive, rather than primarily by the numbers it produces? Yes / No / Maybe
8. When evaluating your organization's performance, do those making the judgments consider the benefits it is positioned to create tomorrow, not just the results it produced yesterday? Yes / No / Maybe
9. When deciding what to continue, change, or stop, does your organization consider evidence of the benefits it creates, rather than relying primarily on conventional measures of performance? Yes / No / Maybe
What do your answers tell you?
If you answered Yes to all nine questions, your organization may have a strong foundation for durability. That's worth recognizing.
But if you answered No or Sometimes to three or more, there may be important opportunities to strengthen your organization's capacity to remain effective as circumstances change.
Even a perfect nine out of nine isn't the end of the story. Durability must be sustained. It will always be a work in progress.
The good news is that becoming more durable doesn't necessarily require changing the work you're doing. It often means changing how you approach that work.
It's about replacing habits that undermine durability with habits that build it.
What would greater durability make possible for your organization?
You don't have to start over, adopt another program, or wait for circumstances to change. Sometimes the most meaningful improvements begin with a different way of approaching the work you're already doing.
We'd welcome a conversation about where your organization is today and what becoming more durable could make possible.
