I am incredibly excited to announce our affiliation with ci2iglobal, the Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. We have been hard at work behind the scenes for over a year, working together to share our wisdom, create useful tools, and facilitate powerful events and laboratories. Our event, We_b, in January at the HUB Brussels brought together some of the inspiring innovators we know in the social sector to test out our individual offerings as a collective.
Why am I incredibly excited about this collective and our events?
Because this is the most phenomenal team I have ever been honored to work with. We are 6 women with a cumulative experience of over 100 years in facilitating social change in global contexts! How often are you in a room with that much experience? More than that, we live and work on three continents now, but we have lived and worked on 6 continents. It doesn’t get better than that until you go to Antarctica!
We have experience scaling up social initiatives around the globe, fostering international collaborations, bringing micro-finance to developing countries, measuring impact for Ashoka fellows, and working with the European Council.
I think it is also important that most of us are old enough to have had long careers in international development while being young enough to be early and eager mavens in social technologies. We get social technology. We get cross cultural dialogue. We get impact assessment. Not just ideologically, but practically and experientially.
The power and capacity that puts in the room when we hold an event is enormous, but that isn’t all. There is more! All of us have done enough of the personal development and group process work to show up in these spaces with egos in check, curiosity in front, and driven by purpose focused on the group outcome.
Somehow the magic combination of this led all of us to explore system sciences and thus we come at our social change work with a core value being the health and evolution of ecosystems – be they human or environmental.
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For the last year or two I have been working on this Action Spectrum model. It started with conversations with Herman Wagter, who offered the basic elements and configuration. Then it evolved in conversations with Valdis Krebs, discussing the social network applicaitons. Concurrently, I was in dialogue with Gerard Senehi discussing transformational philanthropy. I have presented it in conversations with philanthropy professional, social change agents, and thought leaders of various disciplines. I continue to be surprised and delighted by just how powerfully people respond. Hours later, I find people sketching the concentric circles and speaking into them. I hope you find it useful too.
Fit
To me, the Action Spectrum is a framework for understanding the choices we make about the actions we take. It enables us to see these actions as a portfolio where we can perceive risk and understand metrics to expect.
“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” – Darwin
Fit, to me, is not about strength. It is about right placement. The three-toed sloth is not the strongest creature, it simply fits with the environment it lives in, and thus endures.
I am very keen to steal the term “ecosystem-based adaptation” from the climate change contingent and apply it to business ecosystems. Let us point very directly to what pivots are all about – improving the fit in the ecosystem, for example. I believe the action spectrum is the framework for helping us develop our fit and take appropriate actions within our ecosystems.
Intention
This fall I intend to write another book, at the urging of Grant McCracken, this time on the action spectrum, what I call multi-membrane organizations (or living business ecosystems), and risk management. Christelle Van Ham and I are discussing her risk management framework and how she and I can do that work together. Goodie! A writing partner!
Enjoy!
I would love to hear how this feels to you, where you can use it, and what stories you see as examples.
You know when something bugs you enough, you just have to give voice to it. This is one of those moments. I guess I make some pretty big judgments about public speakers based on their ability to answers questions in public forum. Often based on standards I am not sure I could meet, but so it goes. Today, I will play the critic.
Last fall I had a chance to see Tufte speak at his art gallery. I arrived a tad late and snuck into a chair off to the side. He took questions at the end. As he answered each question, my jaw lowered closer to the floor. I slouched down in my seat, feeling defeated. My hero! He was failing me! Later I was able to come back to an appreciation of his work, even if I don’t appreciate his ability to respond to questions. But let’s look for a minute at what triggered me to sit there aghast.
1. Asked a question about infographics for social media, Tufte basically responded that professional journalists do a good job of creating ways to understand this data. This answer completely fails to understand the nature of the medium… the publsihing by anyone should also be data-fied by anyone and not left to the old world of media.
2. Asked a question about infographics for biologists by a biologist, Tufte said that Scientific American and another magazine have great infographics by biologists. For all he knew the questioner was one of those published in said journal looking for more help! He didn’t do anything to narrow down the question to respond to the specific needs of the person asking, and thus made a vacuous circuitous answer that provided nothing of value. And it took him seven minutes of pontificating to do it.
