Mennonite Central Committee weighs overhaul

Central Penn Business Journal, Jul 25, 2008 by Dagan, David

LANCASTER COUNTY

When Mennonite Central Committee takes a hard look in the mirror, it needs at least a dozen mirrors.

The nonprofit peace and antipoverty organization recently began a sweeping review of its mission and its structure. That's a big job for a group that includes 12 separate units across the U.S. and Canada, scores of informal chapters around the world and thousands of devoted volunteers. Akron, Lancaster County, is the base for MCC's biggest unit, which manages international programs.

"We are very locally responsive and very accountable locally," said ArIi Klassen, who leads the Akronbased unit. "The weakness of that system is that it's very difficult to make organization-wide decisions."

MCC is using a method known as "appreciate inquiry." The idea is to bring everybody involved with the organization together to talk about MCC's strengths. The method was started in the late 1980s and has been used by many businesses since then, said Jim Ludema, a professor of organization development at Benedictine University in Lisle, Ill.

MCC supporters will be asked to figure out what the group was doing right when it was at its best.

"Appreciate inquiry isn't trying to pretend that there aren't mistakes, that there isn't bad stuff, that there aren't problems," Ludema said. "But it gets dealt with in the context of talking about what we want for the future."

Focusing on problems can start a negative spiral, Ludema said.

"It can actually depress an organization over time," he said.

Businesses have three broad alternatives when they do strategic planning, Ludemasaid. They can bring in a group of consultants to do what's known as "business process re-engineering." They can setup an internal taskforce of people from across the company to come up with a plan. Or they can ask everyone, from the rank and file to the chief executive officer to suppliers and customers. That's appreciate inquiry.

Appreciate inquiry is more efficient than the alternatives because it engages employees and makes them more likely to follow through, Ludema said. That's not always true when the ideas come from a consulting firm, he said.

"Booz Allen comes in, people are trying their hardest not to implement the recommendations," he said. Booz Allen Hamilton is a major consulting firm based in Virginia.

In some ways, MCC has no alternative to the democratic appreciate-inquiry approach. The organization already is defined by the people on the ground.

Hanging on the wall of a school in Zimbabwe is a poster that declares: "We are MCC."

Bruno Baerg sp otted the ? oster during a recent visit to the school, which has students who get MCC support. Baerg is executive director of an MCC unit based in Saskatchewan, Canada. The poster highlights a bigger point about the people involved with MCC, he said.

"They have ownership of it," he said.

MCC's structure also matches the faiths underlying the organization. There is a similar decentralization in the Anabaptist communities that make up MCC's membership, Klassen said.

Each MCC unit runs its own operations, but they also share policies and resources that are managed through agreements among the 12 groups. Among the big questions facing the combined organization:

* How to define MCC's overall mission. That definition is now largely in the hands of its various units and people on the ground, and it varies from place to place, Klassen said.

* How to speed up joint decision-making. Big decisions now require approval from a dozen boards - one for each MCC unit.

* Whether to make MCC's decision-making global. The organization works around the world, but the big decisions are made just by its 12 North American units. It is worth asking whether MCC members overseas should be brought in, Baerg said.

MCC's plan calls for a task force to sort through feedback gleaned through summits and online. The task force is expected to make recommendations by June 2009. Those ideas would need approval from all 12 boards.

Having askedfor constituents' advice, MCC must be prepared to make significant changes if that's what people want, Baerg said.

"We're committing ourselves to something pretty big here," he said.

BY DAVID DAGAN

daviddijournalpub.com