Client: General Council, and Columban Lay Missionary Central Leadership Team, Missionary Society of St Columban The Society looks to have a deep, and deeply thought through, conversation in 2024 about its path into the future, including at the General Assembly set for May 2024. To such ends, the project has propagated many conversations through 2023,…
Tag: planning
A few questions on vocations
Client: General Council, and Columban Lay Missionary Central Leadership Team, Missionary Society of St Columban The project is having some quiet conversations with other congregations about current trends relating to vocations and formation. A modest number of other missionary societies and like institutions are kindly assisting by participating in a questionnaire about such matters. That…
Conversations
Client: General Council, and Columban Lay Missionary Central Leadership Team, Missionary Society of St Columban The Missionary Society of St Columban includes ordained priests and lay missionaries and is currently present in 16 countries around the world. The Society works across boundaries of culture and religion – with poor and exploited people, seeking justice and…
Corona coffee: back to the future
Deep into the Delta wave of COVID-19 – which for those of us in Sydney means pretty hard core lockdown – we’ve run out of interesting new craft projects to fill in the hours, so are reduced to doing the long-overdue filing, and cleaning out the bottom drawer of the office cupboards. Sad stuff really,…
Down the microscope, briefly
In every organisation, there is a group to whom the organisation owes its existence. We often talk of the ‘owners’, since in a commercial organisation it is the owners, literally, who cause the enterprise to come into being and to have a particular purpose. But there is an equivalent group for every enterprise, commercial or…
Endless coffee is great – but endless time on planning, not so much
Balancing time allocated to board tasks is yet another challenge for the board that requires compromise – between enough attention to rightful detail, and tipping over into meddling in management, for example; or between devoting enough time to well-informed planning, and investing so much time that plans far outweigh results. For the board, governance and…
Sabbatical postcard – no time to wish for coffee
A self-confessed cynic about process improvement, which too often fails from want of a clear objective, I am delighted to report a customer service experience that seems to shine as an exception. It was so fast and efficient there was no time to wish for a coffee while waiting in line for service! The early indications…
Coffee makes planning go ’round
Carolyn Evans and Tanya van der Wall share our guide to keeping planning in perspective as a means to an end – all the coffee in the world won’t fix a governance and planning process that doesn’t keep “eyes on the prize” of realising the organisation’s purpose. Three decades since Michael Porter identified the ‘lost…
Can’t see the wood for the trees?
Internal projects naturally drive additional business activity and costs but our experience at ThinkEvans indicates they do not always result in an appropriate return on investment. So what is going wrong? Here we look at some of the classic issues we see in businesses and suggest a few actions to start successfully delivering the projects…
Inside out strategic planning
Client: Illawarra-Shoalhaven Medicare Local (operated by Grand Pacific Health Ltd) Following on from our earlier survey, ThinkEvans is providing a different lens for leveraging the outcomes as a strategic planning case study.
Is your organisation organised?
Before making organisational design decisions that will be productive and sustainable, enabling sound planning for the future, the organisation needs to be able to articulate its current state clearly. Already cringing? This is more than just consultant-speak or HR waffling: it is as simple as knowing where you are so you can work out…
Changing to grow
Client: Good Grief Ltd Assist the Board of Directors and senior team with the annual strategic planning cycle, including how to embrace new business models and developing an agreed set of outcomes for the next three years.
Planning Horizons
Client: Institute of Sisters of Mercy in Australia As a final assistance to the Institute which has now folded into the Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea, we have provided the leadership team with an implementation plan for 2011-2015. This is the culmination of several years of work asssisting the…
Sustainability in nonprofit enterprise
Client: Provinces of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart A series of papers have been developed for the NSW, SA, New Zealand and Victoria Provinces, with Queensland now also under way, to address issues of sustainability in institutional ministries. These organisations are not-for-profit enterprises that work in education, aged care, community services…
Pioneering the next 100 years
Client: Congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart The paper was presented as a seminar at a national gathering of the Congregation and Provincial Leadership groups in April 2010. Following an earlier paper in April 2009, this session was prepared to assist the national leadership group of the Sisters of St…
Never stuck behind the desk
The Sydney Morning Herald today carried this article by Julia Talevski, in which she quoted from an interview with Carolyn Evans, Managing Director of ThinkEvans. The article also carried this image of Carolyn having a coffee meeting with ThinkEvans Principal Consultant Tanya van der Wall at Coogee beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The full article…