Charities are built on an infrastructure of governance, culture, and ways of working that were inherited, not designed. And very little of it is fit for the world we're actually living in. At least that’s been our takeaway from nearly 15 years of Good Innovation, 5 years of running Good Futures and over 100 years of collectively working in the sector.
Nobody's job description includes "question whether we should exist in this form" - but, in various different ways, this is the question that we keep coming back to.
So - what if you had the time and space to ask, “If you were designing how your charity works from scratch today, what would you keep and what would you throw away?” Not the mission, not the cause, but the internal machinery: the engine room.
All of which makes us massively excited to introduce ‘By Design’: a year-long project exploring that question openly, with the sector. One question, twelve months, built in public.
Over the next year we'll be in the field interviewing people inside and outside the charity sector who are trying something different. We’re planning a series of workshops to unpack and explore the exam question, and our goal by the end of the project is to have developed the inspiration, evidence and tools to help charity leaders to reimagine their organisations by design, not by default.
The goal is to develop the inspiration, evidence and tools to help charity leaders reimagine their individual organisations. By design, not by default. Not to find one answer, because every organisation's mission, culture and context is different and that matters.
It's for CEOs asking whether their organisation is actually built to deliver its ambition. For fundraising and services directors who know something needs to change in their teams but don't yet have the language or the evidence to make the case. And for innovation leads who are trying to build new things on top of structures that were never designed to support them.
Who should we be talking to? Charity leaders with strong or inconvenient views about how organisations should be run. People from outside the sector entirely: co-op founders, organisational designers, governance innovators, culture experts. Basically, anyone who's done or is doing something structurally different.
Please get in touch with us if you have any thoughts, suggestions, questions, challenges or interesting people we should talk to!