Written by Sean McDonald

One of the most interesting, and surprising, parts of building out our work at Civic Strength Partners has been finding the right language for what we do. 

We settled on the term “accompaniment,” because our work is fundamentally about supporting civil society organizations with capacity, expertise, and practical resources during structural pivots – whether forming new mergers, acquisitions, joint partnerships, or wind-down explorations. 

Our goal is to be a value-added, trusted partner that helps leaders steward and navigate huge changes in their operating environment – often by identifying and connecting organizations in need with the people best-positioned to help them. That work has given us good reason to talk to a huge number of partner, peer, and adjacent experts about what it’s like to support civil society organizations through strategic, intentional change. In doing so, we started to realize that our language challenges aren’t just shared, they have a huge impact on when, how, and how effectively civil society organizations navigate change. 

Our work depends on an organization’s leadership recognizing, at a minimum, that something about their work needs to change. From there, our work tends to be a combination of facilitating teams to explore the possibilities, coaching leadership, demystifying the practicalities of each outcome, and connecting and/or resourcing experts to navigate and implement next steps. That work – which required so many more words to describe – is what we’ve come to call “accompaniment.”

And, the truth is, most of our work – and most of the work of the experts we’ve connected with – is significantly less about technical expertise, than it is emotional- and about supporting leaders and teams through the process of making the decisions involved. But all the words for that work are ambiguous – like facilitator, coach, technologist, or strategist – and so the people who need the help don’t realize it and, instead, look for those skills in specific areas of technical expertise. 

In an ideal world, social sector organizations would engage in proactive, strategic and analysis as a normal part of their ongoing governance. As Chris Proulx, of Humentum, said during a recent workshop – the goal of most expert consulting is to embed strategic exploration and evolution of a particular subject area as a continuous consideration for organizational leadership. But, realistically, most civil society organizations are under-funded and/or have line-item restricted budgets, meaning that they almost never have enough resources to do the jobs already expected of them, let alone prioritize cost-and-time-intensive structural innovation over their core operations. 

And yet, for experts, these requests – when the house is already on fire – narrows their ability to help. Organizations often, frustratingly, go one of two ways: (1) they ask for technical instruments to solve problems they haven’t or can’t organizationally implement; or (2) the experts come back with questions and implementing requirements that the leadership may not want, or feel able to, answer. In other words, when civil society leadership is reactive to crisis instead of proactive and intentional, they often aren’t just responding to a problem – they’re having to revisit and address the source of the problem. Often, expert consultants are either an entry point to – or an excuse to avoid – solving ‘governance debt’ problems. 

In technology design, there’s a term called technical debt – which refers to the effort and resources you apply to managing the impacts of a flaw or design decision, before/instead of solving the underlying issue. So, for example, if a software product creates a problem that requires 10 hours a week of customer service to resolve, but would require 250 hours of technical time to resolve, the company may choose to spend the “technical debt” of 10 hours a week of customer service, rather than expending the technical time, because it’s cheaper in the moment. The problem, of course, is that spending the 10 hours of customer support every week does not solve the underlying problem – and at some point, the organization will have spent more resources on not solving the problem than it would have taken to solve it. 

Here, ‘governance debt’ applies the same idea to other forms of leadership. And the reality of most organizational leadership, let alone civil society leadership, is figuring out how to use limited resources to solve an unlimited number of potential issues – meaning that we’re accumulating governance debt almost all the time. Until, of course, those problems become acute crises – then, leadership reaches out to experts – and gets confronted with, at a minimum, the practical differences between mitigating the negative impacts or resolving the underlying issue.

More often than not, civil society leadership begins seriously prioritizing organizational change reactively, in response to an acute need or crisis. So, for example, non-profit organizations tend to be more open to considering new business models when their current source of funding shuts down or changes priorities. Similarly, executive leadership is more inclined to make investments in cybersecurity after an incident than they were at the system design stage, when an incident could have been avoided. 

These acute crises are, for lack of a better term, onramps to accompaniment – they compel civil society organizations and their leadership to reconsider the way they work and create a mandate for critical improvements. Here are a few examples of onramps to accompaniment and how different approaches can shape the accompaniment that results: 

• A funding crisis often leads organizations to seek more or different fundraising support for – essentially – the same core offering, instead of thinking about how to structurally diversify their service offerings and, as importantly, customer base; 
• A new partnership, relationship, or policy may compel an organization to hire a lawyer to set formal terms instead of the parties negotiating through the uncomfortable or difficult possibilities; 
• A data breach or cybersecurity incident often prompts leaders to hire technical experts to fix specific bugs or replace specific vendors, instead of revisiting how they build, buy, and/or invest in maintaining the technologies they depend on;
• A surprise scandal or organizational mistake can lead organizations to hire public relations firms to manage the resulting narrative, instead of meaningfully taking accountability or considering how to best adapt and redress the harm caused.   
• A merger or wind-down may lead an organization to consider joining or closing as a whole organization, instead of unbundling component teams, functions, or products into their best-fit homes.  

While this is an obviously incomplete list of both experts and inciting events, it does illustrate the difference between reacting to a crisis and substantively addressing the underlying causes of a problem. Acute crisis being a primary onramp to strategic organizational change creates two challenges, experienced by both civil society organizations and the experts they hire: (1) the specific type of crisis shapes what kind of help the organization thinks it needs and also what, if anything, it would need to change in order to achieve its goals; and (2) it positions the external consultant in the position of having to assess how willing and/or able the organization is to meaningfully addressing its governance debt (for example, limiting the negative consequences of the problem vs. resolving it). Ultimately the number of choices available and the value of the expertise they hire is often shaped by how much time and resources leaders invest in engaging early on.  

Our work at Civic Strength Partners depends, at the most basic level, on helping civil society leaders and organizations find a range of alignments – between leadership, mission, culture, operating models, teams, and, potentially, many other things. The more time we have to support and accompany an organization’s leaders through these changes, the more opportunity they have to explore and make the difficult choices in front of them. And while that work doesn’t always start with a shared language, it often takes familiar shapes and patterns – and the more we can do to share and accompany each other through that work, the more connected, resilient, and effective we’ll be.