Well, it means that if you are in a crisis, this is the best time to make changes – especially those things that have been most difficult to change in the past.  For this reason President Obama is moving quickly on many fronts:

• Financial regulation
• Health care
• Early education & child care
• Negotiations with countries in the Middle East

…and the list goes on….

For nonprofit leaders, it does seem counter-intuitive to tackle big changes at a time when your organization is facing financial problems; yet, that is the best time to do it.  To understand why, we need to understand the variables in this change formula:

Change = D x V x 1st < cost

Michael Beer at Harvard developed this formula, which states that for change to happen, one needs to have D (high dissatisfaction with the current situation or condition) as well as V (a vision of how things might be better in the future) and 1^st (the first steps to move one from dissatisfaction to that vision of the future).  And, the cost (emotional, energy, financial, etc.) of doing this must be perceived as being less than the cost of staying as is.

What makes today a great time for change are the first and last variables of the formula.  Most people are dissatisfied with the current economic situation and the dissatisfaction is high enough to make staff, board and volunteers more accepting of a potentially high cost of making the change.

Now is a good time for making major change in a nonprofit because board and staff leadership do not need to convince people it is time to make a change – they understand why the times demand that organizations cannot operate as they always have. 

This heightened awareness also increases the perceived cost that people are willing to take on to make the change happen.  They will expend more time, money and energy in order to get to a better place – that is, the vision provided by the leaders.  In other words, staff and volunteers will cooperate more readily with leadership to make change happen.

So this dynamic is what people mean when they say “never waste a good crisis.”  It is all about willingness to make change if you believe that there is a big problem.  This is a great time to make those changes that leadership has been unable to make during good times.

What other factors make this a great time to make change?

In other words, an eye needs to be on the long term even as leadership deals with any decline in resources in the short term.  The financial crisis will pass and each organization needs to have its core programs in place and ready to go as resources become available.  Organizations will address this challenge in different ways; however, they will all speak to the following three questions:

• Are today’s community needs going to be the same needs in the future? How leadership projects these needs will determine the organization’s response in both the short and long term.
• How should our organization respond to the community’s future needs? The answer to this question will determine the organization’s core programs for the long term.
• Are today’s core program service models the models that we will be using in the future? The program service models that organizations choose can be as important as the selection of programs in determining how resources will be spent in the future.

As one of my long-term clients has said, “If the board and staff leadership is not thinking about the future of the organization, then nobody is thinking about it – because the staff are too busy dealing with the alligators in the swamp.”

How are YOU addressing the long-term future while responding to today’s challenges?