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Organizational Heartbeat

I am working on a book about agency, and the power and requirements for transformational change. This comes out of about a decade of writing about philanthropy – both for effective donors and the sector as a whole.  Today, Eugene Kim posted to Facebook a link to a groupaya post, How Can We Make Nonprofit Consulting Transformational? And this reminded me of Geoffrey West’s TED talk on The surprising math of cities and corporations.

My sense is that the larger the organization, the slower the heartbeat of the organization – AND the less it is capable of transformational change. This is all about efficiencies of scale. And you know from previous posts that I have an allergic reaction to scale as a lauded idea in and of itself. It always, to me, requires clarification. Mostly because people act as if scale operates as a power law – when I think it is a sigmoidal function. Probably because of that West TED talk, of course, since I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination.

Sigmoid Curve via Wikipedia

West makes clear is that companies grow on a sigmoidal curve – an S curve. You grow on an s curve too. And then you stop growing. These economies of scale are not infinite. At a certain point the energy required to transmit information throughout the organization and engage all the people in it exceeds the effectiveness gained by adding more people to it. [See also what West says about cities not being sigmoidal.]

Let’s be a little more clear about this scaling thing. The Long Now has a lovely essay on West’s work, which I pulled this quote from:

Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability. (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber’s Law.) Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale. If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line. From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it.

But the proportion is not linear. Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use. Only a tripling in energy use is needed. It’s sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4. Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us.

With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life. A shrew’s heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human’s 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute. The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative. Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life.

Picture a mouse trying to do a startup pivot. Now try to imagine your favorite large scale organizational gorilla trying to pivot. The larger the company, the more difficult it is to turn the entire company on a single point and do something related but quite different.

Startups often go through multiple transformations of what they do, how they do it, and who they do it for. Their organizational heartbeat is fast and their scale is small. (And some of them get successfully gobbled up by the larger organizational bodies, but we can talk about that another day.)

You can have nonprofits, whose social mission talks about transformational change, hiring consultants to help them do that as much as you want, but they won’t be very good at it. The kind of organizational heartbeat needed for transformational change – that leading edge early adopter game changing innovation in the social sector – well, it isn’t going to happen in the large organization. (We could talk about how big donors impede that, how organizational mission moves from “change” to “keeping the org alive” or how larger orgs attract stable-present-focused people who aren’t keen on transformational disruption, etc… but understanding the why doesn’t change that it happens. And we ought to just be honest about it and stop speaking transformational change in organizations that don’t do it.)

Do you think organizational scale relates to ability to be transformational? Or not? If not, why not?

ps. the antidote or innovation that can disrupt this exists – organizational slime molds… crowdfunding transformational change experiments, etc. I don’t have clear answers on how that all works, but I am deeply curious about how it is connecting.

5 Changes I Want to See in Philanthopy

1. Big Lever Funding

I am currently participating in the Illinois Task Force for Social Innovation. And working on ci2iglobal, and transitioning Inspired Legacies. Having worked in or around nonprofits and philanthropy for a decade, I have seen the field changing. I remember the first budding of Mission Related Investing, when there were basically 3 foundations championing it. Then I discovered people were doing Program Related Investing, and we started to see a broader spectrum of how money was being used in the philanthropic sector. We were collectively working to optimize how much money was creating purpose-filled value.

Last year I toyed around with some friends on mapping the financial spectrum. We are doing it again with the task force. It is exciting to see the hybridity between for-profit and for-purpose work and the financial innovation to support it.

However, concurrently there has been an increasing demand for nonprofits and social purpose organizations in general to quantify what they do. When I look at what I consider charity (aka bandaids on existing issues), these metrics really help tell the story about what an organization is doing to deliver that bandaid.

And… my struggle all along, even before I joined the social change effort, was to find the big levers that shifted how things are. What would it take to remove the need for these bandaids? I keep looking for the big levers.

But big levers don’t get funded until they pay off. Usually.

I never bothered to even look for foundation funding or grants for my work on shifting culture to be more thrivable. Who gives grants for core culture change? I think it ought to be funded. It may actually catalyze more transformation in the system, by aligning people and projects along a story. But how do you measure that? How would you even track the spread of the idea, all the people making hundreds of choices differently because they started to see the world differently? At the end of the journey, you can find your way back. But where is the end of the journey? Can you find where it ends and hear back? Do people even come back to you 2-5 years later and tell you a story of how “thrivability” led them to do something different. (Usually only when they know you.) If five years from now, scientists working on environmental science shift their view to look at the world from a thrivable perspective and it unlocks something that allows a cascade of action to follow that make the world more livable, can I claim that as my impact? Could I possible ask for money for the hope that this happens?

