We’re back from the holidays and reorienting on the mission. Programs? Check. Initiatives? Check. Funding? We’re working on it!
This month we’ll be reflecting on the past year and planning for the new one. We just sent out our January newsletter, which covers our progress over the last month. Next week we’ll compile a report for the board on Q4 2023. The following week we’ll do our annual retreat, where we’ll plan out the year, and we’ll finish the month by compiling and publishing our Annual Report for 2023.
That’s a lot of planning and reporting. Is it worth it? As Leverage fans will know, we’ve always been in favor of planning. And people who’ve followed the journey will know that since 2019 we’ve also been very dedicated to engagement. So planning and reporting are both core to what we do now.
Still, one might worry that all this planning and reporting gets in the way of getting anything done. Our solution has been to try to integrate planning and reporting into our everyday operations, in a way that makes us both natural, quick, and productive.
Take our newsletter, for instance. It took just a few hours to write, and an annoying additional few hours to get into MailChimp (Oliver is angry about this). It compiles a lot of the information we’ll need when we prepare our report for the board, reducing the burden of later reporting, and it also helped us make progress just by having to write it.
How can writing reports help us make progress? The answer is that while we write we learn more about what we’re actually doing, and also extend and complete our work as we do it. Here’s a part of the January newsletter, talking about the history of science:
One interesting pattern is how the rigorous study of a domain using new instruments can lead to unexpected discoveries. We’ve seen this with Gilbert, Hauksbee, and von Kleist. Cases like these aren’t fully intentional, since before the discovery no one knows what to anticipate, or fully accidental, since the discovery requires thorough search to come across.
This is an insight we didn’t have before we wrote the newsletter. While I was writing it (I wrote it, Oliver and Melinda proofread and Oliver prepared it for sending), I had to think about what our progress had been in our History of Science program. We’re about to publish our Hauksbee case study, so that’s good, but was that all?
I had the sense that there was something new we had learned, in part based on a conversation Oliver and I had the day before about science and the prospects for turning the history of science into a Netflix series. The newsletter prompted me to turn that sense into something concrete, which actually marks a step forward in thinking about what we’ve learned from our historical studies.
This is what we’re aiming for with planning and reporting: making both seamlessly part of our operation so that we learn and make progress while we plan and learn and make progress while we engage with our audiences. That embeds planning and engagement into the DNA of the organization, and means they aren’t unnecessary impositions from the outside.
That’s the theory. We’ll see if it works — if it does, we’ll be able to do our reporting this month quickly and efficiency, and plan carefully for the year, and get a lot more done besides.
Until next time,
Geoff
p.s. Our Winter Fundraiser runs through February. If you’d like to support our work, please considering donating, or if you’d like help us understand our audience, reach out and tell us why you follow Leverage’s work!