By NuMundo Contributing Writer Joachim Görbert
Where there is good design, there is efficiency.
Love the idea of changing the world with a social or ecologic high-impact project?
Business planning may be more relevant than you think.
Things like funding, team-building, organization culture design and PR can make or break your dream project.
In this article, we will explore some business planning best practices to provide your NGO, project or impact business with all the elements it needs to succeed. And don’t worry — it’s actually not as hard as you think!
Grasp the foundation, grasp the design of sound, structured thinking, and the rest will open up to you, beautiful and vibrant as any flower produced in nature. After all, isn’t she the greatest planner of them all? Nature shows us that it is possible to build something that lasts. I invite you to follow me in exploring the greatest parallels, so that you, too, may craft plans according to these principles.
When there is good design, good planning, there is efficiency. When there is much waste, much grind, there is dust, residue, smoke, and other undesirable consequences. When we compile a plan for an organization or a project, it is much the same. In this article, we will consider how sound business planning, as explained through nature, can help a concept survive, thrive and multiply in a fast-changing world.
In over ten years in planning hundreds of businesses for entrepreneurs from all over the world, I traveled extensively and took great interest in all kinds of NGO and social impact projects. Having myself participated in an accelerator competition in Chile, where my team and I devised a solar desalination device, I know how hard it is to convince business-oriented investors to fund a project, especially when it has a sustainability component. Therefore, I aim to share the most important lessons I learned:
Grow Along Proven Lines of Growth
If you look around nature, you will see that things don’t just grow in random places. They grow where they have water, light, or any other resource they need to survive. Using rivers, other forms of life, and geologic conditions to its favor, growth can develop. When you are planning your project, you have to think about what will be available to you organically and what must be produced artificially. What is the underlying story of how it will all fit in and fit together? Make your project endeavor 100% plausible — and explain to your stakeholders the exact obstacles that stand in your way.
Going after proven lines of growth also entails studying in great detail your competition (if one should call it such in the social impact space, where it’s all about collaboration) and keeping a close eye on the development of your specific niche. Nothing is more powerful than the force of an idea whose time has come. You want to be on the cutting edge of leveraging your impact in your chosen space of operation, riding on the shoulders of giants whenever you can.
Adapt Your Structure to Your Surroundings
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail… do not make this mistake. Be water. As sweetly as nature lets the roots of the trees hug the rocks, find your anchor point in your field. Sometimes the best niche looks like the rockiest, but because of your specific background, you to hold the keys to success where others inevitably fail. The reverse is also true: Sometimes trying to do what is easy will ultimately make life harder for you.
We all know synergy: The alchemy of adding one plus one and getting something greater than two. Syntropy however is the more magical alchemy, and describes the way that molecules (and actually every living thing) strive to form robust and healthy structures. I want you to think in more abstract ways about how you can fit the imagery of “sacred” geometry into all your design — thinking in webs, channels, pyramids, and circles. Your structures will be cleaner, smarter, and less wasteful because of them. Nature has been creating for billions of years. we just started designing things maybe 100,000 years ago. We should look to her for inspiration in solving important puzzles.
Draw Sustenance From Your Environment
Every living thing feeds on something. The things that feed more effectively and sustainably are the ones that are better able to multiply, or fulfill their purpose.
There exist a huge amount of currencies — not just money. And even if money is your problem, it’s floating around everywhere. Sometimes, when you want to attract helpers, you will have to dress up in a funny way or tell an extremely convincing story for things to go your way. For all of these purposes, it is so very important to have one’s antennas primed and ready. Find a way of communicating and rapport-building that works for you, and consistently extend your knowledge base and contacts. These are things you can start doing today at zero monetary expense.
Perceive With All Your Senses
The key to being extra-productive is to be extra-attentive. Likewise, survival in close encounters depends on extreme caution and presence at all times. Do not get wiped out! A living being, born into the world of competition, dis-ease of mind and body, growing scarcity of space and resources and much more sinister menaces, you can never let your guard down. Watching, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling — all have value, but sometimes do not find enough attention in conscious planning mind, especially if that mind is already troubled by agitated internal dialogue.
