Ginomai Organizational Strategy Activation

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Ginomai Organizational Strategy Activation

We work with mission-driven organizations that have a strategy but can't get it off the page. www.ginomai.ca Creates space for brainstorming and idea generation.

Meet the Founder | Leona Banfield

Executive-level data-driven Social Services Sector Professional with a strong background in leadership and extensive experience working with people to improve team morale. Works with front line and management employees within unionized and non-unionized environments to move through change, and leads teams to embrace change in a way that creates space for innovati

on and opportunity. Excels in coaching and leading teams to outstanding performance, reduced absenteeism, and a cohesive team mentality. Proven to be a specialist by nature and acquires in depth knowledge about areas of interest, passion, and new areas that are required. Demonstrates aptitude as a big-picture thinker and brings a strategic perspective to the table. Helps non-profit organizations develop long term strategy on service delivery by identifying key differentiators and developing pricing points.

06/17/2026

The going rate for a strategic plan runs well into the tens of thousands.

For that you get a name-brand firm and a deck so polished you can see your reflection in it, with three years of clear direction, laid out and approved.

What you don’t get, for any of that money, is a sense of what the plan means for you and your team on Tuesday morning.

So it gets filed and 18 months on, a striking number of these plans have barely moved. The thinking was sound, it just never turned into anything anyone did differently.

Here’s the part nobody warns you about. Strategy rarely breaks in the room where you build it. It breaks afterward, in the unremarkable week where the deck is approved and everyone quietly goes back to how they already worked.

I’ve started calling it the gap between the plan and the practice. Most leaders I meet are sitting in it without a name for it.

So I built something for the people stuck there. Five days, one short email each, where you take a single initiative that stalled and work out where it actually came apart. It’s free, and the link is in the comments.

The money was probably never the problem. That tends to be the uncomfortable part.

06/04/2026

Most leadership programs look fine in the workshop. The 30 days after is where they fall apart.

The manager leaves with frameworks and good intentions. Then a high-pressure shift comes in while the team is short-staffed, and the new habit doesn't hold because there was no practice infrastructure to make it stick.

I build that infrastructure. The design is a behaviour-change loop: a facilitated session, then 30 days of practicing the framework in real work - with a buddy and structured journals - before the next layer builds on it. The goal is leadership that holds in the moments when it's hardest to hold.

The management team at The Behaviour Company (Canada) is three modules into a four-module program. 100% adoption every cycle. Every manager reported being more consistent than 28 days prior. Commitment to change and confidence increased each module. CEO Zainab Fazal, R.B.A., BCBA, IBA Fazal is doing the work alongside her team.

That's what the design is built for.

If you lead an organization in a regulated or high-stakes environment and leadership capability is the gap between your strategy and what's actually happening - let's talk.

👇 Send me a DM or drop a comment.

06/03/2026

There's less back and forth. Communication feels tidier now."
That's from a manager's journal, partway through Module 2. It's the kind of observation that doesn't come from a workshop - it comes from 30 days of practicing a specific behaviour in the actual work.

Since February, six managers at The Behaviour Company (Canada) - an MCCSS-licensed children's group home in Ontario - have worked through three competency modules: Confident Decisions, Clear Communication, and Follow Through. Each one runs the same way: a facilitated session, then 30 days of practicing one or two commitments in real situations, with a buddy and a journal.

Across all three: 100% adoption. Relevance to role held between 9.67 and 9.83 out of 10 throughout. Commitment to change and confidence scores increased each cycle. The team kept getting more invested as the work got harder.

The change shows up in the journals, and in the monthly sessions.

"Used this perfectly during our leadership meeting today with the management team! Loved the outcome and am hoping this becomes something we all use consistently." - Zainab Fazal, R.B.A., BCBA, IBA, CEO of The Behaviour Company

When the CEO is practicing the frameworks with her management team and logging it in her journal, that's culture shift in progress.

"Ownership is very clear now and tasks are completed on time and the quality of the work done has been amazing too." - a manager

Three modules in. Module 4 ahead. And in a licensed, regulated environment, "less back and forth" and "clear ownership" are how consistent care actually holds.

06/02/2026

"If they’re not honest, what does that tell you about your culture?"

That's the question I sit with when leaders push back on self-reported data. And they do push back. "How do I know they're actually changing?" "What does this data actually tell me?"

