What Should Think Tanks Do?: A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact - Brossura

Selee, Andrew D.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804787980 ISBN 13: 9780804787987

Casa editrice: Stanford Briefs, 2013

Riassunto

Think tanks and research organizations set out to influence policy ideas and decisions—a goal that is key to the very fabric of these organizations. And yet, the ways that they actually achieve impact or measure progress along these lines remains fuzzy and underexplored. What Should Think Tanks Do? A Strategic Guide for Policy Impact is the first practical guide that is specifically tailored to think tanks, policy research, and advocacy organizations. Author Andrew Selee draws on extensive interviews with members of leading think tanks, as well as cutting-edge thinking in business and non-profit management, to provide concrete strategies for setting policy-oriented goals and shaping public opinion. Concise and practically-minded, What Should Think Tanks Do? helps those with an interest in think tanks to envision a well-oiled machine, while giving leaders in these organizations tools and tangible metrics to drive and evaluate success.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Andrew Selee is Vice President of Programs at the Woodrow Wilson Center and former Director of its Mexico Institute. He has been a congressional staffer and served as staff and on the board of several non-profit organizations. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University and writes extensively on international affairs.

Andrew Selee is Vice President of Programs at the Woodrow Wilson Center and former Director of its Mexico Institute. He has been a congressional staffer and served as staff and on the board of several non-profit organizations. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University and writes extensively on international affairs.

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WHAT SHOULD THINK TANKS DO?

A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact

By ANDREW SELEE

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8798-7

Contents

Preface....................................................................
vii
Introduction: Ideas That Matter............................................
1
1 What Do You Want to Achieve?.............................................
17
2 What Do You Do That Makes a Unique Contributiont?........................
30
3 Who Are Your Key Audiences and How Do You Reach Them?....................
48
4 What Resources Do You Need and How Can You Develop Them?.................
65
5 How Do You Evaluate Impact and Learn from Your Experience?...............
83
Notes......................................................................
97
Interviews.................................................................
111
Selected Readings..........................................................
115

CHAPTER 1

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?

When Marshall Bouton took over as president of the ChicagoCouncil on Global Affairs in 2001, he knew he had a major challengein front of him. The Chicago Council remained one of thepremiere foreign policy think tanks outside Washington, D.C.,but it had become increasingly inward looking and regionallyfocused, despite the success of its popular biennial survey of U.S.public opinion on global issues. He soon launched a strategicplanning process that involved the Chicago Council's board, staff,and key stakeholders, and included a consulting role by the privatefirm McKinsey.

The most important question on the table was how to transformthe Chicago Council's identity from an elite local forum forthe discussion of ideas to a generator of new thinking for nationaldebates on global affairs that could take advantage of its strategicposition in the Midwest. Bouton notes that "in this day and age,you can't be effective as an organization unless you produce intellectualcapital.... [you need] both presentation and production."The strategic plan, which ultimately was approved by the board in2005, revisited the organization's very essence—what its missionwas—and set a series of ambitious, achievement-oriented goals forthe following five years.

Central to the new strategy was the idea of positioning the ChicagoCouncil as both a locally grounded and a nationally relevantpolicy organization. As a result of the planning process, the ChicagoCouncil began to designate half of its funding to global andnational projects, although many of these remained firmly rootedin its geographical concerns, issues for which the Chicago Councilhad a comparative advantage. Two of its major task forces, forexample, focused on food policy, a significant concern in thecountry's heartland, and on Muslims in the United States, giventhe high proportion of U.S. Muslims living in the upper Midwest.Both received extensive national and international attention sincethey also dealt with issues of national and global importance,although they built on issues of concern to the organization's localmembership. The Chicago Council has consciously used its identityin the heartland to position its research agenda. According toBouton, "We're not located in the political capital, Washington,or the international capital, New York, but we are still the premierecommercial city, located in the heartland, and it makessense to leverage that location."

Indeed, the Chicago Council found that this planning processthoroughly transformed the institution. Its revenues rose from$4.8 million to $7.3 million in five years; attendance at its "ChicagoForum" programs jumped by more than 50 percent; membershipincreased by 49 percent; and its task forces, studies, andpolicy briefs received national attention and positioned the ChicagoCouncil as a major force in international policy discussions.Indeed, the capstone event for its research on food policy was amajor conference on food security in Washington, D.C., in 2012that featured the president of the United States, the secretary ofstate, and three African heads of state, as well as other luminaries,and set the stage for concrete decisions on food security at themeeting of G-8 leaders later that week.

By gaining clarity on its mission as an institution, discoveringits comparative advantages, and setting ambitious but reachablegoals, the Chicago Council was able to position itself for a newrole in public debate and to have both a local and national impacton issues of concern to its members.

