Upending the Org Structure

Work gave me an exciting opportunity for stretching my creative muscles recently. I was drawn into a meeting which had the specific purpose of laying out a strategic plan for the coming years. It's a clean slate with nothing off the table and an ambitious goal – raising the Annual Fund's income by 40% in 5 years – and my group's task is to hash out a plan for achieving it.
What made me decide to write about it, though, and what makes it a creative opportunity for me is that I was put in the lead role of the group… which otherwise consists entirely of people above me in the hierarchy. There's almost certainly a couple of good reasons for this, but I believe the primary one might be one of the concepts we've talked about in class: too much input from an authority figure can stifle creativity. Putting the person with the least actual authority in the lead role is an extremely direct way of avoiding that issue, particularly when the authority actually assigning the task isn't part of the group at all. Sadly, I can't take credit for that creative choice. But it does lend me the opportunity to use some of the tools we've been working with.
To help me prepare for this project, I've taken the creativity tools we learned in class together and walked through each of them to see how they might be applicable to our task. The funny thing is that the tools I'm finding most relevant for this in terms of my own preparation are the ones I found least useful in our actual class work. Take one of the perennial problems of annual fundraising: do you put time, effort, and money into raising larger gifts from the people who already support you? Or do you sink energy into engaging new donors and bringing them on board? I've lined up the Innovation Matrix to address this question, with our current array of appeal methods filling in the 'existing products' section and new initiatives like crowdfunding filling the 'new product' gap. It's possible to see at a glance all the possible intersections of appeal methods with existing or new donor populations, and I'm hoping that the clear picture will help us decide on the proper balance going forward. For me, the matrix tools are turning out to be ideal for independent work where I found them less than useful in a group environment. It's my hope that the tools I found useful in a group environment will prove their worth going forward as well: