Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

What do The Reut Institute and the Dutch football team Ajax have in common?

The Reut Institute was established in January 2004 with the purpose of becoming an ‘institution’ and Israel’s ‘leading agent of change’ in the service of its vision.

With this aim, we decided that each policy team should work towards operational integrity. In other words, each policy team has three overarching goals: to master the art of strategic leadership,  to coach its own analysts, and to support the organization’s development efforts.

Most of the policy teams have significant or even full operational integrity in knowledge creation and training analysts. Yet, a greater awareness to organizational development is necessary. To reach this awareness we borrowed from the world of football (soccer) the idea of Total Development: a Dutch-pioneered concept that any player can take over the role of any other player in the team on the football field.

In this context, the team attended a short workshop last week by Doris Schwartz, the Director of the American Friends of the Reut Institute (AFRI). The workshop focused on fundraising methodologies, as well as an introduction to AFRI, Reut’s primary supporter.

The session furthered Total Development on an organizational level. If each member of the Reut team begins tuning into the organization’s development needs, we then can increase our presence on the “field” (hopefully achieving more desirable results than the Dutch football team this year).