Part of this issue is that many of us are not good at asking questions. It isn’t just Tufte being dull.
Fascinating
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing the totally fascinating Alain de Botton speak on his latest book, Religion for Atheists. First, let’s be clear that Alain demonstrates fabulous speaking talent. His stories are delightful, the logic of them disruptive and curious, and the pattern he uses is both refreshing and at the same time clear enough that you know that you too can repeat what he is doing with other cases you think of. The success of his talk comes from the alignment of layers of skill. He asks interesting questions that makes you see something familiar in an unexpected way. He selects stories that take you on a journey of experiencing to see for yourself. He has an emotionally engaging and comfortable presentation style that works for his presence of being. All those things we love in a compelling speaker, and more than that he can answer questions. Or things that are offered as questions but aren’t indeed questions.
People who said things during the question period at the end of the talk did one of several things that drive me totally nuts with that kind of slow-down-for-the-accident fascination…
Let’s make a list of all the fascinating car-wreck ways to “ask” questions:
Minutiae. Pedantic. Make a statement adding something minor and unimportant to the topic for broad audience. Shows a profound disregard for other people’s time as well as lack of being able to discern relevance and importance. Usually publicly perceived as someone over-ambitious to be acknowledged as adding value.
Evangelist. Affirm the topic of the talk and add a personal quip to it. Again, shows a lack of regard for time constraints and relevance. Usually publicly perceived as a narcissist or pawning for affection.
Contrarian. Finds any random point to disagree with. I say random because the effort seems so clearly to be an attempt to spark verbal brawls and so little to do with finding deeper understanding. Whether they admit it or not, the goal seems to be to diminish the speaker. Usually publicly perceived as a bright individual with a vengeful need to upset others through their talents.
Wanderer. Means well, but can’t focus their thoughts well enough to offer any clarity in their inquiry. You wonder, did they ask a question? What was it? How many parts did it have? How are those things related? Reveals disorganized thinking. Associative thinking is great for brainstorming, it isn’t appropriate in public questions responding to a prepared talk. Usually publicly perceived as a naive fool, harmless beyond the time consumed by their traveling story/statement/question.
What other characters have you seen show up?
And I can certainly think of times I have played most of these roles. It is hard to meet someone you revere and think clear enough to ask a decent question.
Alain did a brilliant job of dealing with each of these characters as they showed up to “ask” a question. For bonus points he would even answer a two part question to completion, even if answering the first part led him through a story. He was gracious and good natured. A model of elegance. If I achieve such a level of skill when I am twice his age, I will be quite happy.
When I read How to Ask a Question in the Chronicle, I thought it would be useful to summarize for you here:
Pick one thing you want to know – that you think others might want to know to.
Check to see if you are coming from curiosity. If not, be quite until you are.
Whether you agree or disagree with the points stated, does your offering to the dialogue add value and display respect?
Does it feel like improv? a) does the content feel fresh or new? b) do you “yes, and” to allow the speaker ground to stand on even if you qualify a statement or clarify a concept? c) does it feel like we are here together, sharing the stage for a larger audience?
As the article linked above suggests, avoid the meta-speech. I wonder if this point involves meta-speech already? Say the point, not the internal dialogue you have.
If you are going to disagree or start a debate, begin by voicing respect for the speaker. Say what you like abou their perceptiveness or viewpoint, then ask about the point where your view diverges from theirs.
Watch the “I am a” statements. Identity politics is obscures how different we each are. You are you, speak from that and for only yourself unless you officially represent a group.
We are here to learn from and with each other. Let’s foster a question/answer culture that promotes it.
ps. most of these “ask a question” points also apply to conversations and apply broadly. 😉
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I was an efficiency nut as a kid. I remember figuring out that 9 bites was the most efficient number of bites to eat, politely, a piece of bread or to cut french toast. I love being really, really productive. And I can be so quick and effective that the dishes are done and the kitchen cleaned while you slipped into the bathroom for 2 minutes.
