Plan International Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ian Wishart had great doubt! He was staring at a blank sheet of paper that was to become, under his watch, the fourth strategic plan for Plan International and he didn’t know where to start.

Ian knew that Plan International had to change direction. Around the globe the For-Purpose model of children sponsorship was in decline. When asking the inbound contact centre staff what people usually called about, the answer was ‘mostly sponsorship cancellations’ followed by questions ‘where does the money go?’ The balance of income from fundraising had now shifted away from most funds coming in through child sponsorship and face-to-face cash giving, to chasing government and NGO grants.

Plan International’s programmes and fundraising activities needed reshaping, or to evolve or be revolutionised, but to what, and how? With great doubt comes great learning. Ian sent the Plan International Team out to learn about what other Organisations were doing, both For-Purpose and For-Profit. They read books and white papers outside of the normal reading list for a For-Purpose Organisation. They visited other companies and spoke with business leaders, consultants, and the board members.

From these learnings, a paper was produced and presented to the board. The board, already in agreement with Ian’s belief that Plan International had to change, said it was a good start but it didn’t go far enough. With the board’s encouragement and blessing, Ian’s team went even broader. This support gave the team courage to look in places that may have been previously dismissed.

From all this work, two management concepts started to take centre stage. They were Lean Thinking and Agile Development with both having roots in the same place, the Toyota Production System. Given the Toyota background, it is easy to understand why Lean Thinking is often thought of with respect to manufacturing process improvement, while Agile Development is used in the world of software development by technology companies.

A key underpinning belief of both Lean Thinking and Agile Development is the focus on the creation of Value. If any organisational activity doesn’t create, increase, or improve Value, then it is considered waste and should be stopped.

The strategy is premised on the idea that value must always be relevant and contemporary, refreshed in every decade, to meet the needs of stakeholders. Value for donors attracts them to the organisation and creates a relationship that invites financial support. Value for clients encourages participation in programs and significant change in lives and communities. While neither financial support nor development change can be absolutely guaranteed, our role as an agency is to ensure that we offer value to our stakeholders. (Plan International Strategic Plan FY17–FY19)

This was the platform that guided Plan International in a different direction. The approach gained board approval. It was time to write the strategic plan.

The Plan International Strategic Plan FY17–FY19 took six months to write. There was much internal consultation and still more learning. The plan was signed off by the board in September 2016. Following this new direction of Plan International, the strategy was launched at an all-staff function in October 2016.

Now the major challenge was how to execute the plan. As it turned out this was led by a new CEO.

Nigel Harris, CEO, Mater Foundation, would be considered by many fundraising executives to be in an enviable position. Mater Foundation had the freedom, the critical mass, and the functional control to choose what they did.

But as the saying goes, ‘be careful of what you wish for’.

In most For-Purpose Organisations, the Programmes Team holds the highest position in the organisational pecking order. We usually find the Fundraising Team somewhere down the lower rungs. Not so at Mater Foundation, the Fundraising Team was the entire Organisation, made up of over 100 people.

However, at Mater Foundation, being able to choose to do anything quickly leads to trying to do everything. People at Mater Foundation were becoming overwhelmed with the workload and the constant meetings. ‘We are doing too many things’ was the often-repeated comment.

The problem was there were so many opportunities being presented to Mater Foundation, especially from their community. These opportunities offered a way to offset the flattening of growth of the home lotteries operation and the fact that Mater Health no longer managed a Children’s Hospital, which was a valuable source of fundraising support.

The question on Nigel’s mind was, ‘how can we do more with the same amount of resources, without burning our people out, while staying true to our purpose?’

Nigel had many moving parts to juggle. Mater Foundation had grown rapidly, mainly due to the success of the home lotteries operation but also because of the many fundraising programmes: Mater’s Little Miracles; Chicks in Pink; Smiling for Smiddy; Prostate Cancer; Ovarian Cancer. Adding to this were the many community-based ‘Fundraise Your Way’ campaigns.

The rapid growth had meant the Organisation was now spread across five different offices. This physically separated the people and stifled communications between different departments. The result was more meetings, shuffling between offices, and ultimately less time to get the work done.

But hope was on the horizon.

In January 2017, Mater Foundation moved into their new office. This meant that instead of five separate, ‘rabbit warren’ offices everyone would be working in the same space, albeit spread across three floors. The teams could more easily reach across the floors to discuss cross-functional matters with members from other teams.

Mater Foundation had also implemented an impressive set of performance metrics. Nigel’s monthly Strategic Performance Dashboard would make all managers jealous from both For-Purpose and For-Profit Organisations.

