Week 6

[Music] 3P0, 5 welcome back. Things are getting a little bit more back to normal here with our audio lecture, audio response, form response format. Now that we have our second crisis response handed in, again those are being graded right now and I am again pleased with what I've been seeing from all of you in terms of what you've been turning in and the grades I think at this point reflect that so far. So this week we're going to be dealing with our course readings. They are also posted on bright space and we're getting into an audio lecture format. That is more typical of the way we normally do things. In the advance of your third crisis response, which outline will be posted shortly on bright space and now I think you have a little bit of a better sense of how those things are going to be operating. So at this point I would just encourage you again to keep up with the course readings, make sure you have a look at those slides that are posted on bright space and I would have them encourage you to have a look at the articles that's there and you don't have to read it all at once but if you haven't had a look at that right now, how are you going to pause this audio and you can have a look on bright space. I would make sure you're having a read through for that and you'll make your form and your audio response a great deal easier and I'm looking forward to seeing your work putting this week from your format audio response. So I think it's perhaps a very fitting way to start our journey through working with nonprofits by talking about this very topic of service, which is to say understanding the community served. If you've got your slides in front of you right now, there are slides posted this week that will help you through. You can go through this one by one if not, you can look at them later or if you're out and about listening to this right now and your phone or wherever, that's totally fine as well. Make sure that if there's something that you're finding notable about this, again to you can write it down on your phone the time until save you some time a little bit later on. So we're going to be talking today about innovation. That's a word that I'm certain actually that you've heard before and throughout your journey here in in Spema. Perhaps and this is a moment if we were in class in person, I would be asking, okay, what are your associations with the words? Innovation. What does that mean to you? I mean, certainly you had an idea of what that meant before you came to university certainly. But I think again, after you arrive in Spema, that's your thoughts on innovation, what that means with that entails in the sports sector, certainly have changed. So again, slide two mentions or begins by talking innovation in nonprofit organizations. Non-profit organizations or NPO's engage in change processes as they develop new services to satisfy and increase/maintain membership and financial support. This is from Winnan and Angus Dopolis from 2017. Activities or processes adopted by an organization for the first time are considered to be innovations. That's again, a very broad definition of innovation. Again, just to sort of ground us in what this word means as it applies to nonprofit organizations. So let's focus on that second bullet point to start with. Activities or processes adopted by an organization for the first time. When generally speaking, we are talking about innovativeness or innovations or things like that. And I'm speaking in generalities here, but I'm guessing our default assumption is if you are to choose between a public, the private, and the nonprofit sector. And you can just imagine this in your head right now, which of those three do you associate being the most closely associated with innovation? Chances are you're probably thinking of the private sector. That's not to say that the private sector is not innovative. Of course it is. The question we have, I wanted to ask ourselves, is why it is that we would think in that way? Why do we associate the private sector with innovation? Generally speaking, we ascribe profit motivations to be behind why the private sector would be at the front line of innovation, meaning if they do, and if they don't innovate, if they don't bring new products to market, if they don't do things first, if they don't do things quickly, if they don't take risk, if they don't assume capital risks, like when we talked about when we discussed this with James, that they will flounder. They will go out of business and that is this sort of razor's edge of the private sector of the marketplace. The truth of the matter is that that is absolutely true. In many cases, that again, innovation is required for success in business, but it is not a precondition of the private sector. That's a really important point to start with you, which is to say the private sector does not have a monopoly on the concept of innovation. That's something that I think is also extremely important to discuss as we bring up innovativeness and innovation as it relates to the non-profit sector, because again, it might not be the front of mind when we think about the word innovation. Let's talk about what a service innovation is. Service innovation is defined as, quote, the introduction of new services to existing or new customers in order to increase the effectiveness of an organization its quality and/or customers a satisfaction. So again, services, if we imagine those being things that people need, things that people require, if you imagine sport to be in that line with that, service