Consultant Referral Processes: Summary of Meeting #1

For much of this year, Creating the Future’s Integrity Board has been focused on the people side of running an organization: Hiring and contracting processes. At our September meeting, we turned to another aspect of the people side of things: Processes for referring work to consultants.

Creating the Future is NOT a consulting firm. However that does not stop groups from asking us to take on consulting gigs! We often get requests for someone to facilitate a plan, or to help with an organization’s board or fundraising issues, all by applying Catalytic Thinking to the issues folks need help with.

When that happens (true confession), we mostly just wing it. We chat with the folks on our faculty, chat with those of our fellows who seem to be a fit for the work, and that’s pretty much it.

The last time that happened, one of our faculty asked, “Do we have a system for providing a referral fee back to Creating the Future?” (The answer: No.) That led to the bigger question overall: “How are our decisions made about consultant referrals?”

As Creating the Future steps into what’s next for our mission, we suspect we will receive even more requests for consultants to help groups who get excited about applying Catalytic Thinking to their work. And that makes it even more imperative that we have processes in place.

The following is a summary of our first conversation about this topic. If you would like to watch / listen to that conversation in its entirety, you can find video and downloadable audio at this link.  As always, we applied Catalytic Thinking to topic, starting with the first few questions in the framework. If you’d like to see a brief overview of the framework, head to this link.

Who will be affected by processes, procedures and policies for consulting referrals?

• Consultants – Our processes will determine whether you have the knowledge and skills and behaviors to be an effective consultant.
• Educational community – Faculty working in various capacities in university and other educational settings
• Potential clients
• Communities that will be served by clients
• Creating the Future as an organization

What would having a referral system make possible for these groups?

Consultants:

• A revenue generator. It makes clear the relationship and expectations around this with Creating the Future.
• Credibility that comes with being in an association. Gravitas for the provider and confidence for the buyer. Increases the confidence of the people that are working. Like a certification or accreditation. Gives confidence to the consultant that they know what they are doing and have gone through a process to become accredited or certified as part of the referral process.
• Saves time and money because they are drawing upon a bank of resources that have been tested. If you have a pipeline that comes from Creating the Future, you’re saving time and money not having to go out and do customer acquisition. It gives you a network for sharing resources and bouncing ideas off each other.
• Offers different opportunities. Spotlighting the different consultants by having an online conference or summits.
• Communities of practice that open doors for more perspectives on how to apply Catalytic Thinking work in different environments. Ongoing educational opportunities.

 Educational professionals:

• Clear expectations, credibility, confidence, community, networks, ongoing learning. Access to people collaborating to do this work.
• An important contribution to the field. Academia is often thought of as theoretical and distanced from the work. One of the things people are requiring now is ‘don’t just tell me about it but help me get it done’. And young people don’t want to just learn about theory, they want to know how this applies in the workplace.There’s a gap/chasm between education and training that doesn’t help the people in the community that need help. This helps close this gap.
• Ability to be with other instructors and develop pedagogy.
• An emerging field. Many instructors teach from the same textbooks over the last 10 years. There’s a new way of looking at this. We need to stop calling it “non profit management” because that’s about managing non profits and not making change for communities. What does this pedagogy look like when we’re asking folks not just to focus on the means but the ends.
• Hard to separate teaching and consulting, as when we’re running a workshop or using Catalytic Thinking in our strategic planning processes, there’s a huge amount of teaching that’s going on there.
• Everyone that you are consulting with has access to the Catalytic Thinking resources. This helps to affect the largest number of people possible. Looking at this through a ripple model. Who else has access to this and what does this mean?

Potential clients:

• Clear expectations to communicate to stakeholders (such as board members) to make them feel more confident and comfortable.
• Values assurance – ensuring that the values of this person that you’re going to get is going to align with your values and philosophies.
• Integrity and quality – what do we want our culture to look like and how far are we willing to go to back that?
• Transparency – you can be assured that this consultant or teacher is generating or living the values that Creating the Future has espoused upfront.
• Guaranteeing someone not just on the minimum standard of work, but on values. This is a conversation based on trust. The conversation about saying you certify someone based on a minimum number of skills is a conversation based on confidence. It’s a contractual conversation. It’s based on shared goals or shared ideals. Values are about trust and skills are about transaction.
• One phone call, one conversation – a single place to go.

Students in workshops and in classes:

• University pedagogy is not very good once you move beyond chalk and talk. So people having access to this thinking and access to other educators might be quite valuable to the students because they get a better type of engagement.
• Exposure to people who work from a positive impact value set. That is for, in our view, the right reasons.
• Public administration and nonprofit organization curriculums are focused on how to solve problems. Staying hopeful and being focused on what’s possible is a really hard thing to do.

Teachers/instructors:

• There’s the aspect of learning the framework, then there’s the part of doing this with a specific problem or challenge in mind. Buffalo State University created Creative Thinking as a curriculum. Some people who went through it could apply it to their organization’s problems through workshopping the specific problem.
• Thinking about going through the referral process, how do we match the needs of the client and their problem with the capacity of the consultant or educator. To explain or teach the framework and to facilitate the space to work through Catalytic Thinking.

Creating the Future as an organization:

• Streamlining and clarity of process. Creating something that’s organized and equitable. Who even knows about this, who has the resources, who is considered credible?
• Revenue stream. Adding a box to the org chart called “Consulting” that has its own personnel, processes, etc. It could be a legacy project much like Maxwell Leadership which started with John Maxwell writing books, then got into teaching, then eventually started the global consulting organization.
• Confidence in knowing that we’re advancing the mission – We could become an automated website that helps people through the process. However, as the resources and materials are amassed, create this as a companion to keep the course, otherwise it could just become a big data dump or something that you don’t necessarily intend for it to become.
• Important to get people who can work with Hildy and so that Hildy can continue with her other work. Bringing in the right people to make it work the right way. Creating the Future may need to create a support team, to deal with enquiries.
• This process is alive. A feedback loop – when people are learning, they are also teaching. And as people go around and around we ask, ‘and then what?’ It’s important that it always has people in it.