 

2. Be more like an investor and less like middle management

In startup land, this isn’t unreasonable. A startup can develop a product or an idea, pitch it to investors, get some funding…and if their idea works, the funder gets payback. If it doesn’t…well, losses all around. Investors know that most of what they fund will fail. It is an art of finding enough that succeeds with big enough returns to keep going. Where is this attitude in philanthropy? Both transformational change and startups live in complex adaptive systems… they can’t be predicted and causality is challenging if not impossible. And yet, there is a vital part of the startup world funded by people willing to put big dollars into unpredictable possibilities for the small opportunity of making a big return.

Philanthropy, in adopting more practices from the business world, took on a middle management mindset in far too many cases. Instead of optimizing for what might make the biggest change in the area to address, the optimization has tended toward who can show impact in the funding cycle. It tends toward projects that have strong “predictability” in them. I know how many people will be fed, clothed, housed, cared for if the project is funded.

Let’s be careful here. There are some foundations and philanthropists that are willing to be risky with their giving. They give to a collection of efforts knowing that some won’t turn out as hoped. They may even fund across the spectrum from highly predictable charity efforts to systemic change efforts. But the general vibe of the field is one of mitigating risk of money being used ineffectively by having the metrics to back it up.

 

3. I want to see a Venture Capital Philanthropy company. 

adVenturePhilanthropy or something. They share the risk of some of the projects not achieving desired results…but have smart portfolios of giving capital. Think of it like a high end giving circle where you pay sophisticated philanthropic advisors to fund a portfolio of efforts on causes that you and others care about. The advisor or firm then shares with all the donors the report on value created through giving.

 

4. And, like a business, ROI can be based on value created instead of “impact” made.

Impact. Benchmark. Difference from before. What is the impact? I want to see what is the value. Can we switch from impact assessment to tracking the value created? By doing so we open up more options for tracking the transformational work we want to do in really evolutionary giving. (We are working on this in the book Christelle Van Ham and I are writing called, for now, Action Spectrum).

 

5. Power Adjustments

Additionally, as someone who has managed to avoid having any big donors to yank me around, we have got to get better as a collective about the co-creation of strategy. Grantees are so beholden by the power of the money a donor offers that they can’t say, “what you want me to do doesn’t work.” Instead they all too often feel like they must say whatever pleases the money master. This isn’t really their fault. Nor is it the fault of the givers of money. Both sides need to work on creating agency for everyone involved, which takes a lot of conscious practice and communication clarity.

Collectively, we need to truly and deeply believe that everyone at the table working on transformation has some value to contribute. That value may come in different forms: it may be time or ideas, or network or skill, and of course money or influence. When we cater to the one with the money we make small or even invalidate the other forms of capital at the table – the experience capital or intellectual capital etc. And that will undermine our shared goals. It gives us less assets to work with instead of more! We all have power. It can come in many forms. It doesn’t make us equal… it just allows us each to have something to offer. And thus everyone at the table of social transformation is valuable.

Breakthroughs for a Thrivable World Part 1

The purpose of this series is to frame the shifts culture, business, and the world move through now. We present a story about how we arrived here, what breakthroughs we notice, and how this creates the greater possibility of a thrivable world at this time. We invite your feedback, because, as we will explain later, feedback enables generativity.

Introduction

We are working under the assumption: We humans are driven (by our nature) to increase choice and evolve our complexity through creativity and innovation. This requires balancing creativity, collaboration, and self-regulation. (Nods to social philosophy of the Ostroms.)

What you won’t get here: dire predictions. Yes, there is a gritty reality to face. And foundationally we believe you (and us together) will be creative and resourceful beyond measure. We enter an age of transformation, of intentional evolution. Welcome. Play in possibility. Manifest your utmost potential.

Backstory

Modernism: Order, Structure, and Form

Western culture opened the 20th century with modernism: a belief that we could reduce the world to its parts and create formal taxonomies. Truth was knowable. It was a self-conscious era. Recognizing the world as complex, many attempted to make sense of it through reducing the complexity to its component parts. While it brought us major advances in culture and science, it also had limits.

Post-Modernism: Inside-Out Structure, the Formless, and Chaos

Post-modernism laughed with a hearty right-brained playfulness (and in some cases deep cynicism) at this attempt to create order, fought the concept of a single global narrative and objective truth, and turned structure inside-out. While Post-modernism has run its course of criticism, a coherent -ism about (at least Western culture) current and future precepts has not been named and generally adopted. We may have troubled the assumptions of Modernism, but we still haven’t formulated a broad pattern of what replaces it. Is there a global narrative? Or have we fractured through identity politics into a plethora of narratives, tribes, and truths? Post-Human criticism posits:

“The posthuman is a being that relies on context rather than relativity, on situated objectivity rather than universal objectivity, and on the creation of meaning through ‘play’ between constructions of informational pattern and reductions to the randomness of on-off switches, which are the foundation of digital binary systems.”