innovations are a part of the non-profit sector. In fact, they are a crucial aspect of the non-profit sector. This is where, again, I would normally ask you to conjure in your mind how it is that services like sport are delivered by non-profit organizations. So for instance, if you're thinking about youth sports, you're thinking about youth hockey, you're thinking about youth baseball, youth soccer, youth swimming, any of these things, if you think about what is required to administer that programming, what is needed. I've mentioned this to you two before, but the large amounts of revenue generated by non-profits. It's a lot of money is taken in every year at registration. If you imagine how that process works, I will again ask you to imagine the way it used to work in say 1995 and maybe even 1975. So how would the registration process have worked in those years? Generally speaking, processes that require large amounts of human resources and large amounts of volunteer hours. I mean, these are extremely laborious, but they're also extremely important to get correct. You can't be messing around with the amount of revenue generated by a local hockey organization when it comes to registration time, the amount of fees that are put in. An example of a service innovation here that you'll see frequently in youth sports is ways to generate practices like registration to be done in more efficient methods. Now sometimes that is using products developed by the private sector, absolutely. But service innovation is something you'll see all the time when it comes to registration. That's a big one where you're going to see new methods, new ways of doing things tried repeatedly by nonprofit organizations. Not because they are doing so to risk their financial futures necessarily, but because they're doing it out of a need, an absolute screaming out need that exists in nonprofit organizations to try things to make things more efficient. Does not mean that things are always made better. I'll say that again. That's something I'm sure that is obvious to you upon hearing this, but that's something to keep in mind. But this innovativeness, this disposition towards new things, towards trying new things, you will find it over and over again in nonprofits and again, something that I want to start where discussion with here today. So moving to the notion of policy implementation. If you've taken two P0s 6 with me, which is sport policy, previously, if you're taking it right now, for instance, we talk about the policy making process in that course. I believe it is a core course. Most of you have taken that course either with me or with someone else. You discuss sort of the process of how policies get brought about. One of the stages is policy implementation. Winning an Angostopolis highlight two main approaches in policy implementation, influencing the top these the working of NPO's. One is a top down approach. This considers that individuals at the local level would be expected to implement the policy decided at the upper level. Supporters of this approach argue for well-defined objectives, clear levels of responsibility, linear action plans, and hierarchical authoritative relationships. Another method is bottom-up approaches, which applies a local contextual perspective to the development of policies. Supporters of this approach claim that it is tailored to the challenges faced at the local level and involves those agents who actually implement the policy itself. Again, I think that this is a very important point to sort of stop on to begin with here. When you see these two approaches, I think I can feel, generally speaking by having done this a few times with groups, where the inclination is. I think your thoughts are immediately okay, where we're supposed to say that top down doesn't work and we need to be focusing on bottom-up approaches. Once I consider the concerns at the local level, and I think for many years, it's just taken a long time to even add bottom-up as a notion that this type of policy making or this type of policy implementation is even possible. But I think it's important that we consider the fact that sometimes bottom-up approaches don't work in this delivery of support. Sometimes top-down approaches don't work. There's a large amount of scholarship on the ineffectiveness in certain situations of top-down approaches to running organizations. There are, however, situations in which these organizations need to have top-down decision-making processes. Sometimes when they become too convoluted, these processes can become bogged down and I'm sure you are familiar with this feeling from working in the workplace in the road your life. If not, you will be soon. The idea that a lack of clarity about what the direction of an organization is. Sometimes that can be extremely frustrating and it can be absolutely paralyzing for the delivery of support. This is not to say that number two is correct and number one is incorrect. That's not the way that this essentially works. This is just to say that there are essentially two main approaches to implementing any policy when it relates to support organizations. If you are thinking about professional support and you're imagining which of these two approaches is used in the delivery of professional support, I mean generally speaking, there is a top-down approach here. There is certainly a top-down approach as it relates to accountability, meaning even if there's sort of bottom-up decision made, decisions made and they go poorly, those at the very top are generally held