However, being productive when we are talking about creative acts is completely different. It is not a matter of having a system to handle all the details of things to be done. It is not a matter of staying focused. So much of this seems to be left-overs from the factory world. Start the clock, run the system, get the output. Right, well the rewards for productivity of mechanical tasks need to be different than the rewards for creativity. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the productivity process for creative tasks differs significantly from mechanical tasks.
Creativity is a matter of grace and the muse. Yes, there are tricks to bringing the muse to you. I say muse, because this just seems magical. Not because it necessarily is magical, but because we just don’t know enough about it. So, what do you do about it?
Yes, you can just sit there until something comes out and keep working it until it gets decent. But that is, in my experience, a paltry second to the brilliance of the muse when she arrives. GTD is not going to help me get a poem written, an innovative approach to approaching my market, nor a creative solution to the challenge in my business. It will help me deliver on the tasks I put into my plan.
So I have other games and techniques. This is what works for me. Your mileage… may vary… of course.
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Take the pressure off
You know when you are trying to remember a word or reference and you can’t do it? Then you shift your attention elsewhere, and suddenly the answer comes to you? Yep. Take the pressure off. I walk, do the dishes, or otherwise occupy myself until the insight comes. Creativity seems to often be a background process – it isn’t about focusing the conscious mind on it. It is about letting the rest of the mind make the connections.
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Hold Space
When the slightest hint of muse is present, I put other things on hold and listen. I regularly juggle my tasks for the day to accommodate the muse when she arrives. If now is the moment to draw the graphic or write the article, then I do it now. If it doesn’t feel like now is the moment, I move onto other things until the feeling hits me to do it. I know that seems passive or irresponsible. Too bad. Do what works.
Last summer I got stuck trying to figure out how I wanted to facilitate an event. I was stumped the day before the plan was due. The client wanted a lot of work across different dimensions pushed into a short timeframe. I slept on it. I woke up still unsure. I walked away from my desk, and I did something else for awhile. I felt nervous that the idea might not come, but I decided to trust myself that it would. In my walk down the hallway back to my desk – boom, insight, and the whole plan came into my mind ready to be written up. It was done with an hour to spare. After the event, the client gave me one of the best testimonials I have ever received.
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Give Yourself What You Need
If you are an introvert, and I am, then allow lots of being alone time before expecting anything creative to emerge. It can take a whole day. I know it isn’t in the planning calendar, but trust the process. If you are an extrovert, go do that.
Time and again when I try to force myself to get work done on the clock, and that work is creative, it seems to take three times as long. I can’t focus. I resist myself. I have learned to just allow myself the hour of doing something else so that I will cooperate with myself when I attempt the task.
Not everyone has the luxury of doing this. And it does seem to me like a luxury. But I have learned to give myself that so that I can enjoy and be effective when I do the work.
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Follow the Seasons
I allow myself a “winter” to let things percolate while I appear dormant. Then I get excited in my “spring” with the bursting forth of new ideas. Next, I care for them over “summer” and harvest in the “fall.”
I have had lots of conversations with colleagues about the emotional dip after a creative surge. When I offer the seasons metaphor, there seems to be a giant internal sigh of relief. As if we expected ourselves to, once we create output, to continue at that level indefinitely. Or we expect ourselves to get emotionally high from it. However, that doesn’t take into account what motivates you to be creative. If you want recognition, then you might get the emotional high once the work is out in the world being acknowledged. But if your motivation is connecting with others in a co-creative process, then your emotional high might be in the middle of the effort. Learn what gives you the emotional high from creative efforts, nurture that, and allow yourself space for the other emotions that flow in the seasons of your creativity. Your flow. Not the expectations of others.
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Productivity-obsessed people seem to think they can have harvest season all year long, as if they are optimizing a factory. If they could just get the right mechanics in place, then they can perform at their top levels of creativity continuously. Nope. Not me. I don’t work that way. And I allow that and work with it. I think it brings my work freshness, aliveness, and vitality to not be pushed through some deadline-driven productivity machine.