To answer questions about our global narrative(s) and intersubjectivity, let’s review emerging ways of perceiving ourselves and the world (which influences what we notice and take action upon).

First, a simple demonstration of how reductionism fails and Complexity Science begins to explain.

Toasters, Cats and Snowflakes While we can take a toaster apart and put it back together – thereby understanding it, we can not do so with cats. The modernist/reductionist approach to understanding ever more granular parts fails in organisms and systems that are greater than the sum of their parts. Parts do not produce aliveness.

Complexity Science

Systems with a lot of interaction between interdependent nodes are called complex because the non-linear variations go beyond the scope of our mathematical tools: the sheer size of their potential behaviour defies brute force computational attacks to get a glimpse of the possibilities. They show emergent behavior (not possible to predict its behaviour by studying its components ) and surprisingly adaptive behavior when circumstances change. Markets, genetics, social interactions, maybe even life itself may be a result of complexity.

Human interactions are more complex than we had imagined in the 20th Century. Fanatical about science as a route to objective truth, metaphors from science permeated modernist culture. A vital part of the cultural narrative was constructed around Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest. And while few read his writing, many touted competition and predatory activity as nature’s great process! All the while, culture urbanized, shifting from rural farm communities to more competitive environments of the city and the marketplace. While capitalism freed man from his “destined at birth” status, the meritocratic approach encouraged individualism and zero-sum games. Where there is conflict over resources, one of us had to win and the other had to lose, like a game of tug of war.

There are games that don’t generate zero sum outcomes. Or more directly, there are games in which we win and lose together. Non-zero sum games seem, at first, nearly invisible in capitalistic systems. Issue like Climate Change, at their highest order, become non-zero-sum. Collectively, we will address climate change and everyone wins, or we won’t and we all lose. Collectively we take care of our common pools of resources like water or air quality, or we all lose access to healthy water and air. Over and over again, at the upper level of a system, we win together or lose together.

Today

The world seems riddled with catastrophe thinking. We have focused on what is going wrong (and thus been drawn into it). We have measured what is wrong (and noticed then the rise in that). We face catastrophic failures in our systems with convergent crisis environmentally, financially, and culturally. Disaster planning, risk management, and even sustainability planning focus on increasing our resilience as the world we once knew falls apart. Some of our greatest breakthroughs in these times contribute to the breakdowns we face. For example, John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation) spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum in June of 2010 about how the internet and social media which helped Obama get in office – these very models are what flood the tiny District of Columbia, adding to the US government being overwhelmed and breaking down.

Like a boat without a rudder, the last 40 years of post-modernism have focused on moving away from what doesn’t work without providing a vision to work toward. We paddle frantically to get away from the rocks of crisis, while having no consensus or vision of where to direct this spaceship earth to.

Thus, we offer thrivability. A vision of integrating the breakthroughs, building on what works, and moving toward a world we want.

As we move toward a more thrivable world, what does that mean? Can we see the breakthroughs helping us move even as we feel the breakdown of our past financial, cultural, and environmental systems? There are breakthroughs on the individual level, the collective social level, and the system level. These are uplifted and expanded by breakthroughs in our ability to reflect on ourselves using metrics and feedback as well as breakthroughs in our process of innovation, increased understanding and capability in creativity, and greater rates of generativity (compounded by breakthroughs at all three levels). The next sections explore each of these five points and the relevant breakthroughs, we believe, to the emergence of a thrivable world at this critical time.

Catastrophe Thinking

I am pretty sure my entire life has been lived under the hovering cloud of the apocalypse. Sure there were moments of possibility – the fall of the wall, the election of Obama, the end of apartheid in South Africa. But mostly the global events we hear about focus on the end of civilization as we know it, albeit in small chunks at a time. It is still framed as disaster…. we are losing what we had and aren’t moving into a better world (except in small isolated ways). From AIDS to Bird Flu, from Rwanda genocide to Sudan and Burma, nuclear proliferation, the Gulf Coast disaster 2.0 (and Katrina as 1.0), Haiti (and so many other earthquakes, mud slides, volcanoes, and other weather/geological disasters for humans) – plus economic crisis and climate change, the extinction of so many species, and the war on terror (which just grows fear and terror) all converge – even for those of us who don’t watch the news. There is overpopulation, sex slaves, and child mortality issues as well as deforestation, crumbling infrastructure, and coach potatoes living in suburban nightmares. There are activists working cancer into their bodies with their martyr-like dedication. There are those in sedated near oblivion – zombie-living. There are hedonic wealth-seekers facing doom with greed and opulence. This is the story of crumbling and disintegration. Our globalized post-modern world tumbling through catastrophes.

We tell this story, and we have been telling this story, for my whole life. And the fear-mongering started long before I was born – the the cold war threatening nuclear annihilation for half a century.

