risk lessons and insights from covid-19

Melanie Lockwood Herman703.777.3504 | Melanie@nonprofitrisk.org

Risk Lessons and Insights from COVID-19What Next? What Now?

PART 1

About NRMC

The Nonprofit Risk

Management Center

inspires effective risk

management and Risk

Champions.

We help leaders identify

and manage risks that

threaten their missions and

operations, and leverage

opportunities to take bold,

mission-advancing risks.

www.nonprofitrisk.org

Overview

COVID Truths and Consequences

RESILIENCE: What Works...What Doesn’t

Closing Thoughts and Resources

How to Cultivate Commitment and Build Buy-in

Practical Palette: Resilience-Building Tools

COVID Truths and Consequences

‘Safe’ isn’t the same

Human perceptions of safety differ.

Not everything you do is essential

The need to scale back and shutter services last year made this fact abundantly clear.

Teleworkers CAN be trusted

▪ “Pass the Remote! The Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs of Telecommuting Teams,” NRMC▪ “strive for equity and squash

stereotypes”

▪ “the majority of telecommuters are Baby Boomers”

▪ “Remote Work Stereotypes: 7 Common Myths Debunked,” Krisp Technologies

Pre-pandemic, remote workers got a bum rap.

A turnover tsunami is coming...

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▪ 2 in 5 U.S. workers are already actively looking for new jobs

▪ 2.5 million U.S. employees quit their jobs in May 2021

▪ 9+ million jobs now open in the U.S.

Are you ready?

Uncertainty can inspire resilience

“Not knowing what to expect can breed stress and exhaustion. But when you know how to deal with it, unpredictability can actually make you more resilient.”

— Ginny Graves

RESILIENCE: What works? What doesn’t?

“4Sight” to build Organizational Resilience

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A repeatable process:

1. Hindsight – Learn the right lessons from your experience

2. Foresight – Anticipate, predict and prepare for your future

3. Insight – Interpret and respond to your present conditions, and

4. Oversight – Monitor and review what has happened and assess change

Source: Cranfield School of Management

What Not to Do!

▪ Hubris over humility: “We’re too busy

to plan for unlikely events”

▪ Believing your own press: “We’re all

smart and committed; we will work

it out”

▪ Overconfidence: believing that

“everyone will step up when and as

needed”

▪ Grandiose plans: Building resilience

with an epic goal (epic fail?)

▪ Hiring in desperation

What Works: People Focus

▪ Commit to cross-training and serene succession planning

▪ Try team hiring anchored in asking your team: “would we LOVE having this candidate work here?”

▪ Figure out where—along the bell curve—you should target retention efforts

▪ Resolve to turn “new hires into productive employees quicker”

▪ Acknowledge that you simply don’t know the source and timing of the next big disruption (or your next crisis)

▪ Distinguish the vital few from the trivial many

What Works: Humble Leadership

Practical Palette:Resilience Building Tools

Try the “Never Ever” exercise

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Final Step: Never ever exercise

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Capture what you’ve learned

Plan now to survive the ‘tsunami’

Critical TaskBack-up staff or contractors trained to do this and prepared to step in

Plan to fill any gaps, including deadlines

Review contracts submitted by the program team before execution; focus on key provisions such as indemnification, scope of work, and insurance requirements

1st: Senior Accountant2nd: External Legal Counsel

Deliver a contract review workshop to at least 2 members of the Executive Team by 12/31

Review draft monthly financial statements and prepare a summary memo for the Treasurer and Finance Committee

1st: Senior Accountant2nd: Deputy Executive Director

Train the entire finance team on the mechanics of preparing the monthly summary memo for Finance Committee review

Allow each team member to draft one summary memo during the next six months; provide feedback and suggestions on the drafts

SAMPLE Grid for a CFO

How to Cultivate Commitment and Buy-In

Eliminate nonessentials

“The first type of nonessential you’re

going to learn how to eliminate is simply

any activity that is misaligned with what

you are intending to achieve.”

“The only thing we can expect

(with any great certainty) is the

unexpected. Therefore, we can

either wait for the moment and

react to it or we can prepare. We

can create a buffer.”

—Greg McKeown, Essentialism

Build a buffer!

Sprint to learn

▪ To create a more resilient organization, plan a series of sprints, rather than a marathon.

▪ Each sprint is “a laboratory where the team learns about the changes that are actually needed, and the new skills requirements that change brings.”

“How to Improve Resilience and Adaptability Post-Covid,” GARP, March 26, 2021, by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding

Nick Webb from London, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Navigate change with Lighthouse Projects

▪ We must “....acknowledge that we do not know enough about the precise direction change should take.”

▪ “...rethink the notion of a project and move away from old project definitions and structures to lighthouse projects that act as living laboratories of change.”

“How to Improve Resilience and Adaptability Post-Covid,” GARP, March 26, 2021By Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding

Tap your inner voice as a coach

▪ Chatter “divides and blurs our attention.” Ethan Kross, Chatter

▪ When we’re conflicted between what we want to do and tuning in to our inner voice, our inner voice often becomes a constraint rather than a motivating coach.

See risk differently in 4 steps

1. Recognize the limits of your knowledge. ▪ Your grasp of its implications and tentacles is only a fraction of what’s possible.

Ask: who has information that could fill in the gaps and help me understand the nuances of this issue?

2. Become aware of the ‘varied contexts of life and how they may unfold over time.’▪ Instead of imagining a risk materializing in a very specific way, consider the

many different endpoints and circumstances related to a risk. How and why could the endpoint or impact be very different?

See risk differently in 4 steps

3. Acknowledge other people’s viewpoints.▪ Ask: “Who would disagree about the nature of this risk or its implications for

us?”

4. Reconcile opposing perspectives.▪ Ask, “what assumptions am I making? Do our contingency plans create a

buffer of safety that will protect our mission, regardless of the risk’s trajectory?”

Closing Thoughts and Resources

Don’t fall victim to ‘first-instinct fallacy’

“When a trio of psychologists conducted a comprehensive review of thirty-three studies, they found that in every one, the majority of answer revisions were from wrong to right. This phenomenon is known as the first-instinct fallacy.”

—Adam Grant, Think Again

Choose doubt over convictions

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“We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones.” —Adam Grant, Think Again

Reason like a rocket scientist

Develop your own 3 X 5 card! ▪ What leads you to that assumption? Why

do you think it is correct? What might happen if it’s wrong?

▪ What are the uncertainties in your analysis?

▪ I understand the advantages of your recommendation. What are the disadvantages?

Source: Ellen Ochoa, NASA

Embrace what you don’t know

Things I don’t know.

Things I think I know.

Things I know I know.

Things I know.

Focus on solving, versus managing, problems

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▪ Do you ‘put up with’ problems—big and small—for much longer than you need to?

▪ Do you know why we all do that?

Books that inspired this presentation!

Resources!

▪ Sign up for the RISK eNews here: https://nonprofitrisk.org/resources/e-news/

Resources!

▪ Consider attending the 2021 Virtual Risk Summit; learn more at www.2021RiskSummit.org

Free for CAAs!

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Resources!

▪ Check out the plentiful resources on the Assessment and Risk Resources website!

www.nonprofitrisk.org/CAP

Coming Soon!!

▪ Resilience Toolkit for CAAs

This publication was created by the National Association of Community Action Agencies -Community Action Partnership, in the performance of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Community Services Grant Number, 90ET0469-01-01. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families.

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Questions?!

Thank you!Melanie Lockwood Herman

703.777.3504 | Melanie@nonprofitrisk.org