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Nobody warned me what this journey would be like. No one took me aside and said – your beliefs, your very morality will change on this adventure. So before I embark on the next endeavor within this adventure, let me share a bit about what I discovered. Cause I sure wish someone had warned me. Not sure that would have stopped me, but warnings are nice.
1. Forgiveness
No one warned me that I would learn deep lessons in forgiveness. Of myself. Of others. But sure enough, it came. I thought it was enough in my twenties to have learned compassion for those who I perceived wronged me because they too were caught in their own struggles and patterns, often spanning generations. But no, that wasn’t enough. It had to go further. I had to learn to forgive myself for the paths not taken, the options chosen that led to pain or failure, the consequences of what I had – at one time – thought was right action, but turned out to have negative consequences I didn’t want. I had to learn to forgive myself for hurting those I loved when I made difficult choices. And perhaps deepest of all, I had to learn to forgive myself for being hurt by others.
If this idea is new to you, please sit with it. Take agency for all the experience you have. Every emotion you have, you can be responsible for. Whatever – and I mean WHATEVER anyone has done to you, you can choose how to respond and whether to be hurt. If Nelson Mandela can walk out of prison and love South Africa and the people there, then you can get off your emotional victim high horse and recognize that you have a choice in whether to be hurt or not. Do you take the high road? And when you don’t, please forgive yourself. You are doing the best you can with what you have, right now. At least that is what I keep telling myself.
One of my favorite plays is Death and the Maiden where a woman who endured torture and rape as a political prison has a surprise visitor – the torturer – in her home and at her mercy… what should she do? It can be easy to claim moral high ground until you find yourself in such a position. And the only sane way out, I think, is to forgive even yourself.
2. Progress is nonlinear.
Oh, the plans I have made! They are small next to the gifts I have been given by allowing myself to embrace what shows up in my life. Boldly. Embracing it boldly. Looking back, the most crucial decision points were not on any plan. When Jair mentioned thrivability to me in February 2007, I wasn’t looking for it. There was no plan. I felt in the deepest parts of my being a soft flicker that said – follow this. And over time it grew louder. When I think of the most crucial people in my life, there was no plan for them or how they would fit. When I look back at the Thrivability Sketch – it started as a light nudge from two advisors. I started it with small intentions. As the first steps worked, it got bigger. By the end it had doubled in size and was much more than I had imagined it would be.
When I look back on any given day, I am ashamed at how little of the task list is completed. Even when I look at a week of working, the actions are not adding up to what I want to have happen. And yet… at the end of a month, quarter, or year, I am always astounded at what has happened. Beyond what I could have dreamed. I can’t figure out how that happens. It must be nonlinear. So now I just go with that. I set intentions and then just work with what the universe and my network bring to me.
3. There is Life after the Cleanse.
When you first go through the cleanse – the detachment from worldly positions to seek a life of meaning, it is like a giant high. Euphoric bliss, I found my version of god, and it is purging possessions! I love thee. But no one told me there was life after the purge was over. I lost 50 pounds… no really, it was more like 2 tons. I dumped a 4000 square foot house, a husband, 70% of my belongings, city life, and just about anything else that represented my old life. That was 2002-2006. I got my coach training, and immediately went about double leveling up my integrity and alignment. Talk, walk. Talk, walk. Talk, walk. I was on a super sustainability high. I was even blogging for an organic lifestyle brand. And I still felt like a green fraud for a long time, like I wasn’t “sacrificing” enough unless I was living in the woods with a knife completely off grid. Well, no thank you.
But there is life after the cleanse. At some point you stop getting rid of worldly possessions and maintain some sort of balance of inflow and outflow of goods. At some point you settle on a fair-trade organic diet some percentage of the time, but not every bite. At some point, there is no high left. It just becomes the humdrum life of the everyday. You can’t squeeze more meaning from it. Would I feel just a little bit better if I went to the farmer’s market? Only if I feel like it. It doesn’t define me. I am not THAT.
Over five years after the purge, and I have completely adjusted to my new life. I am thinking about finally getting rid of some of the books that I hang on to. I don’t need to be THAT either. And maybe that is part of the secret to purging. Hold up an item – ask, am I this thing? If you say no, I am not this thing, then you don’t need it. Just keep what you use at least once a year and that which you ARE. Everything else is just crowding your experience of life.
