Find your points of greatest leverage!
February 17, 2025
In this newsletter, I note how you can use focus and leverage to improve your nonprofit's performance. For focus, I use Stephen Covey's famous diagram from his first habit of highly effective people (Be Proactive). Covey says focus on the things you can actually control, work on expanding your circle of influence, and don't focus on areas that you cannot influence:
Systems theory says that almost nothing happens in a vacuum. We all operate in systems, and systems influence our outcomes in critical ways.
So what systems is your nonprofit a part of?
And where are your areas of greatest leverage?
And how can AI help?
Exploring those questions is the focus on the following prompts:
Act in the role of a systems theorist. In that role, research [XYZ.org] in [city], [state]. Identify the systems that impact XYZ, force-ranking those systems starting with those XYZ can control, then those that it can influence, and finally those that may concern it, but which Journey cannot influence.
In the same role, force-rank the points of greatest leverage for XYZ.
For the first bullet point of your first point of leverage, develop a work plan that would permit XYZ to affect this point of leverage to make significant gains in effectiveness and efficiency.
On the first point of your workplan, identify the key documents and personnel XYZ should involve in this analysis.
With respect to the first bullet point of your first point of leverage, describe in detail how XYZ can apply AI at low or no cost to improve performance.
Let me know what you find out and how you refine these prompts to improve results.
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