The Bamboo Project Blog

Disposable Worker Syndrome is Killing Us

 

For the past several months, I've been doing more work than usual with people who have been laid off from their jobs. I've listened to their stories of how the lay-offs occurred--usually in a brutally swift and cruel fashion--and been witness to their pain at having done all the right things, only to be told their services are no longer needed. It's heart-breaking, really, to see how they try to recover from this assault, accepting their disposability as inevitable in some ways. 

I contrast this with the marketing messages we receive from companies and other organizations about the need to re-use and recycle. Inherent in this is the idea that we can be more responsible stewards of the earth's resources, finding ways to renew and re-use things, rather than throwing them away. 

While this spirit seems to be alive and well when it comes to material goods, I don't see the same spirit animating our approach to people. But in my mind, "renewable and sustainable" isn't just about re-filling water bottles or recycling paper. I think it starts with seeing people as renewable resources, rather than as objects we use up and then throw away. 

I cannot tell you the damage this is doing to workers, this idea that you are only as good as the last thing you did for the company. I see people who have poured their hearts and souls into doing what they were asked to do, into "doing the right thing," only to be told that this wasn't enough. And we remove them from our institutions just as efficiently as we take out the trash, with little regard for the fact that these are human beings, many of whom have tied up much of their sense of self-worth in the work we are now telling them we no longer need them to do. 

In the past, through this blog, I've focused on how we as individuals need to keep renewing and recycling ourselves through a process of lifelong learning and adapting to change. I still believe this is true. But I also believe that, through our institutions, we are doing great spiritual and emotional damage to ourselves by consistently communicating to people that they are disposable and that they are on their own in the process of recycling and renewing.  

To torture my metaphor, we are treating people like garbage--throwing them into landfills and just letting them waste away there. We are doing nothing to provide them with the structures and resources and emotional supports that would help them go through that renewal process. 

I've come to realize that part of the reason for my absence here has been that I'm grappling with what it means for me to support people in their careers when they are operating in an environment that so regularly communicates with them about their disposability. Yes, I can talk about positive professional development, but for most people, this is used to develop their capacities in service to organizations and institutions that are essentially sucking them dry. Once they've been used up, they are cast aside.

Somehow it feels almost immoral to me to advise people on how to play the game when the game is so clearly rigged against them. 

I understand all the reasons for companies shedding jobs, including globalization and the impact that technology is having on work. But that doesn't excuse us from treating people decently. In fact, I would argue that it REQUIRES us to come up with better, more humane ways to treat people who are caught up in the winds of these changes.

I'm only beginning to grapple with where all of this leads me. I'm not sure that there are easy answers. But I do know that it is only in the calling out of what's really going on that we can start to find better ways to handle the changes we are dealing with.

For now, many of us can pretend like it won't happen to us, so it's easy for us to hide our heads in the sand. But I promise you, every person I've spoken with who's been laid off (many of them repeatedly) thought the same way you did. Like unplanned pregnancies or car accidents, a layoff is something that is going to happen to someone else. But increasingly, my friend, that is not true.

We owe it to ourselves and to each other to begin talking about what we need to do to bring humanity back into these transitions, to find ways to support all of us in being able to manage the renewal process. We can't treat people as disposable, as garbage for someone else to take care of. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to others to find better ways to help each other through these upheavals. 

Some Observations on Getting Value from a Social Network

For the past few days I've been working with a group of grant-funded projects from across Pennsylvania who are evaluating whether or not to form a state-wide network and thinking through what such a network could do. One of the issues that came up (as it inevitably does) was how to share information, which naturally led to a discussion of social media and networks.

Last year I'd set up a Ning network for this group to use to share information and ideas. It never took off and we continued to send group emails and do phone calls and face-to-face meetings where people lamented the fact that we didn't have a better way to share information.

Yesterday when the issue came up, I reminded the group that I'd set up a site last year and described again what they could do with it. The response was somewhat warmer, but then we got into whether or not people wanted to visit one more information portal. Which led to a deeper discussion about whether or not people had the time to share best practices. Which led into a discussion about how to get "value" from networks.

What I realized was that people were looking at the Ning network as a respository for information, not as a vehicle for conversation. To them, it was basically a library that could hold everyone's tools and resources and to which they could go if they needed to look up some piece of information. While that can be one use of a network, I don't think that's the most valuable part of it. In fact, it became clear that although people said they wanted access to best practices, researching best practices wasn't really part of their work process. What they really want is access to people, something a social network is designed for, but that requires you to participate differently.

When the web is a destination for information, then you can visit a site as often or as little as you want with no appreciable difference in the qualtity and quantity of information you access. You can dip in and out and your visits do not impact the information you encounter. But when the web is a place where you're engaging in conversations, you can't jump in and out in the same ways. You have to put some effort into engaging with other people, into being social, asking questions, giving answers, even participating in "small talk." Using the web for conversation is not an event, but a process and, at least initially, it requires a fairly significant investment of time.

My personal opinion is that this initial social investment can have incredible benefits. By connnecting to other people, you start to get quicker answers to your questions and you are able to more easily find the RIGHT information, rather than a ton of resources you have to wade through. You also learn from the process of conversation with other people, answering their questions, seeing the kinds of questions they ask that may lead you to ask additional questions of your own.  Again, this requires an investment of time, so that's a major hurdle.

By the end of the meeting, the group had decided to try using the Ning network, but I can tell we have a long way to go. The members are going to have to make a major mental shift in recognizing that this network is about people, not information, and that they will have to put some initial effort into connecting with each other, rather than just connecting with the information. Should be an interesting process. Any suggestions on how I can help them make the shift?

Flickr photo via Nimages DR

The Social Media Spiral Revisited

On Sunday, I asked for feedback on the social media spiral I drew to represent my current thinking about how people transition from "old" media to new social media. This is a follow-up post to tease out some of the comments I received and integrate them further into my thinking. I will warn you that it's 6 a.m. and this is a little stream of consciousness.

First, a few people pointed out to me that what I'd drawn was not a spiral, but a helix, so the first thing I need to do is start referring to this thing as the "social media helix."

The visual here shows the progression I went through with Christine Martell in getting to my helix. I sent her the pyramid and then we did a long call. The result for me was the helix, while the result for her was the spiral. (Check out Christine's post on how these visualizations are showing us where we had differences in our thinking that need further discussion).

The helix construction is important, because as many people pointed out, it creates an implied hierarchy that a lot of people disagree with. As Alan Levine said:

The helix, spiral, levels suggest there is some sort of linear progression, or more worrisome, that one level is desirable over another. We can skip levels, operate at multiple levels, the whole nature of it defies 2D or 3D structuring. The phases people are at are not the levels per se, but some sort of overlay that might be a bubble that intersects the phases vertically. But again, I think the concept that it is a linear path is misleading.

This thought was echoed by many people, so I had to go back and ask myself why I'd seen this as a helix, with its implied progression. What I've realized is that I'm not really talking about how people tend to play around with and experiment with social media, which is generally not linear at all. Instead, what I'm trying to depict here is a way to introduce people to these tools so they see a progression and connection between what they already know and the new tools they don't understand. I'm seeing this as more of a training kind of a progression, I think, which is also why I was asking about the skills we think are associated with each of the different levels or phases.

Now of course with any training model, everyone is going to come to it with different entry-level skills. So this is far too simplistic to represent that. For example, some people may jump right into commenting on blogs long before they set up RSS feeds. That's how I was. In fact, I was blogging for two years before I set up RSS, so as a model for looking at how people actually use tools, my helix is clearly not the answer.

Another piece that got thrown into the mix was from Mark Aberdour, who reminded me of the 1% rule--that 1% of people will create/participate on a regular basis, another 10% will do so sporadically and the rest will lurk.