When I am not defined by what I have or have given up, I have a whole new world to create in terms of what I want to be.
4. Justice – There isn’t any.
As a kid, I had a very solid notion of justice. And as I grew older, it was important to me to be part of doing justice. And somewhere along the journey, I woke up to how much that was about me and not about anyone else. The world is not a just place. It isn’t fair. My playing sheriff isn’t going to make it fair. In fact, there are usually so many forces at work, that what is really fair has a very complicated and nearly never ending cascade of actions needed to keep balancing out the fairness.
What I needed most of all was to be okay with myself. Not anyone else. Not anyone’s actions. Just me and mine. This started as a light hint – a sense that I was the only person I had to live with for the rest of my life. Just me. No one else. But it built into an awareness that I should do what I needed to create the life that I wanted. And I didn’t want a life of chasing down other people for what they did or did not do. Creating my own life was much better than trying to bring about justice from others. It may seem really selfish, and perhaps it is. But instead of spending my night worrying about how someone had wronged me, I could sleep peacefully dreaming about what I wanted to do next. My mind-time was free of the anger of being wronged. I simply started to let go.
So when I got divorced, we didn’t fight over money. I didn’t worry about it being a “fair” or “just” division. Instead I focused on what would allow the kids to know they were loved and what was going to foster a healthy relationship with my ex. What did I want to go to bed at night thinking about? The toaster oven? No. I still have random moments where I think, “what was I doing giving him so much of what we built together?” but those moments pass quickly. I can buy the stuff, if I need to. I can’t buy peace of mind or relationships.
Maybe justice is what we can give ourselves if we want to love our own life. This isn’t just “turn the other cheek” – it is turn the other cheek and forget-about-it rolled up together. I am trying to give myself the gift of that mind-time freedom to go about my life starting right now with what I have right here.
Next
I wish someone would tell me what is coming down the pipeline next. What deeply held belief or assumption is going to get deposed next? And how is that going to feel? And what will it then get for me? If you know, please share.
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We must be careful about asking old modernism questions of the new era. The answers do not compute. This includes things like “why isn’t there a static finite answer to questions about what makes us thrive?” or “why aren’t women successful in traditional male fields **using masculine terms of success**?”
Why can’t we answer with a finite static answer the question of how to thrive? Because the answer changes over time. The system is adaptive. And the answers have to evolve as the systems evolve. What we have learned from Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions is that even when we think we have figured things out, we haven’t. We continue to evolve how we believe the universe works. So if we **know** that the answers will evolve – in fact, when that is the most stable thing we can know, then we can embrace that evolution and stop the hubris fantasy of having come up with some finite and static answer that will be true for all time. Instead, we can embrace the answer that seems best right now and continue to seek ever more refined answers. It is the questions we can get attached to, rather than the answers we get now.
This is especially true of questions like, “what does thriving look like?” or “what does it take to thrive?” We have learned that our best efforts to address problems for society in the last 100 years may have improved things on the factors we were trying to improve (think child mortality, disease rates, poverty) but there are unintended side effects. Each effort to make the system better can result in new problems that we find just as pressing as the ones we were solving (overpopulation, for example). Thus, there is no solid or static recipe at the intervention and tactic level. Instead, we need to keep pressing on in our quest to answer how humanity can thrive without killing off the ecosystems on which it depends.
Similarly, in my research on creativity and innovation, I keep seeing the outcome of civil rights and affirmative action in terms of women and other minorities performing on masculine terms of success. It looks like a form of covering to me. For example, women are seen as achieving equal levels of creativity by achieving equal levels of awards, press mentions, etc. However, this is judging women on masculine terms, obscuring what it is even is to succeed in more feminine terms. Feminine terms of success might be better found in growth of community, number of enduring relationships, quality of relationships, network support, peer appreciation and cooperation, etc. Look for where there is cooperation rather than (or in addition to) competition.
