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Verture strategy development – opening up

Author

Jo Kerr

  • Brand

As the staff and Board of Verture kick-off our strategy development this month, we’re doing so with a commitment to open working. So what is open working? Public Digital defines is as: “… showing people the work you are doing, as you’re doing it.” This could include sharing within a team or organisation. At its most developed, it means sharing with stakeholders outside the organisation who have an interest in your work. That’s the approach we’re taking at Verture. 

For us, it builds on the brilliant example set by my colleague Andrew Williams on the Creative Climate Futures Substack, where he’s documented the climate action of communities and partners in Easterhouse and The Gorbals, now entering its third year. 

In the Scottish charity sector, open working has been popularised by Third Sector Lab. In her post on the benefits of open working, Robyn Barclay covers a lot of the reasons we’ve chosen this approach. For Verture, there are five main benefits: 

  1. We will be accountable to the communities we work, our current and future partners and anyone who contributes to our strategy development. There will be a public record of what people said and what we did with those insights. We want to establish an open dialogue, and hope sharing here will support that. 
  1. It’s an opportunity for Verture to have a public voice about the work we’re shaping. We often sit in the background while programmes like Adaptation Scotland, rightly, take the spotlight. This is a way to share our unique contribution. 
  1. As a wholly project-funded charity, with no core or unrestricted income, Verture must look at our future sustainability as part of our strategy development. We hope this way of working will help attract new funders and supporters and help to build trust in our approaches. 
  1. Sharing our work as we go promotes a reflective practice, encouraging us to learn and iterate. This way of working is also referred to as ‘learning in the open’. We will share useful takeaways that other organisations and practitioners in climate adaptation and resilience can benefit from. And we will share what’s not working, so that others can avoid the same pitfalls. 
  1. Most importantly, in a fractured world full of wicked problems, charities can’t afford to work in silos. Verture needs to be clear and specific about what we will and won’t do to be effective, but that only works if we’re clear about where we sit in the wider ecosystem and how we can collaborate with other organisations across sectors to have greater impact. By open sourcing our strategy development, we hope it will prompt others to do the same, allowing us to find greater alignment, and promote multisolving, where a single collaborative solution can have multiple benefits. 

As Robyn says: “There’s a reason that academics publish their work openly — there’s no point running the same experiment 100 times in different labs across the country if someone has worked it out already.” 

I first took an open working approach back in 2013-15 as Head of Digital Communications at Girlguiding, where we shared the development of our digital ecosystem with the organisation’s 500,000 members across the UK. Looking back, it feels like a different world – a rising tide of feminist activism and more ready access to hope for the future. Now, we need greater, more systematic, more vulnerable collaboration to face the climate and nature emergency. At Verture, we’re ready to play our part. 

If you’re also embarking on a strategy development and/or experimenting with open working I’d love to chat. Get in touch!