Part of what I think is going on right now is that we're still in the early adopter phase of social media use, looking at how to leap over the chasm between the early adopters and the majority of users--how to get more than 1% of people actively using the web. My interest in social media is primarily in how it can be used for learning, so I want to see as many people as possible using these tools for their personal and professional development. Part of what I'm trying to understand is how to help people build on their previous knowledge of the web and how to do use it so that they can progress into the more active learning that I think occurs when you move into the Aggregation, Interaction and Creation phases.

I think that how the early adopters are learning to use these tools is substantially different from what will need to happen for the early and late majorities. Remember email and learning to surf the web? The early adopters didn't need to be "taught" how to do those things. They generally figured it out on their own. But once we got into the early and late majorities, that's when we started to need training classes and "Email for Dummies" books, etc. We weren't able to fully scale up until more deliberate training occurred with the largest groups of people.

I think that there's a fundamental difference between the people who are using social media tools now and those that we're trying to help "see the light" for the future. I think that by their very nature, early adopters are self-directed learners, so to try to use our experiences to help the next phase of adopters may be a mistake. The early and late majorities are people who are more deliberate and pragmatic. They tend to want to be "taught" rather than to want to learn these things on their own. They feel more comfortable if someone shows them why they need a new tool and helps them learn it. They have lots of questions and worry more about "rules."

So where I'm going with this isn't so much about understanding how we early adopters are learning and using these tools. It's more about trying to find a more deliberate way to introduce these tools and concepts to people who aren't as self-directed or comfortable with exploration learning as the early adopters. I'm trying to understand the progression of skills and knowledge that people need to develop to full understand and engage with the learning opportunities provided by social media. Ideally I'd prefer it if they didn't have to be "taught"--I wish everyone was self-directed. But I'm a pragmatist, too, and I understand that we may need to think differently about how to help this next wave of people experience what we have.

With that in mind, does the helix make more sense? And am I on track in thinking that we may need to be thinking differently about helping this next phase of learners get the full benefits of social media to construct their own personal learning environments?

No Excuses Leadership

Katya Andresen has a GREAT post on operating your organization with no excuses. Apparently she recently did a presentation on tweaking your marketing messages, where she was told by her audience that her suggestions weren't possible because:

1. I don’t have the budget to do that.
2. I don’t have the staff to do that.
3. I don’t have the time to do that.
4. I don’t have the internal support to do that.
5. I don’t have the expertise to do that.

Katya goes on to take each of these "constraints" and turn them into possibilities, urging us to think in terms of what we CAN do, not what we can't.

Katya's experience is something I get all the time, particularly when it comes to suggesting that staff change how they are currently operating. It seems that it's easier to spend time making excuses for why things can't change, rather than trying to figure out how they can change.

I suspect that this goes back to how scarcity thinking seems to rule in most organizations. Even though there's a lot of evidence to suggest that creativity actually does better when constraints exist, most people persist in the belief that constraints hold us back, rather than giving us a framework within which we can find solutions to our problems.

I'm doing a lot of thinking lately about leadership in organizations and Katya's post underscores the point that leadership is about making solutions, not excuses.  It's about recognizing where there may be some constraints and then using those constraints to propel you forward.

One of my favorite leadership books of all time, Good to Great, talks about how the great companies use The Stockdale Paradox:

                  
                                                                          

The Stockdale Paradox
Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.	AND at the same time	Confront the most brutal facts of  your current reality, whatever they might be.

Many companies have failed because they are unwilling to confront the brutal facts, but I suspect that in the nonprofit sector, the bigger problem is going beyond the brutal facts to create something different. There seems to be a pervasive mindset that a lack of resources means an inability to change or have impact. From what I've observed, however, it's often not the lack of resources that is the problem. It is how the resources are being allocated and used that is the issue. In Katya's post, for example, she points out that instead of thinking "I don't have enough time to tweak my marketing messages," the answer should be "My time is better spent fixing a bad message rather than sending out more bad messages."  It isn't about the lack of time as much as how the time is being used.