The other crucial place I see this misguided judgment of the new by terms of the old is in leadership within generations. Older generations keep bemoaning the lack of leadership from the younger generations, when in fact it is that they can’t perceive what leadership even looks like for the younger generations.They continue to look for it as command-and-control models. And forget, the younger generations saw JFK and Martin Luther King get shot. Younger generations believe in starfish leadership by catalysts rather than spider models of top down leaders. (See starfish and spider.)
*Note I see this in my own work, as my older gen nonprofit partner in philanthropy keeps wanting me to study under a nonprofit leader and points me to old model sustainability people. It was a pleasure this week to point her to my honorable mention on the EnrichList where I am placed next to some of her own heroes. It is as if my work on thrivability since 2007 seems nearly invisible to her, because it doesn’t exist in her world the way other organizations do… the network and visibility of the work doesn’t register as significant on her measures (dollars in the org, donors, placement at old model conferences, etc.). Instead, the measures of network reach, meme spread and adoption, dispersion across multiple sectors and networks, and such measures matter most to me. Success with the term thrivability has always meant, to me, “how many people are turned on by it and shift their way of seeing and being in the world because of it” and not how much money moves through the organization or wether the old guard adopts it. It is about awakening and activating people, then trusting them to do what will lead to more of our collective thriving.
These mismatched conversations have us talking past each other, the new world inexpressible to the old. And the old world, nonsensical to the new.
Recently a friend commented on how crucial holding space is. It needs unpacking. What do we mean when we talk about holding space – both interpersonally and in groups?
A room holds space. A circle of chairs holds space. My arms around you hold space for you.
The foundation of a house holds space for the house to be built. It touches the ground. It makes the house stronger and more resilient. But you don’t go looking at the foundation unless you are buying the house or it seems to have trouble.
Holding space seems invisible. It is hard to see, but you can sense it is there. When it isn’t there or isn’t strong, the lack of it is very noticeable.
As a facilitator, holding space for a group of people to do something together involves:
creating physical space that is conducive to the task.
What do people need to do with their bodies?
What relationship do their bodies need to have to each other?
Is there light, fresh air, refreshments to keep bodies fueled?
creating emotional space that enables action on the task at hand.
How do people feel welcomed and invited to engage?
Is the emotional desire to get what matters done greater than the emotional desire to rest, resist, or sabotage?
Are there clear boundaries for good behavior? Who enforces boundaries and how?
Does each participant feel respected and appreciated – valued for their time, skill, and experience?
creating intellectual space that sparks wisdom and creativity.
How do people know they can safely contribute wild ideas?
How is the critical (refining) phase made distinct from the generating phase?
How do people know they can move beyond impressing each other to doing something together?
What helps contributors feel like they are a part of something larger than themselves?
In one on one dynamics, holding space for an individual to do something transformative, vulnerable, or bold mostly involves:
creating physical and intellectual space
Same questions as a group for both, plus
Does the individual feel safe – physically, from distractions, eavesdropping, etc?
creating emotional space
Can they have their experience of their emotions without having to defend, justify, or argue them? (even if that is painful to the listener)
Can they explore a thought or feeling without being interrupted or distracted?
Do they feel a respected? Experience engaged neutral listening?
Holding space for someone is not about responding to the emotions or words and gestures. It is about observing the emotions with the individual. Being beside them in the experience they are having, not as a respondent (even if it is about you), but as a companion in the experience.
And this can make holding space for someone really really hard for us. We have to move out of ourselves and into a space of an objective compassionate observer.
When you make a chair or a house, there is a tangible visibility to the work. You can see it happening, measure it, check against specs, and watch it function over time.
When you are holding space, there is a very intangible and invisible quality to the work. Conspicuousness in holding space shows a lack of grace. You can’t see the “magic” of it. You can’t touch it. When space is well help, people feel at ease, as if they can be themselves. At the highest level, it can be about stepping deeply into another person to experience with them what they notice and feel, which requires an incredible amount of vulnerability on their part.
And this is magnificent gift, when space is well held people can bring forth their best self.
