Organizational Study
You don’t know what you have until you look, right?
An organizational study is intended to provide a closer look at the various components that need to come together to make the whole organization work well and be more resilience. In The Resilience Practice Mix (see below) an Organizational Study supports the practice of Looking Back. There are five areas of examination in our organizational study. These include:
- Environmental Scan: The environmental scan identifies and analyzes the external context in which the organization functions.
- Internal Analysis: Assessment of the key assets, resources, and capabilities of the organization upon which to build successful strategies.
- Strategies Analysis: Identification of strategies the organization can use to create or maintain a sustainable competitive advantage, which for nonprofits often means consistently delivering high quality services over the long-term.
- Implementation: Identification and recommendation of objectives to set and actions to take for the organization to align with its vision and mission and to achieve its strategic goals.
- Leadership, Structure, and Culture Review: Identification and recommendation of an optimal role for the organization’s leadership, structure, and culture for supporting implementation of the recommendations emerging from the analysis.
Supporting Resilience
An Organizational Study is a way of Looking Back at what a group has been doing and taking stock of how well it has been performing. In this way an Organizational Study contributes to The Resilience Practice Mix, which, as a whole, strengthens the resilience of nonprofit organizations, businesses, associations, and even whole communities.
An Organizational Study helps identify an organization’s competitive advantage. Once known, the competitive advantage can be used to inform the existing vision, mission, and goals of an organization as part of the Looking Ahead process. In this way it can point an organization in the direction of potential growth and development.
Additionally, an Organizational Study contributes to Minding by helping the organization identify areas where management improvement is needed. Finally, it contributes to effective Responding as it helps to focus its efforts in moving forward with its plans.