REVIEWING AND RENEWING THE MISSION

Every successful journey starts by asking why. Organizations thatknow what motivates them and what they hope to achieve overtime—their big-picture goals—are far more likely to make animpact than those that do not. Having a clear mission statementthat captures the aspirations of the organization is an essential startingpoint for any planning process, whether it is a structured strategicplanning exercise or a more ad hoc process. Indeed, the centralrole of having a clear mission to achieving success is true in thinktanks, in other nonprofit organizations, and even in business.

The first crucial step for the Chicago Council in setting off on anew course was to rethink its mission statement. The old missionstatement read,

The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonprofit,nonpartisan organization committed to building global awarenessin Chicago and the Midwest and contributing to the national andinternational discourse on the great issues of our time.

The revised statement approved in 2005 read,

The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations is a leading independentnonpartisan organization committed to influencing the discourse on globalissues through contributions to opinion and policy formation, leadershipdialogue and public learning [italics added].

The new mission highlighted two changes that the ChicagoCouncil board and staff wanted to make to their role. It would bea "leading" organization and it would be "committed to influencingthe discourse on global issues," not merely "committed tobuilding global awareness." The revised mission statement pointedin the direction in which the organization hoped to go and set aroadmap that it could follow into the future.

The Brookings Institution underwent a similar strategic planningprocess soon after Strobe Talbott took over the presidency ofthe institution in 2002. Brookings, however, decided not toaddress the decades-old mission statement directly as much as tryto understand the core values that make the institution tick and arethe basis of the mission statement. Through a series of discussionsfirst among the institution's senior leadership and then throughoutthe institution, staff settled on a set of three concepts thatencapsulated the core values: "quality, independence, and impact."

This became a useful motto for the organization's external relations,but more important, the leadership and research staff usedthis exercise to develop an understanding of their living mission intoday's context. Each word was the subject of extensive reflectionand consensus building, as managing director Bill Antholis, whohelped Talbott lead this planning process, observes. The termquality had implications for both hiring personnel and settingquality standards for institution outputs. Independence meantmore than nonpartisanship, a term that was discarded during theprocess; it implied that researchers had to begin from a position ofindependence that leaves aside preconceptions and easy answers.Meanwhile, to understand impact, participants actually developedan entire theory of change, which was published as part of the firstlong-term strategic plan. Researchers are now asked each year todevelop an impact statement for their work, which identifies howtheir efforts relate to this theory of change. The Brookings' formof strategic planning departed from the traditional model ofrewriting the mission statement itself and instead encouraged staffto reinterpret the mission in terms that had contemporary meaningfor their work.

In many ways, Brookings's approach stands as the gold standardfor how to transform an institution of its size and history within afew years by getting people to focus on the key elements of what itis they do and why they do it. Far from an academic exercise, thiseffort to rethink core values eventually led to a five-year strategicplan and to significant changes in the way the institution operates,including developing a set of cross-cutting initiatives and beefingup Brookings's outreach efforts. By starting with a conversationabout what the institution's core values were—the mission's meaningin today's world—staff were able to arrive at a set of practicalsteps that they then needed to follow to implement the corevalues.

It often makes sense for programs within a think tank to havetheir own mission statements, consistent with the institution'soverall mission, especially if they have their own internal planningprocesses. The Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute, forexample, has a mission statement that dates from its beginnings in2003, but in 2008 the Institute's advisory board revised it as thefirst step in a long-term planning process. As with the ChicagoCouncil, the main question was one of moving from an emphasison "presentation" (convening events) to "presentation and production"(convening and developing new ideas). The board added aphrase about "developing new policy options" to the existing missionstatement to emphasize a new direction in developing innovativeideas for policy that could cut across national and partylines. That change had significant implications that helped sharpenthe Mexico Institute's focus on new ideas, expand the range ofimpact, and eventually bring in new sources of funding.

While not all organizations need to spend time talking abouttheir mission statement, it is a critical thing to do at the beginningof a process of significant institutional change—perhaps the mostimportant thing to do. However, during normal times successfulorganizations often find other ways of embedding the mission ineverything they do, keeping it present as a guide for their efforts.That does not necessarily mean plastering it on every document(although some organizations do put a short-hand version of it ontheir documents), but rather making sure that the organization'score purpose is at the center of the organization's reflections ongoal-setting. Many successful organizations live their missionrather than discuss it, but it may still be worth pulling the actualstatement out from time to time, dusting it off, and making sureit remains a relevant source of inspiration.

SETTING ACHIEVEMENT-ORIENTED GOALS

When the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute decided to change itsmission to include a greater focus on "policy options" it also set anumber of ambitious goals. These included creating a major taskforce on U.S.-Mexico relations during 2008, an election year, andconducting a series of additional specific studies on four topics(security, economic integration, migration, and border issues)decided by the board in consultation with staff. The plan alsocalled for a specific media outreach plan, and a new speaker'sforum for high-level public figures from Mexico. All of these goalswere clear and measurable, and had targeted dates for implementation.The Institute thus turned an aspirational statement, themission, into a series of action statements, the goals, which provideda clear roadmap for implementation.