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I am super excited to see Adventures in New Giving http://www.adventuresinnewgiving.com/. And perhaps a bit jealous. If I could focus the time and energy, I think Nathaniel is doing what I would do. (see his video here: http://vimeo.com/37718193 ) For years, I have lived a double life working in traditional progressive philanthropy to pay rent while working on bootstrappy social enterprise as a passion. In my consulting work within traditional philanthropy, we talked about the democratization of philanthropy. However, I did not see much of it in practice.
That seems to have come from somewhere else. Tech start-ups culture maybe? Socent pragmatism? Microfinancing brought home? Whatever the path, it has been interesting to watch the birth of efforts like kickstarter and startsomegood.
It seems aligned, naturally, somehow with the collaborative consumption “Mesh” culture. All of which seem part of a larger movement toward network production. So I am super excited to see Nathaniel capture the stories of this practical democratization of philanthropy.
I am also curious to see how this will hybridize with traditional philanthropy. I have visions of foundations and philanthropists using crowdfunding as part of their due diligence. Something of an early market testing and reliability assessment before or as part of larger funding efforts. Picture a foundation giving a matching grant – matched via startsomegood. This could be really a good time saver for family foundations with intentions to give and little time for sorting through applications.
I can’t wait to see what Nathaniel does with Adventures in New Giving.
I can’t wait to see how we all play together in evolving new giving.
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https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Thriverhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngThriver2012-03-07 16:07:222012-03-07 16:07:22Adventures in New Giving
It may seem like I am an optimist and the whole thrivability effort is full of utopian idealism. I am sure, for me, that is not the case. I am a pragmatist. While I love exploring, if the exploration doesn’t result in something that matters and gets tangibly completed, I feel like I wasted the time. And I abhor wasted time.
Back in September at SOCAP, I was speaking with Whitney of Culture Counts. She has a personality assessment tool, and pointed out that I was primarily someone driven to learn, share, and do what matters. This, of course, flattered me, so I decided it was accurate.
At The Agency, which we just launched, I talk about being bold, pragmatic, and inspired. I carefully chose these three things because I think each alone is a lost cause, but together they are an unstoppable force.
Inspiration – infused with spirit, from a refreshing perspective, forward-looking.
Bold – a real stretch or leap, requires courage and fearlessness, significance.
Pragmatism – getting it done, working with what is.
Pragmatism is about creating a feedback loop from practice to theory and back to practice again. Looking at whole sections of my life, I can see my drive for this. Like when I decided to leave academia because it wasn’t enough about practice in the world at large.
There is a figure eight, cutting back and forth between getting things done and reflecting on what is the right thing to get done based on what has worked.
I can only tolerate so much debate and minutiae before I have to ask: what are we doing? But then, I can only tolerate so much doing before I have to ask: is this the best approach? Is this thought through carefully? Are we using what is known to inform wiser action? I love process, but only process that leads to results and action. Being, and mindfulness feel very important to me. And yet, if being isn’t leading to doing, then it seems like a pretty narcissistic practice.
Dance. Hold the tension between. Watch for indicators of being too far in one direction or the other, then correct course.
Getting what matters done requires a solid focus on getting things done, and a wisdom to know what to do and how to best do it. And that is what The Agency is all about catalyzing.
My thoughts are too lengthy for a simple tweet. The most important of which I never see spoken of. There are several movements or methods for women today. The old guard is the one most of us are familiar with. It is rooted in social justice – where do women not have access and let’s count them and fight to change the numbers by bringing visibility and accountability on the issue. This is a movement about access and choice – women ought to have access to just about anything men have access to – and then have a choice about whether to participate – as women. What this usually looks like is women parading around as men, taking on male traits to succeed on masculine terms in a male-dominated space. Back when this movement had its peak women even wore shoulder pads to physically appear more masculine. It was an important effort, and today many of us, of the female kind, stand on the shoulders of giants who pushed for this form of equality. This acting-as-if we are men is part of the insideous practice called “covering” which many minorities are forced to practice in order to operate with those in power. (Thanks to Kate Ettinger for pointing me to the book on Covering.) Some might argue that all of us perform covering to some degree.
