GREENHOUSE LAB

A Strategy Workshop for an EdTech Nonprofit

OVERVIEW: At the start of 2020, the board of a NYC-based EdTech nonprofit hired a new Executive Director to completely overhaul and reorient the organization. Once an innovator in the field, they had fallen behind the capacity of big tech’s community initiatives.

However, their plan for relaunching with a new mission became suddenly unrealistic as the pandemic hit. Their leadership team needed to come together to keep their ship afloat and find a viable new direction.

After six weeks of research, design, content creation, and event coordination — we facilitated a week-long workshop where our client’s leadership team aligned around the organization’s current state, built team buy-in around a new theory of change, and determined new ways of working to maximize the organization’s impact.

Synthesizing stakeholder interviews, designing workshop activities and accompanying visual assets and templates, coordinating for event production, and co-facilitating the sessions

SKILLS:

ROLE:

I was a Lab Producer in the Greenhouse Innovation Lab at Deloitte, helping design and deliver over 30 client workshops, including this one, within a team of three.

PROCESS

Stage 1:

DIAGNOSE

DESIGN

Stage 2:

DELIVER

Stage 3:

DISTILL

Stage 4:

STAGE 1: DIAGNOSE

After meeting with the Executive Director to understand their point of view on the challenge, we broadened the aperture to understand the situation from every angle.

  • I supported our team by:

    • Conducting desk research on the organization, landscape, and best practices for nonprofits in strategic planning

    • Identifying and coordinating with subject matter experts

    • Developing an interview guide for ten key stakeholders at the organization and a survey for all employees

    • Defining the lab’s core challenge statement

Core Takeaway: Through interviews, it became clear that the leadership team (a mix of legacy employees, employees from a merger, and the new Executive Director) distrusted one another, widely varied in seeing a need for change, and were individually focused on the impact of their own projects versus maximizing organizational impact.

STAGE 2: DESIGN

We set forth to craft a workshop of participatory activities, conversations, and frameworks for the team to step through in order to move through their challenge.

  • I supported our team by:

    • Laying out the desired outcomes of the workshop

    • Evaluating the client’s current state against the desired outcomes

    • Mapping the client team’s journey through the lab to reach each desired outcome

    • Developing a detailed approach/set of activities and facilitator guide to bring that journey to life, using design principles like divergent and convergent thinking

    • Building a metaphor (a community garden) into the design as both a storytelling device to guide participants through the progression of the workshops and to keep them energized and having fun amidst stressful topics

    • Creating engaging and interactive templates and visual assets for the workshop

Example Design Element: In order to align on the current state of their organization, we created a “Gallery Walk” to use early on in the workshop. In this activity, we displayed anonymous quotes from stakeholder interviews that were grouped into themes and asked each participant to identify one quote they agreed with, disagreed with, and had questions on per theme. While giving a way for individuals to step outside of their POV and take in the broader context, it also helped to address any elephants in the room and to establish an atmosphere of radical candor early on.

STAGE 3 & 4: DELIVER & DISTILL

We ran the lab over the course of a week. I facilitated breakout groups and live captured all discussions and decisions. Following the workshops, my team synthesized and distilled all insights into an executive summary and game plan that we shared with the client.

Sketch note by fellow team member

FEEDBACK FROM PARTICIPANTS

“Thank you for so generously sharing tools to help us collaborate, communicate, and fulfill [our organization’s] enormous potential.”

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- Executive Director on client team

“Thank you infinitely for helping us launch the next era of [our organization]. I am so impressed by your team’s ability to listen and guide us through this process!”

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- Chief Partnerships Officer on client team

“Our lab has been joyful, well organized, and pedagogically appropriate with a great mix of activities and solid outcomes. Thanks for your great attention to detail and for caring deeply about our students throughout the process.”

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- Chief Partnerships Officer on client team