accountable in the same sort of fashion, generally speaking. I'm sure that many of you can think of examples where that has not been the case with wherever professional support that you follow if you do follow one. It's important to consider here. The sport world is very familiar with top-down approaches to decision making. The delivery of support at the youth level, at the nonprofit level, at the NSO level, this is still a top-down situation as well. Doesn't mean you can't consult, doesn't mean you can't get good information, doesn't mean you can't talk to people, absolutely not. Just keep this in mind as it relates to the delivery of sports in general. Number one here, the top-down approach, generally speaking, is still even with the large amounts of consultation, the default decision making process for the delivery of support. Let's move to number four, or your slide four here, the slide that discusses attitude, which is another word that I know you're familiar with. Winning and angstopolis, that's a tricky one for me to say, but there it is from page 581, they focus on this notion of attitude. They say the disposition of implementers is a critical element for successful implementation. In the early stages of the development of innovations, managers attitude is critical for innovation. An attitude is, quote, "a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor." And again, this is just helpful sometimes to say, "I know you know what an attitude is, just helpful to remind ourselves what this means in this specific context with regard to nonprofit organizations and the delivery of sport." Therefore, enthusiasm for change and newness is one of the key elements that facilitates innovation. Now, I want us to sort of pause for a moment there as it relates to sports specifically. Innovativeness or the notion of innovation or being open to change. This is something that essentially these researchers are suggesting is an important part of developing a culture of innovation in an organization that is related to sport. If you're thinking about sport in your own life, you're thinking about professional sport, whatever professional sport that you follow if you follow one. If you follow sport in general, any sport at any sort of level throughout your life, how receptive to change do you feel like that sport is? If you're a fan of professional golf or if you're a fan of volleyball or if you're a fan of baseball, basketball, hockey, you name it doesn't matter. Imagine to yourselves right now the administration of that professional sport, how amenable to change generally speaking are these organizations. Let's focus on that. Psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor. Okay, that's whether the word "attitude" is defined. So what are the attitudes towards innovation in these sports? And for many years throughout history, and again, I won't turn this into a history lesson, but I can tell you by almost default major North American sporting institutions, do not have a disposition of favor towards innovation. Now there are reasons for this. I mean, certainly as soon as professional sports and sports in general, NSO's in general as well as sports become popular and start generating lots of revenue and a lot of large amount of profit in the professional sector, there is a large incentive to be innovative. This is something that again, you are well aware of here in them. I don't need to be the one to talk to you about these sort of conditions. But again, carrying this attitude towards innovation in general can be negative as the sport seeks to grow and seek to evolve and seek to meet new challenges. Therefore, quote, "induousism for change and newness is one of the key elements to facilitate innovation." That's again from the research. So basically here, what this research is suggesting to us about organizations in general. As it isn't necessarily about the industry, the sport itself, it's about the attitudes inside the organizations and why is this important for all of you. Well, you're going to get a little window into it by working with some of these organizations. And one of the things that's going to be demonstrating to you that your organization that you're working for actually has a positive disposition towards innovation and change is the fact that they are working with you in this very moment. Because this is not a conventional sort of method. They are willing to take risks. They're willing to have outside help. They're willing to go to a group of undergraduate students at a university they may or not be familiar with and ask for assistance. Creativity. This is again, sort of a sidebar here, but it's an important aspect of your nonprofit working assignments as well. It's something that I will repeatedly mention to you as this process evolves. These organizations are looking for creativity. They are looking for capability. They are not looking to give you a step-by-step instruction guide about how to achieve all of the tasks as they are laid out in front of them. If they had the time to lay it out blow-by-blow and give you exactly how these organe these tasks needed to be carried out, they would simply do them themselves. They are seeking innovation. They are seeking creativity. They are not seeking perfection. They understand this is not going to be perfect, but they are seeking assistance in this way. They are looking for innovativeness in their volunteers, but they're also demonstrating an attitude towards innovation by simply taking part in this course. That's something to keep in mind as