Do not let layers of negligence cloud your perceptive organs; keep your body and mind clean and sharp. Extend your sensitivity and memory capacity through both technology and physical and spiritual practices. Study your body’s alchemy and compose energy nutrition and performance routines to open up next-level intuition and make you a deception-proof vortex of sensory input.
Everything Spins: Move With the Flow
Ever since protons and electrons have made up the fabric of most, if not all things around us, things spin. If you have really understood what this means, you will start to see the world with different eyes.
Making yourself an intimate part of the flow of nature — through your study of the seasons, the behavior of living things, the weather and natural forces, the body energy inside you, and all the positive and negative energies floating everywhere around us — will give you ultra-performance powers. Next-level abilities like extreme focus and charisma are very real and no laughing matter if having to compete against. There is a way of least resistance even to the greatest objectives. Only if you are in flow can you find it — trust me.
Evolve Design to Higher Principle
So why do we want to convert ourselves into avatar project planners, chakras ablaze, the likes of which were described in Sanskrit thousands of years ago? We want to follow the principle of higher design. From the atom to the bean to the sun to the galaxies to the neuronal networks in our brains — we consider everything that is healthy, growing and replicating successfully without destroying its resource base to be well-crafted.
If it looks like cancer, kills like cancer, and leaves paths of suffering behind wherever it goes, it’s probably not a great design to replicate. I believe in a positive force evolving towards ever greater design. However, I also believe that a darker force of Chaos is likewise acting on all things and following a principle of predatory, parasitic growth. It doesn’t pay attention to the resources needed for indefinite replication.
Follow higher design. Recognize and avoid twisted design. It’s not the big scythe that must worry us, but the small one: Entropy. Decomposition. Infestation. The Unraveling of life. Sorrow and grief.
Conclusion: The Plan is All Around Us
Now is a time of action. In this respect I want to recommend reaching out to the global independent location movement (from which I personally stumbled into the impact sphere), as this is an excellent source of readworthy business advice, collaboration potential, and even direct income and funds through their job brokerage platforms. Perhaps come and visit the DNX conference, or consider applying to the dynamite circle. For knitting your first loose ties consider joining some Facebook groups, or even go on a workation or a retreat for some intensive co-working (or even co-boating?). There is also my friend Robbie’s forum.
Increasing the professionalism with which we plan and execute our projects will go a long way toward making our efforts more effective and creating more lasting transformation for others to enjoy.
In this respect, I want to use the chance — probably fair to say on behalf of all socially-minded entrepreneurs — to extend my personal note of encouragement to you if you are among the people who have taken it upon themselves to push the frontier of utopian paradigm shifts. With conviction, lend momentum to the struggle to undo the forces that so detrimentally ravage this marvel, our world!
Let’s give her our best; she sure gave us hers.
If you are looking to plan something as complex as a social impact business, or even just a short-term charity project, keep your mind wrapped around the sobriety of structured thought. Study the outline of your puzzle, and follow the advice I have laid out above. You will see the pieces as they come for what they are and assemble them, helping each achieve its greatest form.
This is the overarching, most abstracted higher design principle. If you are looking to understand the more formal principles of sound business planning, I invite you to have the look at my website, BrainHive.de.
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Joe Goerbert is CEO of BrainHive Consulting and its affiliated marketing agency. With 9 years in strategy and market entry consulting and 5 years living as a digital nomad traveling chiefly in Latin America, he has personally planned more than 650 businesses and written dozens of marketing plans and other analytical documents. He publishes regularly in his space. Follow Joe on Quora, Facebook and Twitter to stay tuned for updates.
NuMundo is the digital platform and community linking the global ecovillage movement and accelerating the development of regenerative living centers. Learn more at our website: www.numundo.org
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Originally published on Medium: https://blog.goodaudience.com/use-these-6-business-planning-principles-to-fail-proof-your-impact-project-d5ae02f0d12c