Greater Positive Impact
with Reduced Stress on Staff & Volunteers

Short Duration, High Impact Programs:
Capacity and Team Building 
for Environmental Non-Profits

Pro bono (free service)

(for a limited time; some conditions apply)

How It Works

  • A short duration program of fast-paced, high-engagement online workshops
  • Based on a method proven in hundreds of meetings. 
  • Testimonials at actionmap.org/testimonials.
  • Goal: rapidly produce strong shared understanding among organizational stakeholders, supported by high quality process maps, evaluations and action plans.
  • Major results are typically produced in 5 hours of online workshop spread over 3 days.
  • Work product examples are shown below in this page (click to scroll there.)
  • Work products are exported to PowerPoint and Excel immediately after the workshops.
  • Workshop participants
  • Workshops can include up to about 12 core knowledge holders; workshops can start with just one knowledge holder.
  • No advance training or preparation required; simply schedule the workshops.
  • The activity of capturing and sharing knowledge and views can be extended through offline methods to include larger groups.

Key Values Produced by this Program

  • Increased Capacity through Organization and Process Optimization
  • The process maps and evaluations combine to produce a large number of detailed action points that can be carried into an ongoing action item tracking activity (which can be formal or informal) for detailed process optimization. 
  • The workshops include guidance in setting up that action item tracking activity.
  • The process maps and evaluations reveal clear areas for focusing organizational resources with appropriate functional groupings and assignments.
  • The work products can support many organizational purposes, including:
  • Strategy
  • Business plans
  • Budgeting
  • Job descriptions
  • Training
  • Standard operating procedures
  • Automation requirements
  • Grant writing
  • The program also provides fast, economical and detailed information gathering/discovery for more extended programs involving other consulting services.
  • More Impact for a Sustainable Environment
  • Organization and process optimization systematically improve the use of existing staff, volunteer funding and material resources and
  • Provide better information about the organization that can be used to engage existing and new stakeholders:
  • Including donors, grant sources, board members, influencers, the public and other organizations. 
  • Strong Shared Understanding
  • A major focus of the workshops is to produce strong shared understanding among stakeholders of organizational processes and each other’s interests and ideas with respect to those processes.
  • This strong shared understanding can be extended to produce many values for all stakeholder groups (see image above.)
  • Reduced stress/increased engagement in staff and volunteers
  • Increased understanding of overall operations and each other’s values and ideas:
  • Provides clarity that their work is focused on impact
  • Provides structure to focus their efforts
  • Enables stronger co-ordination, cross-support and backup
  • Increases certainty about roles and responsibilities
  • Detailed organization and process optimization plans:
  • Give staff and volunteers a way to contribute their ideas
  • Provide a view of moving forward and making progress

Call to Action

Why these programs?

The best hope for a sustainable environment lies with organizations that are focused on that problem. These organizations have impact as shown in the illustration above.

These organizations also provide direction for a very large percentage of the overall resources available for sustainability. So the effectiveness of these organizations is critical to the overall sustainability effort.

  • Government is constrained by politics and business is mostly only focused on growth.
  • So the most potent change drivers toward environmental sustainability are organizations focused on the problem.
  • Many people in these organizations are under continuous stress from working their hearts out tackling world-sized problems while facing massive obstacles and intense opposition to their efforts.
  • Based on career backgrounds, these organizations typically do not have extensive experience with organizational and process optimization methods. And the professional organization and process people are typically preoccupied working for for-profit companies.
  • Organizational and operational optimization can expand environmental organizations’ impact and provide relief and encouragement to their staff, if they have access to the capabilities.
  • The purpose of this program to provide access to those capabilities and accomplish that optimization rapidly and at scale.

Why am I offering these programs pro bono?

  • First, because I understand the pressing need for action now on climate change and all other environmental concerns. 
  • Second, because I believe these programs can be greatly scaled through training and software, which I can also offer pro bono, and that personally delivering these programs pro bono can “prime the pump” to get that scaling started.
  • Third, because our mission (that’s partner/co-developer/spouse Anne and myself) is to support the reduction of suffering at the largest possible scale.  At some point that means broad commercial distribution of our software. However, even if that never happens we will continue doing this work pro bono for as long as we can.

Example Work Products 

The example below is compiled from several real engagements.  

Actual work products are shown at the bottom on this page: actionmap.org/examples

The information in the work products below would typically be captured in 3 to 4 hours of online workshops.

Call to Action

Accelerate Innovation