you move on here. This is an attitude towards innovation being demonstrated by these nonprofits. Is that the case for every nonprofit that delivers support? No. Is that the case for every professional sports organization? No. Is that the case for every league, every federation, every nonprofit that administer sports in this country? Certainly not. That can be helpful sometimes. Sometimes organizations being slow to changes is what can make an organization successful over time. Other times, it can lead to scandal. It can lead to financial disrepair. It can lead to a lot of the number of deleterious consequences. According to the next slide, innovativeness and organizational change, this notion of innovativeness. If you have a look at that slide right in front of you here, if you pull it up a little bit later, what does innovativeness mean? The slide defines it here, and this is from the research that we were just drawing from earlier. The ability of an organization to successfully offer new services or products and to keep offering these advances over time. Organizational change is the introduction of practices that are different from those currently in use. And that impact the whole organization, its structure, strategy, human resources, operations, and even culture. So we mentioned this notion of what is innovation. Well, innovativeness is the ability of an organization to successfully offer new things. It's the ability of an organization to change. So you can look at a nonprofit that administer sports in this country. Say Canada Soccer, baseball Canada. You can look at hockey Canada. You can say, what is the innovativeness inside that organization? How capable are they of offering new services and new products? And you can look throughout the last 30 or 40 years as a sample size. You might be working with an organization right now that has a long history of innovativeness. Being able to say we're doing things differently. That can be super helpful. You might be working with an organization or you might think of an organization right now. And certainly, given one of your writing assignments, you've seen some of these struggles that nonprofits have been, have had over time here, certainly in recent moments. You can sort of notice that perhaps a lack of innovativeness is one of these issues. And that can relate to innovating new ways of delivering services. But it can also say changing the way that our organization is structured. Changing the way that things are reported in our organization. Changing the way that these decision-making structures can relate from everything to governance, to the administration of locker room policy or anything. And you can use your imagination here as to how a lack of innovativeness can lead to big problems. Some of the problems that you were reading about a little bit earlier in this course. And organizational changes define on the slide here. This is essentially how these practices are implemented by the organizations themselves. Sometimes it is, even though this is a class on nonprofits, sometimes it's helpful to use professional support as a way of measuring these instances. Again, if you're a fan of professional support, certainly you don't need to be in this course or any course here at SPIM. But just if you are, you can use this as an example in your head. Now receptive to doing things differently is your favorite team, your favorite sport, your favorite league. Right? I mean, for many years just as an example here, if you're not a fan of baseball, that's totally okay. But generally speaking, North American professional baseball has been considered one of the least resistant to change of any of the major North American sports out there. Certainly things have changed drastically in this past. I would say past 15 years in general, but even this past 24 months, in terms of the way the sport is even organized, the way the sports administered, the physical geometry of the sport. I mean, many of the aspects of a thing that made baseball what it was are being physically altered. Now, what are the conditions driving those changes? I mean, is it a shift towards innovativeness? Perhaps. Why is that? I mean, perhaps there are many different reasons you might know a few of them off top of your head. If you can imagine the demographic shifts in the viewing habits of professional baseball. If you're working in baseball for one of your non-profits here, it would be that the Kitchen of Matter Baseball Association or baseball Canada know that they are also subjected to the same dynamics as major league baseball as in terms of waning interest in the game itself and attention spans and all the things that have affected baseball. So these things all happen in concert with each other. How innovative is an organization? What is the innovativeness of your nonprofit? They all exist in the same sporting landscape as the professional sports. Now, the way that they implement organizational change might be different, but just know that they're all subject to the same conditions. Moving on to the next slide. We are introduced to the concept of organizations and innovations themselves. NPSOs possess unique characteristics that influence the way change in innovations are perceived by their stakeholders, staff and managers. NPSOs, and when I say NPSOs, I mean nonprofit sports organizations, need to innovate in order to acquire the resources they required in order to survive and to promote their sport. This is a key, key aspect of today's course content. This notion of the necessity for innovation inside of nonprofit organizations, if you can remember nothing from today, remember that. Case studies on innovation in NPSOs have shown that a large part of innovation success is due to a professional management and commitment as well as innovation implementation. Essentially what this research suggests is, nonprofit sports organizations are required to innovate consistently over time. This is a requirement that is somewhat unique to nonprofits in this way. These are our professional sports required to innovate perhaps, but given the financial dynamics of professional sport in some senses and the private sector in general, a successful product does not necessarily require innovation. It's a successful product as it is. If it's generating large amounts of profits for those involved, the impetus to innovate really comes down to the individual manager themselves, but there isn't this built in requirement to constantly be introducing new things and new services as a function of that organization in the private sector. To keep that in mind, this is a crucial, crucial aspect here. And again, if you're looking for proof of this, look for proof of the fact that how many nonprofits we have willing to to work with us in this very course. This leads us to this discussion of risk, which puts us on slide 7, by the way, for following along in front of your slideshow. NPSOs of generally, and NPO's in general, have generally been thought of as risk at verse, meaning they are not receptive to risk in general. However, the current study argues that the opposite idea could be also the case as NPO's under examination can embrace and support innovation. And this is from this women and Angostopolis article that I've assigned in the course readings and I'm taking excerpts from on these slides. Moreover, sports federations is staff favorite consulting sports clubs about innovative ideas. This is in line with the bottom-up approach of implementing policies. As for practical implementation, it is necessary for organizational actors in NPO's to develop positive attitudes towards newness in order to facilitate the implementation of innovation. That's a lot of words to describe a relatively simple concept here. And that is essentially, these two researchers have looked at and this is citing other research that's been done over the past few decades. The fact that in successful NPSOs, you see a receptiveness towards change. In successful NPSOs, you see organizations that are willing to listen to lower level employees to those who are actually involved in organizations at the lowest levels in order to be successful. They are willing to change frequently. Even if their organization is successful at delivering that product, that sport, that delivery of these things. That's key in terms of our understanding of NPSOs. Because generally speaking, as the first part of this slide mentions, when we think of risk, we associate that with the private sector and that's something that I want to disabuse us of right now, the notion that NPO's and nonprofits in general are safe landing spots for those not willing to take any risks or try new things. Again, if you've ever worked at an NPO, you understand that every single year is a huge challenge. Even if your sport is extremely successful. In some of our discussions with some of the NPO's we were working with this semester, I was discussing how quickly things can change. It was talking to one of the large NSOs here, mentioning how this particular NSO is essentially now center of attention in terms of the nation's sort of sporting attention. In a way that 16 months ago, it was Canada Soccer. In that 16-month period, Canada Soccer's problems, a lot of them stem from these rapid expansion. What I'm trying to say here is, it doesn't really matter how successful an NPO is or an NPO is. It's constantly being innovative in their product and constantly thinking of new ways of doing things, even when they're successful. In fact, in the case of hockey Canada, Canada Soccer and many others, even more so when they are successful, this is why you will see a risk taking atmosphere inside of many nonprofit organizations. Even though you necessarily probably associate that type of behavior with the private sector. If you've got ideas, if you have solutions, if you've got a lot of ways in your head about how to fix things in sport, that's the way that you're looking to start your career. If you're looking for a demonstrating your skill set, if you're looking to say to a professional sports organization in five or ten years, that you have a demonstrated track record of solving problems or operating new solutions. Generally speaking, it's hard to break into professional sports architecture with those types of things. This notion that they're always just ear to the ground looking for brand new ways of doing things, it's fundamentally not the way these organizations have run. All you need to do is talk to someone who's worked at these organizations and ask them about how receptive many of them are to brand new ways of doing things. They'll tell you, again, this is about perfecting what's already working in most senses. NPSOs creativity is a very, very important aspect of the job and certainly is a part of what they're looking for. This isn't me giving a sell job for the notion of NPO's, but I am trying to open your eyes to the possibilities that NPSOs and NPO's in general can be a lot more innovative than you might imagine and therefore more receptive to outsiders than people who have new ways of imagining