Category Archives: Enrichment: Concepts

A Couple Sample Procedures

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So I’m actually the guy who mostly maintains the website and sends out the blast e-mails for my longtime teacher, Rabbi Natan Margalit over at Organic Torah. Organic Torah, Inc., is a small nonprofit organization centering around Rabbi Natan’s teachings, including his “organic torah” (click over there to read more) as well as courses he teaches each year on rabbinic text with a focus on the “organic” structure of Mishnah. It’s a typical startup nonprofit situation. As I progressed toward my own rabbinic ordination, and especially during my year of study in Israel, it became necessary for people other than me to maintain the website and send out blast e-mails. So, I developed a couple of procedures — as I explain in the Documentation essay within Chapter 10 of Growth through Governance — to help someone unfamiliar with the process carry out the periodic tasks on the website that need doing.

Click here to view two of the procedures I made for Organic Torah. The idea of procedures is to use quite a lot of detail, but to use plain English and explain any jargon terms. A procedure should be useful to a reasonably intelligent person who has no prior experience with your organization or the software products it uses, beyond basic ability to use office software. In this case, my procedures were designed to be useful to Natan in case he needed to do his own website updates, but also to a brand-new volunteer who may not have seen our website in depth before and may not be familiar with Natan’s specific teachings.

What do you think, are these procedures useful, or is anything unclear? If you desired to volunteer for Organic Torah, do you think you’d be able to complete a blog post or a change to a widget just by reading these procedures? The point of organizational knowledge is for you, me, or anyone to be able to pick up a procedure (that’s explicit knowledge) and do the task, and learn by doing through iteration to become good at the process (that is, to create tacit knowledge in our heads).

Accounting Terminology: Debit and Credit

The Decision Belongs to the Organization

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I just want to give due recognition to the importance of knowing which people make an organizational decision, which was very well articulated in Light’s book, which I cited there in footnote 14. In Growth through Governance I teach the idea of organizational decisions — decisions that belong to an organization, not to any one individual. I think the example I gave, of the dinner party, is sufficient to show that organizational decisions exist. If you and I join President Obama for dinner, and the three of us have a discussion about whether we’d prefer pastrami sandwiches, enchiladas or Korean barbecue, then whatever decision we make will belong not to any particular one of us, but to our dinner party corporately. The joint decision creates an organization around it, if the organization wasn’t there before. This is not very different from the way in which most nonprofit organizations emerge by having a meeting of people and voting themselves into existence.

But to underscore Light’s emphasis on the people behind decisions, I mention my undergraduate first-year advisor, Prof. Larry Bacow, who went on to serve as Chancellor of MIT and President of Tufts University. Larry would critique what he called the “talking building syndrome”: the idea that “MIT decided,” or “the City of Boston decided” this or that. Larry would point students to the importance, for being effective in organizations, of pinpointing how and by whom those decisions emerge.

Neither side of this dialogue is wrong. Both sides are right. In Growth through Governance I concentrate on organizational decisions, about which you’ll see even more in Chapter 3. But let’s not discount the need to know which people are behind which organizational decisions, and why.