Those are valid questions, but the answer isn't to dismiss the data.

One of the most replicated findings in behavioral science is that self-monitoring itself drives behaviour change. Track what you eat and you snack less - not because writing it down is magic, but because naming and owning a behaviour builds the awareness that changes it.

The measurement is part of the intervention.

As for the concern that people will lie or lack the self-awareness to rate themselves accurately - that's worth examining. But if your first instinct is that your people can't be trusted to self-report honestly, that's a culture signal worth sitting with, not a reason to bin the metric.

And self-reported data is one of your earliest windows into whether change is taking hold. Before it shows up in outcomes, before performance metrics move, the people doing the work know whether they're practicing differently, and that signal matters.

The management team at The Behaviour Company self-reported behaviour change from a 2/10 baseline to 8.4 by the final check-in in Module 3 – that’s a 320% lift.

Across all three modules: 100% adoption, and every manager reporting they were more consistent than 28 days prior.

Is that self-reported? Yes.

And then there's what Zainab Fazal, R.B.A., BCBA, IBA shared with me on a recent call: "This is changing our culture. Supervisors are coming to me less and managing things effectively on their own."

A CEO watching her team operate differently - with one module still to go.
Self-reported data tells you whether the people practicing believe it's working.

What Zainab described is what it looks like when they're right.

05/29/2026

80% of Canadian nonprofits are already using AI in some way.

Most of them are using it for communications and fundraising tasks. Very few are applying it to anything strategic. And 64% have no policy governing any of it.

If you're leading a mission-driven organization right now, you're probably somewhere in that picture - AI is already in your building in some form, you know you should be more intentional about it, and between the funding pressures, the staffing gaps, and the actual work of running your organization, figuring out where to start keeps getting pushed to next quarter.

The AI Readiness Diagnostic was built for exactly that moment. Not to tell you what tools to buy or what's trending in the sector, but to help you get honest about where your organization actually stands across the four domains that determine whether AI integration will take root or quietly stall out.

5 minutes, and no technical background required. You'll get a clearer starting point than most AI strategy conversations happening in this sector right now.

DM me and I'll send it over.

05/22/2026

Mike and I have been paddling together for years. Apparently the Grand River finds this hilarious.

We signed up for a river canoe course and when our instructor realized we were a couple, we joked: there should be a divorce lawyer stationed on the riverbank for any couple attempting this.

We wanted to learn proper technique. On a lake you can get away with mediocre form - if you meander a little nobody gets hurt. The river doesn't give you that grace. It turned out the technique wasn't really our problem. Mike and I had some unlearning to do about how we communicate in a canoe - because on a river, that's the thing that will either keep you upright or put you in the water.

In a canoe, the person in the back steers. The person in the front sets the cadence and speed. The person in the back can see the person in the front - but not the other way around. The person in the back has to communicate what they're doing, and the person in the front has to call out what the person in the back cannot see. Both roles matter. Neither works without the other.

We discovered this the hard way. Twice.

The first time, we were heading towards a swift (moving water just before a class-one rapid). The canoe was pointing the wrong direction - I was convinced of this. So I did what any reasonable person does when they're 99% sure they're right and 0% interested in discussing it: I took a corrective sweep stroke from the front.

No warning. No words.

Mike: "What are you doing?!"
Me: "You're going the wrong way!"
Mike: "I'm trying to go AROUND the rock, not over it."
He was right.

He saw the rock - I missed it. And instead of asking what he was doing or him telling me why we were going "the wrong way", I just overcorrected - which very nearly sent us into the thing I was trying to avoid.

The second time, my job was to scan for shallow water and call it out. I got distracted scoping the swift ahead, which felt very strategic and responsible of me, and completely missed the rock shelf two feet in front of us. The canoe stopped hard. We did not. There was some shimmying. There was some shoving. There were also some words I will not repeat here.

Two people. Same boat. Same destination. Zero communication in either direction.

I see this in organizations constantly. A leader has a vision. They present it at the town hall, they put it in the monthly newsletter. People show up, nod, and the leader reads that as alignment.

It isn't.

Showing up to a town hall is not the same as knowing what you're supposed to do on Monday morning. And assuming it is - that's where most strategic plans quietly fall apart.

The person with the vision thinks their job is to steer AND set the pace. But those are two different roles requiring two different people communicating clearly about what each of them can and cannot see and anticipate.

