Deborah grabs a great quote here: Organizational culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Her quote raises interesting questions about the power of organizational culture and the power of strategy. How does strategy relate to organizational culture? Can a strategy "infect" the organizational culture and alter the organizational DNA? Are good strategies only appropriate for some organizational cultures?
A big part of the work on network-centric advocacy is tied up in this disconnect of "selling" good strategy to organizations that treat these strategies as an attack or simply are not moved by them.
The right strategy and strategy sale is not an affront to organizational culture (triggering an immune response) but the sale of strategy in a way that drives the organization in the direction the organization wishes while slowly corroding the defenses inside. Selling a strategy to transform membership (while helping them grow members) transform fundraising (while raising more money) and transforming media outreach (while helping meet old media needs.) We all know what organizations need to feed on and how the Executive Directors and Board behave like predictable drones searching (more members, more media, more money). They can only measure "inputs" into social change work so they develop a ravenous hunger for input.
The challenge to us that want to sell them the medicine they need to make it "children's chewable" (which are soo good) so they ingest the strategy and begin to heal in the process and come to use the best modern strategies which focus on squeezing outputs of labor, skill, services and social or policy change.
The failure of organizations to adopt better strategy is not thier fault. It is ours.
