Anika Legal
Strategy Workshop Facilitator · 2021
One strategy day with a legaltech NFP. Taught me more about communication than anything else that year.
What I Learned
- Jargon is a defence mechanism. Strip it out and you find out very quickly what people actually believe versus what they've been repeating.
- A room full of passionate, smart people does not automatically produce consensus. Facilitation is a real skill, not just chairperson work.
- Running a legaltech NFP on passion and limited funds requires a specific kind of clarity about what you're for -- because you can't be for everything.
Anika Legal is a legaltech non-profit doing genuinely important work -- making legal support accessible to people who can't afford it. I was brought in to facilitate one of their strategy days.
The brief was to help the team cut through some competing priorities and reach shared direction. What I found when I got in the room was something I've seen in a lot of organisations: smart, committed people who had been operating in a specific vocabulary for so long that they'd stopped questioning what the words actually meant. Strategy conversations were happening in the language of mission statements rather than the language of choices.
My job was to slow that down. To ask what we actually meant when we used a particular phrase. To surface the real tradeoffs that existed underneath the consensus language. It's uncomfortable work -- people don't love having their assumptions made explicit -- but the conversations that come out the other side are usually much more useful than the ones that stayed in abstraction.
The day went well. The team left with clearer priorities than they arrived with, and I left with a renewed appreciation for what it takes to keep a passion-funded organisation coherent. The constraint of limited resources forces honesty in a way that well-funded organisations often avoid. At Anika, every decision had a real cost. That made the conversation matter more.