Creating the Future's Integrity Body (Board) Meeting:
Monday, September 9, 2024
10am-12pm Pacific time / 1pm-3pm Eastern time / 6pm-8pm UK time
Topic:
Designing Consultant Referral Processes via Catalytic Thinking
Watch the meeting LIVE at this post. Just scroll to the very bottom of the page.
Details about how to participate are below.
Designing Consultant Referral Processes: Catalytic Thinking in Action
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. This month, we will turn 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 seemed to bring us back 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.
That is what our Integrity Team will begin discussing at our September meeting. And as always, the conversation will be a whole lot richer if you are at the table with us!
How to Prepare
First, let us know if you plan to attend by sending a note at this link.
Second, please look through the links throughout this post, to familiarize yourself with the topic at hand. Our planning to get to this point has been extensive and community-driven, so those links will help you be up to speed for this important conversation.
Third, if you are not familiar with Catalytic Thinking or the Integrity functions of our board, the following will be helpful:
The Catalytic Thinking Framework is described at this link, with links to videos and other documents that can help you understand the framework. You can also check out the questions that guide Catalytic Thinking at this link. We recommend having those questions available during the meeting, to spark your thinking during the discussion.
To get a sense of the context of our Integrity Board, this post introduces our thinking about that.
3 Ways to participate
If you have never been part of Creating the Future's work, all our strategy and board meetings are open and participatory, for anyone who wants to be part of the discussion. You can see more about that at this link.
Where we meet:
The board meeting will take place online via Zoom. You can watch it right here at this post. If the video does not appear precisely on time, please be patient – we are probably just running a few minutes late.
There are 3 ways you can participate in our meetings.
- If you are already familiar with and committed to Creating the Future’s work, and you would like to be actively involved in the meeting discussion side-by-side at our online “meeting table,” let us know, and we will send you an invitation to join us online. Read more here about what it means to participate in that way. (Please note that these seats are limited, to ensure everyone's voice can be heard. If you are not able to be in the room with us, no worries - there are still two other ways to share your insights with us!)
- If you want to participate but are unable to be in the meeting itself (perhaps you’re at work, or maybe at home with kids running around, etc.), watch the live-stream in real time and tweet your questions and ideas to us via the hashtag #CreatingTheFuture. We read those tweets aloud during the meeting, just as if you were there. This is a great first step for those who are not as familiar with our work, but want to get more involved.
(Please note: We will only see your tweets if you use the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag. In addition, during the meeting, we will not look at blog comments here at this post. While we will check those comments later, during the meeting we will only be following the #CreatingTheFuture hashtag in the Twitter stream.)
- Lastly, if you want to simply watch, or you want to think about what you’re hearing and respond later – or if you will be watching the recording after the meeting happens – please add your thoughts into the comments here at this post. We will include that thinking into the mix of things.
We look forward to your being part of the discussion!
* All Creating the Future's board meetings are open for anyone to participate, or to watch afterwards. To learn more about the thinking behind this openness - and our experiences with being open - click here.
Logistics: The meeting will happen right here at this post. Details are below.
Watch the meeting HERE on Monday September 9th
Note: if the meeting does not start on time please be patient as we may be running a few minutes late.
or, After the meeting - LISTEN TO THE MEETING HERE
or Download the MP3
(To download to your hard drive, right-click {or click and hold on a Mac} on the link above and select "Save Target As".. or "Save Link as"... depending on your browser)
I am curious on how this process works and would like to watch your meeting to gain a better understanding. If I have ideas or thoughts to add, I will tweet them.