Unlocking Your Board's Potential with Catalytic Thinking

Unlocking Your Board's Potential with Catalytic Thinking
Wednesday, May 1 | 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM eastern | Interactive Webinar

Presented by: Hildy Gottlieb, Co-Founder & Chief Boundary Pusher, Creating the Future

Offered in Partnership with: Creating the Future

Your board members want to make a difference. This webinar will teach them how!

While the world has changed dramatically since the 1970s, ideas about “good nonprofit governance” largely have not. The result? Governance experts are still addressing the same problems people were complaining about 50 years ago! Your community deserves better. Your team deserves better. And your board deserves better, too.

So, what does better look like and how do we get there? That’s where Catalytic Thinking comes into play.

Catalytic Thinking is a framework of questions designed to bring out the best in decision-making, planning, goal-setting, and more. The questions we’ve all been taught to ask can leave us feeling frustrated and stuck, like nothing we do will ever make a difference. Changing those questions will change your decisions – and your results!

In this webinar, we will apply the powerful questions of Catalytic Thinking to our boards, providing a different way to think about our board’s role and their effectiveness. The reason boards are often NOT forces for change is that they’ve been taught to focus on reactive, internal minutiae instead of community change. If you’re ready to move beyond all that, this webinar is for you! Beyond…

• The tired lists of roles and responsibilities that DO focus on organizational minutiae.
• Listening to reports on what happened in the past (staff reports, financial reports, etc.).
• Rehashing staff work (and maybe micromanaging?) instead of doing forward-looking work that is actually meaningful.
• Asking, “Where’s the money going to come from?” instead of building on strengths and community.
• The narrow focus of their legal obligations (duty of care and loyalty to the organization) vs. advocating for the community.
• Encouraging staff to be more business-like.
• Playing it safe and focusing more on the balance sheet than your impact in the community.
• The governance model of the past instead of one built for the present and future.

Join PANO and Creating the Future for this unique learning opportunity that will help us transform our boards into an energized and engaged force for visionary community change.

Together, let’s free our board to be their best selves!

Note: This program is set up as a “flipped classroom”. This means that all content will be provided in advance so that you will have time to absorb the material at your own pace and can join the live session (on May 1) prepared with questions, ideas for practical application, and items for discussion.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why legal accountability is just a bare minimum, and how to instead lead towards what is possible
• Why board micromanage, why they get disengaged, why they are bored/don’t show up/any of the other common problems of board, and what to do to aim your board towards their potential
• What real inclusion looks like – at the board table and throughout all your work.
• How “accountability for community impact” encourages boards to soar far beyond “accountability for the money” (and how to DO it)
• What does an impact-focused board do and how do they do it?
• How your organization’s values and vision can transform your board’s work
• What it means for your board to be a force for change in your community – and how to do it
• Why focusing solely on oversight actually prevents boards from being their most rational and creative selves – and what will free your board members to be their best selves
• The role of trust and relationship in building a highly functional board
• And much more!

How It Works and What You’ll Get:

How It Works

This program is set up as a “flipped classroom”. This means that all content will be provided in advance so that you will have time to absorb the material at your own pace and can join the live session prepared with questions, ideas for practical application, and items for discussion.

What You’ll Get

• 1+ hours of video classes (to be viewed before the live session on May 1)
• Handouts to help embed your learning
• Readings – articles that dive deep into the subject
• Copies of key slides from the videos
• 2 hours of live Q&A/discussion (this is what will happen on May 1)
• A recording of the Q&A in both video and audio-only formats (so you can listen while you drive, work out, cook dinner, etc!)
• The ability to ask quick questions of the faculty at Creating the Future FOREVER (applies to questions that can be answered in an email)

Registration Fees:
 

Single Login Ticket:

$45 per person for PANO Members | $90 per person for Not-Yet Members

Group Ticket (4-10 individuals):
$145 per group for PANO Members | $290 per group for Not-Yet Members

This option makes the most sense when you have 4-10 individuals interested in viewing the webinar. All individuals on your group ticket will receive their own login instructions; no need to gather around one screen to watch together but you are, of course, welcome to do so if that's what works best for your group!

For fewer than 4 attendees, a single login ticket for each person is the most cost-effective option. For more than 10 attendees, please email Christina at christina@pano.org to discuss options.

Materials & Login/Call-In Instructions:
Materials (PowerPoint and other handouts), along with instructions on how to login and call-in, will be emailed to attendees a few days prior to the date of the webinar. PANO uses Zoom as our webinar platform; you can familiarize yourself with Zoom and/or join a test meeting prior to these sessions.

Can’t attend? All registrants will receive a recording of the webinar following the live session!

About Creating the Future:

Creating the Future is a collection of people around the world, supporting each other in a grand experiment in systems change. CTF is on a mission to create systems change, so that the systems we encounter every day are creating conditions that advance everyone’s ability to thrive – creating a future that is different from our past, a world that works for everyone. Learn more here.

About the Facilitator:

Hildy Gottlieb, Co-Founder & Chief Boundary Pusher, Creating the Future

Hildy is a social scientist and asker of powerful questions. She is the co-founder and Chief Boundary Pusher at Creating the Future, the creator of the Catalytic Thinking Framework, and a strong advocate for the power we all have to change the systems we find ourselves in, by changing the questions we ask.