The Art of Nonprofits According to Pablo Picasso

I lead two nonprofit workshops this week; one on the use of technology and one on how to communicate your impact.  I always begin my workshops with a similar theme: understand your organization and take a serious look at your values, vision, and mission.  Once that is clear, you can more clearly identify the goals and actions to take your organization where it needs to go.  Seems simple but in most cases, these are extremely hard conversations to have and even harder to reach consensus.

As I was leaving my Forefront workshop in Galesburg, Illinois, I drove past a construction crew working on a house and had to capture the image.  The signs read "Every action of creation is first of all an act of destruction" by Pablo Picasso.  Genius and true!

If you want to build strong buildings and organizations, you first have to tear them apart, see what you're dealing with, come up with a plan for improvement and then build it.

This also reminds of nonprofit guru, Joan Garry, her mantra that "nonprofits are messy".  They are.  Although they operate often in a chaotic environment with multiple stakeholders with competing demands and interests, their work should be focused with a common purpose.  Kudos to all those nonprofit works working in chaos.  I hope that you have the opportunity and courage to embrace destruction so you can emerge stronger.