People in the communities that organizations serve:

• Starting to see the process show up in other places, whether or not it’s referred to as Catalytic Thinking. It’s starting to change the way people think or see things. One of the ways we know this is after a conversation relabelling “succession planning” to ”continuity planning”, there’s been several other leaders within the community using this phrase.
• Provides the community with a process that’s forward thinking to support the work that they’re already doing. A mindset shift. Scarcity vs abundance. Enoughness. Lots of people who are working in unofficial (not 503) community organizing, that do this but don’t realize there’s a framework or process that could support them.
• Empowering people at different levels of the system to speak the same language – giving people from organizations or academia the language to understand what people from these small groups or communities need so they can get it.
• The power in focussing and re-embedding consultants and instructors first on “community” and then on the “future”, rather than on “organizations” and on the “present”. Because the present is the past manifesting itself as whatever happens to be today.
• There’s a strong focus for services to focus on ‘managing the organization’ – e.g. Maintaining the funding, instead of focusing on what does the community need? The ongoing focus on “Where’s the money going to come from?”
• One of the things to rail against coming from non profit organization management is the funding structure – we’re all competing for the same fundraising dollars and from the same grants, and until that structure is taken away, we’re always going to be in that competition. By having consultants and trainers out in the community advocating for “communities first, then organizations”, it continuously shifts collective thinking to help flip this structure.

Other points raised…

• Preparation rather than qualification – when we were starting as an organization in 2014, we knew we needed to train other people and so we underwent training faculty. One of the things that came out of that was thinking through the lens of inclusion rather than exclusion, preparation rather than qualification. We would have a process that in order to teach you have to for example take this class or get a note from a client, whatever it was it was things that would prepare them to teach. If they weren’t willing to go through all those steps they self selected out. It was a mindset shift.
• Validation for many people already practicing in this way – Catalytic Thinking validated what Jess was either already doing and thinking, and goes against the grain of how consulting is being taught or practiced. This is an intuitive way of operating for a lot of people, and for those people this could be legitimizing their approach.
• A way of thinking and being –Catalytic Thinking is not a process for consultants, it’s not a process for non profits. It applies personally to anyone in their own lives. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of living.
• Future of non profit education – Hildy and Angie are working on an article in which they’re looking at the future of non profit education. What non profit education focuses on is the means not the ends, how do you run a non profit organization, not how do you change the world. Incorporating Catalytic Thinking into the classroom requires you to think about the world. What the students got out of a class on fundraising is equity issues and inclusion issues, because of Catalytic Thinking.
• Creative Commons – There’s a bank of resources already, but to know that once you’re in the pipeline you can take them and use them. Giving people a different level of permission to use it. All resources are under creative commons.
• How do we know we’re successful? When people we don’t know are asking these questions of other people we don’t know. It would be nice if every conversation only started with “who will be affected” and “what will it take for them to be part of this conversation”.
• This process is appealing to younger people. They don’t want formulas – step one, step two. It’s more fresh and extends across generations.
• Continuum of potential – what do you do with groups who aren’t ready for this. Systems of behavioral change, continuums of behavioral change – people don’t change instantly, they change in micro moments. Everyone is in a different stage of reaching for their potential about a certain thing. Folks that are thinking about getting referrals from Creating the Future will need to be at a certain stage of their thinking about how to make change.
• Address the relational aspect – When people leave, a relationship could break down, or there’s political stuff. How people are able to build relationships that are mission driven or ability to work through conflict or disagreements.

Reflections:
As we close the meeting, what is standing out to you from our conversation today?

• We can never underestimate the value of the community and connection. Comes up every single time as an advantage or something we all crave.
• The offering of not just hard skills like expertise but soft skills, representing the values of Creating the Future.
• Philanthropy advisors don’t spend the time to understand the values we have. Everything we talk about at Creating the Future revolves around values. This allows us to provide organizations with people who share their values, while also ensuring that Creating the Future’s values are upheld.
• Doing what we’re doing today just adds transparency to relationships. People on different sides of the relationship have different ideas on what it’s supposed to be. So having this conversation creates that clarity and hopefully leads to people working in the same direction and grounding in those shared values.
• Being privy to the process of the meeting – having Hildy steer the divergent and convergent thinking by asking questions. Going on a tangent and then coming back.
• Some of the attributes that we attribute to folks who are dealing with neurodivergent issues, is because we’ve created systems that make no sense. So how do you navigate systems that make no sense? It’s not creative, and especially if that’s not how your brain works.
• The word opportunity – it’s a great opportunity for each party to think about and discuss. It’s an opportunity for Creating the Future to think beyond the horizon. It’s an opportunity for consultants to feel empowered to position themselves as Catalytic Thinkers. It’s an opportunity for communities because the system is broken, and the worst thing we can do is to know that the system is not working and keep trying to make the system work.
• Clarity and transparency which deals with assumptions. How do we know we share values with someone? Combining that there is a framework and we share values – one of the ways we do that is through transparency.
• I need to see context – all of our brains work so differently and we’re all forced into a model that is not human. This process creates context for those who need to understand the whole before we can understand the parts.

This conversation will continue, as we step into the next questions in the Catalytic Thinking framework – conditions that must be present for our description of success to be realized. Join us on October 14th to be part of that conversation. Information is here.