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The Strictly Come Dancing approach to charity strategy

Governance | Tesse Akpeki | 4 Jan 2012

Strictly Come Dancing set smashing standards last year, and delivered results. Tesse Akpeki muses that the Strictly approach could be adopted by charities.

More than 12 million viewers watched McFly drummer, Harry Judd and his dance partner Aliona Vilani dance their way to becoming 2011 Champions of Strictly Come Dancing. I had been spellbound by last year’s Strictly as the score of 34 out of 40 was not sufficient in the last few weeks of the show to save some contestants from elimination. As a result, couples strove for scores of 39 and the perfect score of 40. The level and quality of performance just kept going higher and higher. And several dance champions were made! 

Harry and Aliona achieved the perfect score of 40 twice in the finals and the difference in judges' scores between the winners and runners-up Chelsee Healey and Pasha Kovalev was just three points!!! The investment of training, clear routines, commitment, discipline and focus on the goal was clear to all to see.

I can’t keep my mind from wandering to a recent article in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge entitled The New Measures for Improving Nonprofit Performance by Julia Hanna.  In view of stronger emphasis on results, Julia quotes Mario Marino: “Without understanding outcomes you can’t get at the issue of what works and what doesn’t”, and outlines the outcomes as thus:

• Getting the right people in the right seats
• Modelling behaviour you want the organisation to adopt
• Crafting a moral and ethical framework to build a culture
• Clarity of vision to build a culture
• People knowing what is expected of them and giving feedback in a constructive way
• Using information to allow people to get engaged, to investigate, to explore, to be curious, to learn, to continuously improve
• Developing people in roles
• Linking methods to strategy, to management more generally, and specifically to performance measurements
• Acknowledging that this is all a process and sometimes it can be slow

The article concludes by posturing that outcome mapping could potentially be useful for measuring ecosystem outcomes by bringing together a diverse set of stakeholders working on similar problems to map out their different roles and various theories of change. Relationship building would use the wisdom of crowds to identify pathways for change.  Learning-based approaches built during this process would support taking risks, looking at failure, analysing data, and then doing various midcourse corrections; combining evaluative and learning-based methods.

The bottom line? The willingness to look crucially at what you’re doing well, what you’re doing poorly and then trying to improve it. Creating and leading high-performance organisations is both difficult and deeply meaningful, but this is the stuff that shapes and changes the world. The outcome is Strictly Excellence.

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Who's Who: Tesse Akpeki