In so many cases, it seems that organizations just sort of give up and give in to their excuses. This, to me, is one of the most profound failures of leadership. It's impossible to have any kind of vision if your sight is clouded by all that you can't do. Vision, by it's nature, is about seeing the possibilities, not the limitations. It's about seeing what CAN happen, not what isn't working. Excuses don't create change. They maintain the status quo, something that presumably many organizations are trying to change.

It also seems like this kind of "excuses only" leadership could become one of the primary reasons that  many nonprofits may find themselves becoming irrelevant. In a recent post, Seth Godin talks about the death of direct mail and how he he's worried about the ability of the largest nonprofits to change:

I'll start with the bad news: I despair for most of the top 50 non-profits in the US. These are the big guys, and they're stuck. Unlike the Fortune 100, not known for being cutting edge in themselves, the top charities rarely change... if you're big, you're used to being big and you expect to stay big. That means that generation after generation of staff has been hired to keep doing what's working. Big risks and crazy schemes are certainly frowned upon.

What I see here is the potential for more "excuses only" leadership--"We can't change because we've already invested so much into doing what we've been doing" (a constraint), rather than "The rules of the game are changing, so how can we keep up?" (a possibility).

What Katya's post opens up for me is a call to "No Excuses Leadership" that individuals and organizations must learn to heed. If they don't, then they'll get left behind.

Photo via vandy.

A Vision of Students Today and Information R/evolution

A couple of interesting videos from Michael Wesch, the creator of The Machine is Us/ing Us who's leading a Digital Ethnography workgroup/project that's bringing together students and professors of Anthropology at Kansas State University to look at the impact of technology on human interactions.

The video above is "A Vision of Students" today. It was created by the 200 students in Wesch's Intro to Cultural Anthropology class.  Here's how they arrived at the numbers and put together the video which they created by working together to edit a Google document and then videotaped in one 75-minute class period.

The one below is the Information R/evolution and it takes a look at how digital information is qualitatively different from information on paper and how this changes the ways we think about how to store, use, access it. Some of the ideas come from The Machine is Us/ing Us, but still worth looking at.

Make Your Organization Web 2.0 Too

As soon as I finished posting about moving your organization's website from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, I see in my feed reader (via The Agitator) that Todd Cohen at Philanthropy Journal has published a report on how nonprofits are using new media to engage constituents. Todd makes an excellent point about needing to change your operational paradigms, not just the look, feel and functionality of your web presence:

"Nonprofits that simply plug new media into old ways of doing business may be bound for the scrap heap.

To survive and thrive, nonprofits must adapt to the engaged new-media world in which individuals with easy access to computers, mobile devices and wireless connectivity are transforming the way charitable dollars are raised and social causes are promoted.

The challenge for nonprofits is to wed tried-and-true principles of operating, fundraising and service-delivery with the emerging new-media culture that engages the collective power of individual voices, values and assets for the common good."

Some ways in which we're still operating under old ways of doing business, according to the report:

• Using one-size-fits-all approaches and not providing information and services to people based on their individual preferences.
• Holding on to traditional organizational boundaries and not re-organizing and re-tooling around new ways of working with stakeholders.
• Treating communications with stakeholders as a one-way medium, rather than engaging stakeholders in conversations and developing the organizational brand.
• Not listening to younger workers who may be more in touch with the ways in which the world is changing.

The report is definitely worth a read and should be considered in conjunction with any web site changes you make. There's no point in making your site 2.0 if your organizational policies and approaches are still mired in the 1.0 ways of doing business.

Architectures of Control: How Design Influences the Ways We Use and Do Things

Just stumbled across a REALLY interesting blog called The Architectures of Control. It's maintained by Dan Lockton who says:

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

Dan goes on to define architectures of control this way:

Architectures of control are features, structures or methods of operation designed into physical products, software, buildings, city layouts—or indeed any planned system with which a user interacts—which are intended to enforce, reinforce, or restrict certain modes of user behaviour.

