by Jeff Schar, Managing Director of Sendero Consulting and TN HIMSS Board Member
The TN HIMSS Board Retreat began several months prior to our actual meeting. Enter President Elect, Justin Mooneyhan. You see, Justin had an idea, a unique vision, a provocative thought to use data to gather, assess, and drive action to improve processes of our TN HIMSS Board. He thought, “Is it time to refresh our vision and mission? Who do we aspire to be? Where do we want to go? What do we want to achieve?” This form of thinking became the catalyst for a highly engaging and interactive retreat to focus on our Board strategy and actionable plan to get there.
Our strategic planning retreat was kicked off this year by leveraging a strategic software solution from a company called New Orchard. New Orchard’s mission is to help organizations achieve operational excellence. For us to evolve as a Board and reach the goals we all want to achieve, it was time to drive change. The first step began with our board members taking two short New Orchard assessment surveys:
- Business Identity Index (BII) – These results reflect an individual’s perspective regarding HOW an organization makes critical business decisions, results are NOT an articulation of an individual’s personality.
- Change Capacity Assessment (CCA) – This measures the ability of an organization to sustain positive change based on the perspectives of individuals at all levels within the organization.
The Chapter’s leadership and a few, recent past presidents also also went through a live and interactive assessment called the Operational Maturity Inventory (OMI) which measures the current operational maturity of TN HIMSS across 45 principles and best practices specific to non-profit organizations.
Sendero Consulting, as they did in 2023, worked with a small Board team to set the agenda and facilitate the meeting. Additionally, Sendero worked with New Orchard to synthesize the assessment results, interpret the data, and provide an executive readout to board members. A summary of key takeaways from the strategic planning session were:
- A refreshed vision and mission statement with emphasis on being innovative, story and mission driven, and vision focused
- Improve operational maturity. Opportunities include:
- Define board roles and responsibilities
- Focus on succession planning
- Maintain more rigor of process documentation and maintenance
- Leveraging board committees in greater ways
- Improve Programs/events. Opportunities include:
- Conduct retrospectives after each event
- Establish clear metrics and KPIs to measure success
- Continue to be innovative by introducing new events that can increase attendance and membership engagement
- Increase Membership. Opportunities include:
- Continue to use data to inform strategy on member acquisition and engagement
- Develop target member characteristics
- Open up new member outreach(e.g., expanding Organizational Affiliate members, young professionals, non-members attending TN HIMSS events, etc.)
As you can see, there are MANY great opportunities and actionable next steps for our Board ahead of us in 2024. Our meeting set the tone by creating an action for bias for our Board to get to the next level. It is time for all of us to lean in and go BE GREAT!