It’s easy to be pessimistic as we sail into a recession the likes of which we haven’t known before. There’s going to pain and trouble ahead, but is there an upside? Perhaps there is, as a group of charities experts hinted at in this week’s Third Sector Magazine.

The ‘Recession Watch Panel’, which has been pulled together by the magazine, recently met to discuss what a recession may mean for not-for-profits across the UK. Their conclusion was that financial pressures were likely to subject the sector to ‘Darwinian Forces’, with medium-sized charities likely to be most hard pressed.

Why medium-sized ones? Because, the panel suggests, such organisations don’t have the capacity or agility that large or small bodies do in responding to reduced funding streams and weakening engagement from volunteers.

But now for the silver lining: some of these organisations will face up to these problems rethinking the way they do things and being willing to contemplate a few risks.

Fortune favours the brave, so to speak – especially for those wishing to take the ‘agile route’ through the recession and beyond. And it’s the ‘beyond’ that’s really the point here.

Let’s face it; in the good times – when the economy is stable and growing – it’s easy to get a little lazy and tolerant of sub-optimal ways of doing things. Come a recession, this can leave organisations in a fragile state, vulnerable to downsizing or even closure.

In today’s world we therefore need to be a bit harder on ourselves and root out waste and poor practice. In so doing, it’s possible not just to withstand the recession but to emerge leaner and fitter, as well as more focused.

So what might the high-road to agility look like? The panel of charities experts gives few clues, so we’ve put our hats on instead.

For a start in means being more:

• - Responsive (more receptive and reactive to customers’ needs)
• - Innovative (open to new ideas and ways of doing things)
• - Flexible (cutting out bureaucracy and rigid working methods)
• - Adaptive (able to quickly change systems and processes)
• - Resilient (acting robustly to cope with unexpected challenges)

These are not characteristics acquired over night, but need to be worked on over months and years. But they are the very means by which organisations survive and prosper, even in difficult times. So how do we make them happen? Let’s start with ‘organisational design’. We’ll then go on to talk about ‘lean processes’.

All organisations today (especially the hard-pressed medium-sized ones discussed earlier) need to be increasingly ‘networked and connected’. This is the case ‘internally’ (how people work together across the organisation), as well as ‘externally’ (how it links with volunteers, partners and customers).

In one sense, the agile organisation is the polar opposite of the traditional ‘command and control’ hierarchy – the old style bureaucracy where everyone knew their place and there were limited (and very formal) interfaces between work groups, departments and the world outside.

In 2009, only by working fluidly with the most knowledgeable people – those who can get the job done, solve the problem, and so on – can organisations respond quickly and efficiently to customers’ needs.

This also means having access to the information and collaborative infrastructure that allows individuals and work groups to share ideas, address problems and deliver services. Increasingly, of course, we can rely on internet technology and mobile communications here. But it also demands quick and easy access to integrated databases, which lets those individuals and groups work on the tasks before them without being impeded by technological and spatial barriers.

Having more agile organisational designs is only one part of the puzzle, of course. Agile working also demands adopting ‘lean’ approaches to the design and management of ‘processes’.

At its heart, lean approaches are all about ‘cutting out waste’ and focusing people’s efforts on ‘added value work’. In so doing, they also seek to improve the quality of work (eliminating rework) and increasing the value that customers receive.

Getting started with lean approaches is easier than you might think. While there are plenty of specialist consultants willing to help with this, there are some easy things organisations can often do for themselves.

To begin, you can ask each individual, work group or department to look closely at the work they do (and the time they spend on it) and ask where the real value is in it? Does it really need doing (could it be eliminated)? If essential, could it be minimised (if so, how)? If it’s really a source of value – either to internal or external customers – how could it be enhanced?

The next key step is to recognise that individual work tasks and business processes are usually part of a ‘wider whole’ – a process that (often) runs from one person or department to another, before delivering (hopefully) something useful to a customer (which could be someone internal, of course).

Processes grow over time, with multiple handovers occurring between individuals and departments. One key problem here is that work loads can often become unbalanced, with work in one part of the organisation slowing up work in another.

Further problems are caused by the ‘fragmentation’ of work: people lose sight of the end goal, and only local optimisation occurs.

By taking a ‘systems view’ – looking end-to-end across processes - it’s possible to remedy these problems. Work can be redesigned to improve the general ‘flow’ of what is done. Where hand-offs are occurring (particularly in paper format), IT can be used to support workflow management and to ease bottlenecks.

Taken together, better process designs, combined with more networked and connected organisational structures, can help reduce costs, improve responsiveness, enhance service quality and ensure greater effectiveness all round. To make this happen a range of other changes are needed, of course.

Management – from the top to the bottom of the organisation – needs to adapt, allowing for greater discretion and ‘self-organisation’ at the level of work groups and teams. Organisational culture needs to change, encouraging greater work flexibility, as well as more willingness to work across borders and in teams. And a more modern mindset is required, one that challenges established approaches and demands more progressive ways of doing things.

Organisations that embrace these ideas will not find the recession easy. Jobs may still be lost; people will still be unsettled by the experience of change. But they may emerge the other side of it with skills and capabilities that allow them to work more productively, effectively and responsively in the future. Being optimistic about it, that’s surely a prize worth having.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the start of the International Space Station. Back in 1998 the first piece of the station was launched into orbit, commencing an ambitious exercise of international collaboration.

Space exploration is an expensive business. You need access to specialist equipment, as well as masses of computing power to track and guide your mission. But imagine this: supposing NASA (and other space agencies) were to throw open their doors and allow would-be space explorers to make use of their technology and infrastructure.

Okay, there might be limits on what they could use (and sometimes costs), but imagine what could happen if any would-be space entrepreneur could get his or her hands on technology of a quality and scale that would allow them to build and launch their own rockets and space stations. Sounds fanciful?

Well, it’s only an analogy. What I’m really keen to talk about here is about getting into the metaphorical world of ‘cloud computing‘. If you’ve come across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google’s developer-focused resources, you’ve already met the world’s biggest providers of cloud computing services.

Put simply, cloud computing allows you to build and host software, as well as store data (images, files etc) without having to own your own operating systems. Just by having access to the Internet, you - and your co-workers and customers - can run applications, operate business processes and access services, without the need for owning and managing the infrastructure yourself.

In a sense, it’s as liberating as being freed from an earth-bound existence. Wherever you are, as long as you can connect to the web, all the data storage and computing power you want is there at your fingertips. No more need to worry about capacity, maintenance and obsolescence, somebody else will do that for you (okay, at a price, depending on what you want).

Not only can owning your own systems and data servers be expensive and time consuming, few companies can afford to invest in the sort of infrastructure that allows them to scale up when demand surges. Consider a situation where you suddenly had a million customers wanting to download pdfs from your site, or view an online video; if you’re just your own little island of storage and processing, you’re going to get clogged up pretty quickly.

Which is where access to bigger providers comes in. But the paradigm of cloud-working also goes for smaller providers offering outsourced Internet services. We would say this, of course, but why would you want to maintain your own creaking infrastructure - often difficult for staff to access - when someone else can host and deliver the data and applications you need across the web?

And here-in lies some of the complexity of the ‘cloud’ metaphor. In truth, the movement we’re talking about here is about ‘clouds’ - some bigger than others; some with different properties than others. But the underlying principle is the same: access to technology that an individual organisation (especially small and medium sized ones) could only dream about.

It’s a world that’s enabling developers and micro-business to create and deliver a host of new online services, secure in the knowledge that is has a platform that is powerful and scalable if demand hits a spike. NASA might not be opening the doors to such people and organisations; but the infrastructure providers of the cloud certainly are.