While the use of architectures of control in computing is well-known, and a current issue of much debate (in terms of digital rights management, ‘trusted’ computing and network infrastructures themselves), it is apparent that technology—and a mindset that favours controlling users—is also offering increased opportunities for such architectures to be designed into a wide range of consumer products; yet, this trend has not been commonly recognised.

This, of course, isn't really new--control has often been inherent in the design of products and systems in the past. We have only to look at the Windows Operating system and the Catholic Church to see this principle at work.

What is new, I suspect (although I may be wrong) is the widespread use of intentional design to control and restrict user behavior.  That is, it seems as we become more aware of how the design of things influences how we interact with them, designers are choosing to use features to control user behavior more intentionally.

This raises a few questions and thoughts for me:

• I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of "architectures of control." I instinctively recoil from the idea of "controlling" anything, yet I also recognize that it's inevitable--whatever we create invariably shapes how we interact with it, the customs that develop around the object or system, etc. It's unavoidable. And one person's "restriction" is another person's "liberation."

Take a look, for example at Dan's post on (Anti)public Seating, which includes a number of examples of how seating in parks, train stations and other public areas actually discourages people from sitting in or using those areas. Apparently one set of benches has been specifically designed so that homeless people won't sleep on them, with the effect that no one would want to sit on them. I personally see this as a restriction that serves no one well, but others obviously see it as a perfectly legitimate use of design principles for the public good.

• What is the larger societal impact of a design approach that seeks to control and restrict? This, to me, ties back into the scarcity mindset I explored a few months ago. Scarcity is about control and restrictions. It would seem, then, that we have a mutually reinforcing dynamic going on where the more we see scarcity, the more we seek to control through design and the more we control through design, the smaller and more restricted the world becomes. Is using design to restrict behavior the symptom or the disease? Or both? And how does this really influence all the ways in which we see and interact with the world?

• In looking at technology, the interplay between the open source movement, the growth of user-centric Web 2.0 tools, etc. makes things more confusing and difficult to discern.  The hoopla around Facebook as platform seems a perfect example of how the design of a thing can appear open, yet actually control, as this Read/Write Web post shows. Where else does this go on? Does it matter?

• Despite what we know about design, it's still very often unintentional. Because how we interact with a product or system often happens below any real level of consciousness, how is it shaping our behavior in ways we don't really understand? In my system development work with organizations, we often run up against the fact that the design of their  customer systems is actually reinforcing the very behaviors staff want to change. So, for example, in a system that's supposed to help people independently prepare for and find employment, most of the service functions actually discourage people from taking any independent action. One of the challenges is getting people to recognize how design really does influence behavior. It's something that happens below the radar, so they don't really notice.

I see that this has become one of those rambling posts with no real conclusion--just some questions and observations. One immediate impact for me of reading this stuff is a greater awareness of the design of things and how they influence what I do. It also reminds me about the need to assume nothing and to question everything, including how objects and systems may encourage certain behaviors that I consider to be negative, but have not noticed.

I'd be curious to hear other people's responses to Dan's blog and how you see this playing out in your corner of the world. Is this something we should be paying attention to or is it just an academic exercise?

Facebook, MySpace and Class Divisions

Danah Boyd has posted a provocative essay on the class divisions she sees in the users of MySpace vs. Facebook. This is actually a phenomenon I've noticed myself in the past several months as I watch my 15 year old move from MySpace to Facebook and get her perspective on who in her high school is making the shift to Facebook and who is staying on MySpace.

Danah's premise, in a nutshell:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Danah calls the first group "hegemonic teens" and the second "subaltern teens." And within the subaltern group, she notes a further class division, with the "alternative kids, art fags, emos, goths" and similar groups being aware of Facebook, but rejecting its values, while Latinos, immigrants and more disenfranchised groups are often unaware of Facebook.

In comments on the essay, Danah makes clear that she is looking at high school students only and that she's not drawing inferences about college students or adult use of the two sites, although she does note that signing up for Facebook seems to be a rite of passage for those entering 4-year institutions, while MySpace is the social network of choice at community colleges.  She's also clear that this is an essay, not research, although it's raising questions she intends to look at more closely.

Danah's observations interest me for a few reasons. From a purely practical standpoint, it underscores the need for organizations that look to operate in social networks to think clearly about the audiences on those networks and what they hope to achieve by operating there. But on a deeper level, there are disturbing implications that concern me for the future.

I've talked previously about the digital divide.  I'm afraid that this is another form of it at work.

The beauty of the web is that it makes previously inaccessible networks available to us. People I would not connect to in the physical world because of geography or other differences are often more "reachable" online. But for me to enter those networks, I must 1) know that they exist and 2) know how to navigate them. Furthermore, every social community has specific values, conventions and codes of behavior. Being proficient in these codes marks you as a member of the community, while violations of these conventions mark you as an outsider.

If what Danah says is true, young people who are not headed to college (and who may, therefore, already be at a disadvantage), will be unaware of a digital space that could do much to support their future success. Further, they will not learn the conventions and values of that other space and so if they do enter it, may have difficulties finding their way.

Why should this matter? Because many businesses are increasingly reporting that they are using Facebook as a recruiting tool. If you're not there, then you won't have access to these connections and opportunities. Further, Facebook's move to an open API has developers making a mad dash to create applications and plug-ins to the Facebook platform that will increase it's value as a networking and life-long learning tool. Again, if you're not there, then you won't have access.

Another concern--Danah notes that the military has recently banned use of MySpace (the online home of most enlisted personnel) but not Facebook, where officers tend to congregate. Again, one of the beauties of the web is its ability to allow for a collective voice and collective action. Yet, just as we find that the disenfranchised are silenced in physical space, it seems that its happening in the digital world.

Maybe I'm worrying needlessly about all this. Maybe we're just at a particular point in time between what appears to be a divide on our way to a more inclusive environment. But even so, I think the issues Danah raises deserve attention and discussion as we consider ways to both support people in developing the skills to navigate online social networks, as well as when we look at our own organizational uses of the tools.

When We're Faced with Change, We Can Either Fence Ourselves in or Make Ourselves More Resilient

A few days ago there was a story on NPR's All Things Considered about coral reefs and mangroves and protecting against global warming. One of the environmentalists interviewed on the show pointed out that the typical environmentalist response to danger is to fence it out. But when the enemy is global warming, fences don't work. The only way to deal with this kind of change is to make the species more resilient.

I think it's pretty typical human behavior to build fences as a protection against change that we perceive as danger. Unfortunately, we tend to interpret most change as being potentially dangerous. And in a world that is full of constant change, that's an awful lot of fence-building. Despite our fences, somehow change always finds its way in.

So I started thinking that maybe we should stop planning ways to keep change out and instead focus on ways to make ourselves more resilient in the face of change. Some of the ways I've tried to build my own resilience:

• Find my personal mission. When life has meaning, you can be remarkably resilient. Ask Viktor Frankl. This is something I'm always searching for, though. It seems to change or maybe I haven't found that core meaning yet. I do know that when I feel a sense of purpose, I'm more willing and able to deal with change.
  

• Know my strengths. I think that part of being resilient is understanding my areas of strength and building on those. In particular I always try to find work that maximizes my strengths and minimizes my weaknesses.  Great advice from Marcus Buckingham that I'm always trying to live by.
  

• Focus on what's in my control. This is a tough one for me. I seem to believe that just about everything that happens in the world  is somehow responding to some action I've taken. I can spend a lot of time fretting about things over which I really have no control. So I'm always trying to separate out for myself the things that I can do something about and the things that I have to leave behind. Sometimes easier said than done, of course.

• Look for the opportunities in change. This is one I've gotten pretty good at. Whenever I see a change coming, I try to find a way to take advantage of it. This is also a great way to look at failure.

• Build my personal capacity to bounce back. Part of resilience is understanding what "fills your well." I've learned that I need a lot of time to myself, I need good food, yoga, friends to talk to, books to read, my journal to write in, time with my husband and daughters, stimulating conversations both on and offline, and this blog. All of these things help me keep my perspective and build my resilience.