I am tired of this story. I am tired of seeing faces worn down with the contraction of fear. I am weary of the negativity and desperation driving people to hate, divide, hoard, and fight. I am sick of finding out my government is justifying killing people in order to obtain more resources (because, I guess, we are in such a state of lack!).

We victimize ourselves, and in that suffering, we victimize others with our trauma.

Enough. Put it down. Don’t believe the hype. Don’t fight for a world you already gave up on.

Look for the flower emerging in the sidewalk – life pressing through without complaint or blame to assert its urge for sunlight. Nature is incredibly resilient and adaptive. Work within the world we have to co-create the world we want. Focus on what is going well and right, and encourage more of it. Breathe and be the serenity prayer.

Do not deny the brutal facts before us, but know that you see those facts through a filter of the story you are telling yourself (and others) about the world. You can transform that story and see those facts in a fresh light – from a different vantage point. Turn on the thrivability light, and recognize that life gives rise to more life. Never before in human history have we known a greater wealth of possibility.

After three days in Philadelphia discussing philanthropy and philanthropic strategies for transformation, I feel deeply convinced and inspired by a model I can see of thrivable philanthropy. Gerard calls it evolutionary philanthropy, and there might be some subtle distinctions. However, let me explain. And then I hope it will be more clear why our stories about our world could shift to transform our experience of it and the world itself.

Let’s call charity the work that we do to address immediate needs of others who can not, for whatever reason, care for themselves. It is as if you are standing on a riverbank, see a baby floating downstream, and you rush out to save the drowning child. Only, there are not enough people pulling drowning babies from the river, and the babies have suffered from being in the river. Our hearts break open. Some savvy volunteer wonders aloud – “who is tossing babies in this river?” And a crew of helpers decide to go upstream to find the cause. And they discover a system out of balance allowing babies to land in the river. They decide to change the system and set up programs to help mothers and advocate for social justice. We call this social change and social justice work. Still, babies are floating down the river. The philanthropist supporting this work starts to wonder – huh, what impact is my giving having? I want babies to stop ending up in the river – this is madness! And the social justice worker says – well, we think we have decreased the number of babies in the river, but this is a complex adaptive system so I can’t name all the causes and effects! I can’t clearly attribute your dollars having saved babies without acknowledging other programs and the dynamic changes in the system in which our town operates, babies are born, the economy shifts, and nature takes her course. We might have even changed our baby counting practices in a way that changed how many babies we can account for, which skewed the numbers giving an artificial bump. But we are not sure.

Then a thinker stands up and says – it is the very culture and beliefs in which we operate that give rise to these systems that aren’t taking care of all these babies. And the philanthropist has to choose now – either fund better metrics to know whether there is an impact… or fund cultural shift. And there are still babies in the river, and everyone’s hearts break open knowing it and seeing it. And they are sad.

Transforming culture takes longer, it is harder to measure, the complex dynamic system of it all makes it next to impossible to attribute agency clearly. And, it is where the greatest possibility for creating a culture that ever more deeply transforms itself, cares for each other and the whole, and enables the world we want.

Change your story.

Transformation Kit

Recently I got a late evening call from a good friend. A crisis had emerged. In 5 minutes I packed and headed over. Well, I brought beer, because this friend and I often met for beer and conversation. And I also brought chocolate. A girl knows in times of change, a good bar of high quality organic dark chocolate is a necessity – both for the incredible yumminess of it as well as the chemicals they say it triggers in the brain. I brought nuts. Several kinds. I didn’t know how long our conversation would last. Protein is important. I wanted an easy snack that could act as a supplement or get one over a skipped meal. You get the point – it was a 5 minute grab bag of essentials.

Nurturing is most critical and visibly necessary at moments when our lives take a drastic turn quickly. In truth we can use nurturing all the time. Personally, as someone willing to ride the edge, I have fallen off the edge more than once. I have my little patterns now for recovery, as many of us do. Some of the patterns are about giving into the darkness and despair enough to feel it thoroughly. Some of the patterns have emerged from successful tools I have used for recovering. So, I am thinking about developing something of a Transformation Crisis Nurture Girl Kit.

To nourish the body

  • list of items to have on hand and what each is for
  • list of stretches and other body care ideas and how they help

To nourish the heart

  • activities and exercises to tap into love
  • resources on the heart, love, and friendship

To nourish the mind

  • inquiries and challenges for thinking about situations differently
  • quick reference guide to non-violent communication process

To care for the spirit

  • list of inspirational quotes – the wisdom of those who have passed this threshold before
  • ways to clear space for spiritual reflection

Creative Commons License photo credit: S?ndy

Suffering in transition is a sign of our care and attachment. Having tools at hand for mediating our experience and challenging ourselves to grow and evolve can be invaluable.

What would you want to have in your Crisis Kit? And what do you do – and how are you being – when you or a loved one experience radical transitions?