If the mission statement provides the organization's purpose forexisting, the goals lay out the specific things that the organizationwants to achieve in the short to medium term. For a policy researchorganization undergoing change, or simply looking at its next yearof activities, these are often new initiatives and special areas ofemphasis. As Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, the authors of Money WellSpent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, write, "Your chancesof success are greatly increased by having well-defined goals and asound strategic plan to achieve them. The goals should describewhat success should look like...." Having goals that are achievement-orientedalso helps in evaluating success and learning fromexperience. As we will see in Chapter 5, evaluating impact dependsa great deal on deciding prospectively what impact looks like at theoutset. It is hard to measure success if you do not start off with anidea of what you want to achieve.

Similarly, when the Chicago Council revised its mission statement,it also set four practical goals in its strategic plan that flowedfrom its new purpose: (1) strengthen its forum in Chicago; (2)expand its contributions to national and international discourse;(3) develop a broad, sustainable base of long-term financial support;and (4) reposition itself in the perceptions of national andinternational leaders. Each of these goals was then broken downinto component parts that set tangible markers for what successshould look like.

For the Brookings Institution, goal-setting included two majorinitiatives considered priorities by fellows and staff: first, developinga new outreach strategy and, second, creating five cross-cuttingissues that would bring together fellows across different programsto work together. Considerable details were dedicated to whatthese changes would look like and what they entailed. In the secondBrookings strategic plan, a different set of four cross-cuttingissues were agreed on for the next five years on the basis of issuesthat had then become salient.

Brookings, unlike the Chicago Council and the Wilson Center'sMexico Institute, is a highly complex organization with a budgetover $80 million a year and five semi-autonomous programs that,in turn, include several centers, each with its own purpose andindividual goals. In the largest think tanks, goal-setting at an institutionallevel is often less about setting specific program directionsthan it is about determining general directions and specific benchmarksfor the health of the institution as a whole. In these organizations,specific programmatic goals are often best set at the level ofprograms or centers, which generally have their own specific purposesand planning processes within the larger institution. In contrast,the Chicago Council, which is a medium-sized think tank,has greater ability to set specific goals at the institution-wide level,and the Wilson Center's Mexico Institute, which is a programwithin a larger institution, can be quite specific in its programmaticgoal-setting.

If mission statements inspire people to action and point thecompass in the direction along which common efforts should go,achievement-oriented goals actually lay out the specific path tofollow and provide clear targets. Institutions without a clear missionand goals often find themselves headed in several directionsat once and lacking a sense of common purpose that gives structureto the many efforts undertaken, even if they are each worthyin their own right.

DEVELOPING ASSESSMENT TOOLS

Before setting goals, it is useful to undertake a series of assessmentsthat help the organization position itself. Most of these exercisesare the subject of the next three chapters, which are about decidingon unique programming lanes, identifying key audiences, andsetting in motion a plan to build the resource base. However,before we go any further, it is worth laying out the series of questionsan organization may want to ask before it sets its goals.

First, What does the organization do well and not do well? Knowingthe relative strengths of the organization is crucial to settingrealistically ambitious goals. Everything from geographical location,institutional mandate, staff skill sets, ideological orientation,and past experience helps determine what organizations do well.It is sometimes worth pushing the organization to move into newkinds of activities, as the Chicago Council and the Wilson Center'sMexico Institute did by beefing up their intellectual productionactivities, but this requires developing new institutionalmuscles. Organizations that do this need to consciously dedicatestaff and financial resources to developing these new capacities.

In some cases, organizations would do well to accept their limitationsand concentrate on what they do best. The Center forGlobal Development (CGD) does an admirable job of producinginnovative ideas for policy that can help reduce child mortalityand poverty in the developing world, but it consciously hands offthe advocacy work to other organizations once it has developed theideas and built a degree of initial support among key stakeholders.The Wilson Center, which is not only a think tank but also a presidentialmemorial to Woodrow Wilson, steadfastly avoids controversialissues that could put its status as a federal trust in jeopardy.The Chicago Council, which is a member-driven organization,likes to make sure it has a base of members who will provide supportfor an initiative before it starts.

In doing an assessment on institutional strengths and weaknesses,it is also worth asking specifically about whether there areinstitutional opportunities or threats that may emerge in the future.Leadership changes, shifts in funding availability, and other organizationsentering or exiting the field can affect the organization'sability to meet its goals effectively. These types of changes can sometimesbe positive opportunities, such as the availability of newfunding streams or the addition of new talent that enhances institutionalcapacity, but they can also be potential threats, such as economicdownturns and leadership changes that set progress back.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from WHAT SHOULD THINK TANKS DO? by ANDREW SELEE. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Briefs
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804787980
• ISBN 13: 9780804787987
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 118
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile