January 25, 2005

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT:
Kennard Wing, Kennard T. Wing & Co.

 

Advocating a Strong Base for the Sector

 

By Brigette Rouson

 

Ken Wing

For consultant Ken Wing, change has been a constant, and he embraces it like a true believer. Almost from birth, Ken has been a person of transitions, born in Alabama, then living in Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island before settling in Pennsylvania.  Learning about business management in the retail industry where he got his start, Ken came face to face with resistance to change—especially when the changes were suggested by him at the age of 22.  His experience turned from frustration to discovery when he found organizational development, and within it ideas and methods that bring right and left brain into harmony.

Ken's current work involves research, writing, and consulting he hopes will change practices across the nonprofit sector in ways that increase effectiveness. "The idea," he offers, shaped by many capacity-building stints, "is not to work so much improving individual organizations, but to work on projects that will have a regional or national impact—for example, the nonprofit cost overhead project that I've been involved with for over a year and a half." (See presentation slides from the Alliance DC'04 conference: www.allianceonline.org/Members/Library/advocacy/wing.pdf.)

Housed at Urban Institute's Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy and Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy, the project builds on insight about the huge disparity in resources between for-profit and nonprofit environments.  "I came from the for-profit sector, where we had updated computers, voice mail, someone to handle payroll—this whole infrastructure that supports you in doing your job. There’s so much I took for granted," he says.  "In nonprofits, you often have one person called an administrative director who is your information technology department, your human resources department, and handles facilities. . . . There are plenty of nonprofits—and not the very smallest—where the executive director writes the grant proposals and prepares the financials for the board meeting."

What needs to happen is a "no-brainer," in Ken’s view. "We’ve got so many fragile, weak nonprofits in the sector, and we can go out and do board development with this one, and strategic planning with that one, one at a time, but if we just gave them the money to have the infrastructure they need to be effective, we could dramatically increase the effectiveness of the whole sector."

One way he has gone about contributing to that possibility is to tell the truth about the cost accounting gamesmanship that goes on now.  As found by the cost study, fundraising and administrative costs frequently go unreported or underreported by nonprofits.  In part, that’s because they are often capped by funders (foundations, government, federations and sometimes individuals)—or those funders' decisions are weighted to favor groups with relatively low reported infrastructure costs.  "Unrestricted funding is the lubricant that gives organizations the ability to have what they need to be effective."

His emphasis on building knowledge and transforming practice began while studying at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in the late 1980s.  There, Ken pursued this synthesis through coursework, research and later consulting with Russell Ackoff, a key thinker who has brought systems thinking to management.  A key principle of Ackoff’s is "idealization"—that people make major improvements not by incrementally improving what they are currently doing, but rather by imagining what they would ideally like to have now and working back from that in a participatory manner to a feasible but potentially breakthrough plan. He later became fascinated with large-scale change processes as developed by Kathy Dannemiller and her colleagues.

For years, Ken applied these insights and approaches to working with a mix of for-profit and nonprofit clients.  He recalls how rewarding it was to work with the Texas Relocation Commission, helping to honor the commission's intention of bringing people with disabilities directly into the strategic planning process.  Increasingly, he consulted in nonprofit settings, working with a number of hospitals. In the nonprofits he found—just as in corporate settings—the appearance of order while tensions roiled beneath the surface. It was often a reality of "lousy relationships" right alongside common ground in the desire for positive change.

Having taken his practice into the "financial and emotional roller coaster" of self-employment, Ken remembers, "I was looking for a firm that was in the nonprofit sector exclusively."  He landed at the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning (Philadelphia), founded by one of his professors, Tom Burns.

After trying on various roles and modes in capacity building, Ken has now come full-circle into independent consulting.  "I do planning, research and evaluation aimed at strengthening the nonprofit sector and individual organizations within it. And I tend to work in three areas—community development, the arts, and organizational effectiveness."

Throughout his work with client organizations and larger-scale projects, Ken finds the Alliance the "associational home" of choice, "because its focus is people interested in improving the effectiveness of organizations.  It's unique in the nonprofit sector, where there are so many associations that are exclusive in membership. It's a big tent," one that includes consultants, funders, researchers, publishers, and other capacity builders.

"I get so much affirmation when I go to the annual conference," he says. Not only does the Alliance offer a "feeling of warmth and connection" each year, but through the TALK online forum, to which Ken is a major contributor, and other contact points, he has circulated and then published his insights, been asked to lead conference sessions, and attracted more of the opportunities he most values.

Ken Wing can be reached at: kennarwing@aol.com.

 


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