Stop communicating and listening, and you'll find your team overcorrecting into the exact rock you were all trying to avoid.

05/21/2026

Most organizations I’ve worked with have a strategy. Almost none of them have a plan.

These are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the most expensive habits in the sector.

Strategy sets direction - it answers where you’re going and why. Done well, it reflects a real understanding of your environment and what you’re willing to commit to. It belongs in the room where leadership makes decisions.

A plan, however, is what makes the strategy real for the people who have to execute it. The goals your teams are working toward this quarter, the metrics that tell you whether you’re moving, the leadership behaviours that signal to everyone in the building that this direction isn’t just aspirational.

Most organizations skip that translation entirely. Not because they don’t care, but because it’s harder than writing the strategy:
-> It requires decisions.
-> It requires saying what you’re not going to do.
-> It requires your leadership team to be aligned on something specific enough to be held accountable to.

So the Pillars stay on the website, everyone keeps delivering quality service, and the strategy document sits in a folder somewhere, doing nothing.

Pillars are not a plan.
Goals without metrics are not a plan.
And an AI rollout your leadership team doesn’t understand and your frontline staff weren’t prepared for, is not a plan either.

If your strategy hasn’t been translated into something your teams are actually working toward, you don’t have a strategy. You have a document.

05/20/2026

I watched well-run organizations struggle to pivot because nobody had built a plan behind the strategy.

I was working in social services leadership when the Ontario provincial government restructured the autism funding model and handed the money directly to families to spend where they chose.

It sounds like a reasonable policy shift. For the organizations delivering those services, it was a detonation.

Overnight they had a market and they had competitors. They needed to know what made them worth choosing, and most of them had never had to answer that question. The funding had always come. Quality service delivery was the whole job. Hence, strategy looked like a set of Pillars on the website under a tab nobody clicked.

Some organizations merged. Some pivoted successfully. Others are still finding their footing.

The ones that navigated it best had something the others didn’t: enough strategic clarity to make fast decisions when the ground shifted. They knew what they were building and what they were willing to stop doing to protect it.

I’m watching the same conditions build right now around AI. The organizations treating it as a tool to plug in rather than a capability to integrate with a real plan are building the same exposure all over again.

The funding model didn’t create that struggle. The absence of strategy did.

What challenges yours will probably be quieter. And faster.

05/17/2026

Halfway up a canyon wall in Canmore, I told the guide I didn’t think I could do it.

I wasn’t being dramatic. I was leaning backwards off a rock face, a line of people waiting behind me, and I genuinely couldn’t figure out the next move. I was annoyed, a little scared, and very aware that I was holding everyone up.

He pointed to a ledge so small I wasn’t sure my foot would fit. It did. Then he showed me how to read the rock - how to spot what I’d been completely missing. I’d never done this before and had no idea what to look for, and he certainly had no business assuming I did. He didn’t take over and he didn’t do it for me. Instead, he showed me what to look for and then let me do it scared.

That’s the part many leaders get wrong when leading teams through change. We either step in and do it for people because we’re impatient or controlling, or we assume they can see what we can see because we told them what we want. Neither works. People don’t need more instruction or motivation. They need someone to show them the ledge, and then trust them to make the move.

05/14/2026

Five years in, I still get that nervous-excited anticipation as I head to the annual Actionable.co Summit.

Not imposter syndrome exactly. More the specific kind of anticipation that comes from deliberately putting yourself around people who are further ahead and won’t let you coast.

Today a group of us hiked up to Grassi Lakes in Canmore, Alberta. Somewhere between the elevation gain and the cold, clear water, we got into one of those conversations that doesn’t have a tidy resolution. About what we’re building and why, and whether the direction we’re moving in is actually the direction we want to go.

Nobody gave advice or fixed anything - we just thought out loud with people who weren’t going to let us get away with the comfortable answer.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that those conversations are not a bonus - they’re the whole point.

The work that happens back at your desk is only as good as the thinking that shaped it; and for most of us, that thinking gets squeezed out by everything that needs to be done today.

I don’t know what that looks like for you, but I’d ask: when did you last put yourself in a room, or on a mountain, where you couldn’t just stay comfortable?

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Burlington, ON
L7P1H2

Website

http://www.ginomai.ca/

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