To me, we have both personal and organizational responsibility to become more resilient ourselves and to help those around us. Sort of like putting on our own oxygen mask so we can help others find theirs.  This feels particularly true in the human services sector where so much of what we're dealing with is a lack of resilience. Instead, we often see a brittle, fearful response to change that can break our clients (and ourselves) in two if we don't learn how to bend.

So what have you done to become more resilient?

Photo via ERK.

We Need More Beginnings

Rosetta Thurman of Perspectives from the Pipeline points us to a most excellent post--Are You Ending or Beginning? In it, Hildy Gottlieb asks us to stop trying to end things and start focusing on beginning something amazing. She points out that for 40 years we've been had "wars" on poverty, hunger, homelessness--you name it, we've been fighting it. Yet little seems to have changed:

And the reason we feel like we are not getting anywhere is because we are, in fact, not getting anywhere.

But then, we have not been aiming at getting anywhere. We have instead been setting our sights directly at our problems. And as happens when we give that much energy to anything, it grows. Yes, it grows.

We have aimed all our energy at our problems, and they are thriving under our attention.

The solution, Hildy suggests, is for us to start focusing on what we want to create, rather than on what we want to destroy. What we pay attention to grows, so why are we focusing on problems? Good advice, but how to get there?

This focus on problems and endings is a legacy of that scarcity thinking I've written about previously. It's difficult to get out of that mindset of seeing the world as a series of problems to be solved rather than as a series of opportunities to create something new. And we've spent a lot of time dwelling there, building up a system, skills and staff that are focused on getting rid of problems, not on creating a new world.

One big area of change I see being necessary is in staff skill sets. The skills it takes to solve a problem are not necessarily the skills it takes to create a new vision. Problem-solving seems to me to be more analytical, left-brained work, focused on identifying the problem, generating solutions, weighing pros and cons, and applying the solutions. There may be some creativity in generating solutions, but because the focus is on essentially destroying something (a problem), can it truly be creative?

Creating a new vision for what the world would look like without hunger seems to me a vastly more artistic exercise, one that requires us to picture something we've never seen before and to focus on what's working, rather than on what's not. It feels like an artist's eye is required here and I wonder if we even have the skills to do this in a consistent, long-term way? I wonder if you asked a staff person to describe to you what the world would look like without your nonprofit's "problem" if they would be able to do that?

I also think about the staff systems we've set up. Have we created a process where we hire staff who see the problems and can solve them, but don't necessarily have the vision to create something different? In my own work I know a lot of wonderful people who have excellent abilities to keep things running smoothly. But ask them to picture a different world? Not so good with that.

And what about staff development? We have all sorts of trainings that support teaching the skills to solve specific problems. But when was the last time we taught a creativity course? How are we teaching people to challenge their own mental models so that they can break free of old ways of thinking (the ones that focus on "ending poverty," for example), making room for new ways to see the world.

I believe that many of the things that play out in our personal lives are a microcosm of how things work in organizations, so I'm going to end with a story.

Five years ago I was in the process of getting a divorce. We knew every problem we had in that marriage and we had spent years trying to fix those problems. What happened instead was that the marriage ended, in part because we spent too much time "fixing" our problems and not enough time creating the relationship we really wanted.

Even more difficult for me was that once the "problems" were gone, I had to picture a life without those problems. And I didn't know how to do it. I only knew how to define myself in relationship to ending our problems, not in relation to beginning a new life. I still struggle with it actually, even though I'm married again and going in different directions. Sometimes I find that I'm more focused on avoiding the problems I had in my first marriage rather than on creating a new marriage, and that's when things don't go so well. When I focus my energy on what we're trying to create, then things seem to fall more into place. 

I share this more personal stuff to say that I think that what I've experienced on a personal level is what happens on an organizational level when we focus on fixing problems. I do believe that where we put our energies is what we get more of and that the first step to dealing with what we want to end is to begin creating something else. The challenge lies in making sure that we have what we need to do the creating.