things. So if you've got ideas for how to fix problem X or Y in sport, NPO's are generally speaking a great way of breaking into that sports industry in general. And the final slide that we're going to look at today here is just slide eight if you're watched, if you're on your computer right now or if you're on your phone looking through these slides, talk about promoting innovation inside of NPSOs. Sport policymakers could use the present findings. This is from the study that you're going to be reading to foster innovation in sport organizations by incentivizing change and newness and rewarding those organizations or individuals that make it happen reinforcing positive disposition towards innovation would encourage a bottom up approach, the implementation of implementation and change and innovation and change within sport organizations. What this means is these organizations that they wish to be successful, they wish to be innovative need to create cultures in which employees are rewarded in this way. So this is what the research suggests is a good way of doing that inside of NPSOs. I think this is something that again is extremely important. Now this research that I'm demonstrating to you here is it's relatively dense again. You can focus on the conclusions. You can focus on the conclusions that have been extracted onto this slide. So in general, that might be a quicker way to do things as well, but make sure you have a look at the article as well. But it basically demonstrates the fact that if you're looking to change things inside of an NPSO, not all NPSOs are perfect, certainly Jeff Scherrenberg's guess lecture discusses the ways in which he wishes many of these organizations would operate, but not necessarily do in practice. That's what you need, right? If you're going to look to overhaul an NPSO, if you're going to look to overhaul an NISO, if you're going to look for problems within an NISO, oftentimes this type of disposition towards change can be suppressed and employed or often not rewarded for these types of things. And again, in the research, they mentioned this sort of disposition towards bottom-up approaches. Now I'll revisit that sort of aspect here before we cease for the first part of this week. Again, yes, is a bottom-up approach a useful method for organizing an NPSO absolutely in some senses. But it is also important to remind ourselves that top-down approaches are not necessarily antithetical to progress and antithetical to a well-run nonprofit. These top-down approaches are required. And sometimes bottom-up approaches, generally speaking, can actually have the inverted effect in terms of an effectiveness. Now there needs to be bottom-up methodology sometimes, which is to say asking the opinions of and having deep consultation with those at the actual implementation level, absolutely. But most organizations do need to sort of have top-down decision-making processes and institute it as well. And that's not something that I think the researchers would disagree with. Certainly, I think they acknowledge the hierarchical nature of most organizations in general. That's to say, there are leaders who make decisions and there are people that have to implement those decisions. That's essentially a fact that's hard to remove from the process of any sporting organizations. But again, as you imagine how this works in your own sort of sporting life, whatever sport that you follow, imagine that the sport is administered, right? Whatever sport that you follow right now likely has a commissioner or president of a federation, a commissioner of its professional sport, or both in some senses if you think you have a sport like hockey, for instance. And again, so those are top-down hierarchical organizational methods. There's really no way around that. How can we sort of change these things? We can use Bob on approaches. We can make sure that there are policies that are actually being implemented effectively. And most importantly, as we reflect on today, we can be receptive towards change. And that's essentially again what I want us to take away from today is this notion, innovativeness, this notion of risked verseness. And I want to open our eyes to the idea that nonprofits can be a place in which risks are taken, which products are innovated, services are innovated. And in some senses, they are actually uniquely positioned to do that. And lastly, this week I want to instruct you on your form response question, which deals specifically with your readings this week. So your audio response is going to have something to do with what we talked about today in our audio lecture. And your form response is going to have something to do with the reading. This is something to do specifically with Wynart and Christos Anganopolis and Ghostopolis, I believe it's how you pronounce that. I'm not quite sure, but I'm going to project to Christos for five of the finances last name correctly. But it's a very simple question. Our NPO is well positioned to embrace innovativeness and risks. Why? Or why not? And the reading actually specifically mentions some things there that you can get into. So make sure you have a look through it that reading. And again, make sure you're, if you are again listening to audio lectures, make sure that you, well, of course you are. You're listening to me right now. But if you are, make sure you're writing down notes so that your process is easier when you go to do your audio response. And that's your form response question for this week and looking forward to reading them. [Music]