To continue the operational improvement Nigel employed a Senior Manager for Business Performance, Improvement, and Change. With all the meetings, informal processes, and ‘stuff getting done by who knew who’, it was time to become more efficient. Staff were trained up in base-level project management skills. A change management programme—‘Stepping Up’—was launched.

More disciplined processes were introduced where new projects went through a qualification stage before being accepted. The aim was to address the basics before looking at concepts like Lean Thinking or Six Sigma.

In the mid-2000s Oxfam was given a wake-up call. They were basically told ‘to go look in the mirror’.

Globally, Oxfam’s leadership was exasperated at the multitude of different government programmes from countries around the world. Nothing was coordinated, programmes were cutting across each other, and Oxfam was lobbying for a better, cohesive approach.

But Oxfam International was guilty of the same problem. Oxfam, in the 2000s, had grown to 14 different affiliates from around the world. For example, in Australia, Oxfam’s beginnings were that of Community Aid Abroad. Each affiliate was operating under their own management. Therefore, just like multiple government programmes operating on top of each other in Africa, multiple Oxfam’s affiliates were also operating the same way, causing the same problems. This was reported in the major press and gave Oxfam the wake-up call they needed.

Starting out by better coordinating their overall approach, Oxfam made good progress in the early years. Then in 2013 Oxfam’s newly appointed Executive Director, Winnie Byanyima, pushed the global alliance to go even further. From her urging came the global organisational structural plan called Oxfam 2020.

The world is changing at lightning speed and Oxfam needs to keep modernising too, staying ahead of the curve to ensure we continue to fight poverty with maximum impact. Oxfam 2020, our confederation-wide change process, is an exciting opportunity to shape what kind of organisation we need to be. The aim is to create a much stronger Oxfam that is globally coordinated in every country in which we work. Throughout this 2020 journey our ambition is to:

• Become more globally balanced—and strengthen Oxfam’s accountability, legitimacy and relevance by becoming more rooted in the countries where we work, bringing greater equality and stronger representation and influence from the global ‘south’ of our planet;
• Strengthen our ability to influence greater global, regional and national change, and run better quality programs, through strengthening our ability to build and share knowledge evidence and expertise across the network of affiliates and country programs;
• Simplify and streamline our ways of working, especially in country programs, to be more effective and efficient through greater integration and collaboration and further reducing cost and complexity in country management structures, and sharing HR, IT and financial services. (Oxfam 2020)

What is very interesting about Oxfam 2020 is that it doesn’t follow the usual approach followed by For-Purpose Organisations and For-Profit companies alike. When faced with the need to better coordinate activities in Region, State, Country, or the World, the natural tendency is to centralise management. The common thinking is to create central reporting lines that can control all the activities of all the affiliates to avoid inconsistencies, inefficiencies, and duplication of effort. This creates a centralised Programmes division, Fundraising division, Operations, and more. Through this we create vertical silos that reach from the coal face to the corporate towers. Sound familiar?

Oxfam chose to do the opposite, it decentralised.

But again, they didn’t decentralise with the usual approach, they created ownership.

Oxfam 2020 gave each country the authority to decide which programmes were best for their country.

At the country level, the ultimate goal is to move from affiliate coordinated strategies, multiple country programs and multiple country teams to one single program strategy, one team and one budget per country. (Oxfam 2020)

Each country was given the empowerment to write the Oxfam Programme plan for their country. When we think about this it makes sense. Who is in the best position to know what they need; the in-country teams. But with this empowerment came the accountability to plan and execute.

Accountability for the delivery of the country strategy is clearly established from each country to the Oxfam International structure (so country to region and region to global) as well as to the CGG [Country Governance Group]. The same principle applies for responsibility over all program related issues (alignment to strategy, good quality program delivery, learning loops, etc.) and in particular social accountability to partners and communities. (Oxfam 2020)

When a team has the combination of Empowerment and Accountability we create Ownership. An important part of what Oxfam 2020 is doing is creating ownership within each country to deliver successful programmes. If you take away Empowerment, that is, someone else makes the decisions for you, or if you take away Accountability, that is, who cares what the outcome is, you lose Ownership. You must have both.

The important dynamic about creating Ownership is that this is an ‘intrinsic’ driver. It is not the ‘extrinsic’ driver of being told what to do. With the intrinsic driver that ownership creates, we are self-motivated to achieve the best outcome we can. When we are told what to do we deliver to what is expected of us, not what might be possible.

CEO of Oxfam Australia, Helen Szoke, embraced Oxfam 2020. Maybe given her background as a former Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner, Helen understood the power of self-motivation. In fact, when asked what she would wish for if she could ‘wave a magic wand’, Helen said:

I would like to accelerate two things. To increase the change we are doing around delegation, mandates and accountability. And to leverage Information Technology more to underpin the execut...