But there is another form of feminism in the generation of women that followed. I think I fit in this group. For us, we were raised with the idea that we could choose any career. Few of us were told (and if we were told, we didn’t take seriously) that we couldn’t do the career of our choice because of the simple biological fact that we were women. We assumed access. Many of us are ambidextrous. Well, make that androgynous. We know how to demonstrate traditionally masculine traits quite well, but we also could use our more feminine traits. Most importantly, few of us wanted to be the “first woman” to do something. We wanted to be successful on our own terms and as individuals with specific skills and abilities. We didn’t want preferential treatment for being a woman.
One woman I spoke with that fits this space is a journalist. She said she didn’t want to be a “female journalist” she wanted to be a “journalist” who happened to be female. We don’t want to use the “woman” card to gain special access. Tokenism. While tokenism gains some ground for the cause of social justice, it hardly feels rewarding to win on grounds that shouldn’t be considered to begin with. Tokenism means it is still about whether you are a man or a woman, and we will toss in some people by choosing them based on their sex (or race, etc). It isn’t about the ability of women to compete – regardless of their sex, and succeed because sex is not a filter. In fact, it highlights sex as a filter.
Women in this group don’t want to attend “women’s groups” or have events or panels for, by, or about women’s issues. We go so far as to nearly deny the biological reality that we are women. Make it a non-issue. Ignore it. Shhhhhh.
I have a sense that there is a younger generation that is moving beyond this urge to silence the sex issue. These women are embracing their experience as women and realizing that being a woman brings strength and ability that is crucial in today’s world. I have a few books on my shelf that point to this new embracing of the value of women. The first one I read, many years ago, was entitled, “How to Succeed in Business without a Penis: Secrets and Strategies for the Working Woman.” Another is “Web of Inclusion.” I would love to know your favorites books and articles in this space.
There are many things I admire about this emerging movement for women – mostly millennials – as they begin to solve some of the complications of past movements for women. I also see some ways there are unintended consequences. The value judgment is mine, and I own it. Sexual and romantic relationships for young women seem to have been adversely impacted. Women’s image of body and self hardly seems to have improved. That all seems like a lengthy topic in itself. But let’s get back to women in business for now, where progress has clearly been made.
As the article in Inc. mentions, women by the numbers are successful in achieving equality (or surpassing it) in education. And, where women are present, there can be “higher ROI” and better “capital efficiency” and so on:
“An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men. Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those run by men, and that organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35% higher return on equity and 34% higher total return to shareholders.”
The women who make it past the sexist barriers and glass ceilings can be even better at business than men. As these stats become known, having a woman involved in your business becomes a business strategy instead of a moral imperative. Will the new tokenism be less moral and more pragmatic? I hope so.
For now the women’s movement feels more complicated given that a large segment of women don’t want to have their bodies sexed and their identity tied up in the sex of that body.
What can we do? Let’s move toward more integration. At SXSW last year I was on the only panel that was all women that was not at all about being a woman. Let’s acknowledge that women have an expertise and an identity beyond that of their sexed body. Include women not as tokens (perceived as a deficit attached to a moral obligation) and instead include women because they are capable, perceptive, agile, hardworking, insightful, or whatever traits are needed in these uncertain times. See us for our strengths and not the “lack” of a penis.
For event organizers, put women on panels – not because you want to have a good ratio of men to women but – because you want to have a valuable perspective on a new approach to success. We enter the Relationship Economy, as Jerry Michalski calls it, and women, in general, navigate the world of relationship with profound perception and intuitive grace, achieving very useful business results. If you want to be successful in todays uncertain world, put women on your team, your board, or your panel.
ps. as for you women – the few – that demonstrate the seemingly female traits of backstabbing, destruction and gossip – who want to masquerade as men by denigrating other women, your selfishness undermines the work we all do as humans to evolve. It makes you appear short-sighted and shallow, and alienates you from authentic connection, trust, and alliance. We are angry with you, collectively. We will forgive you, but please go get some therapy! If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at this garbage: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2011/07/25/why-women-shouldnt-go-to-tech-conferences/
Note: I speak here only about women…some issue may overlap with race and other “minority” positions. However, I can’t speak to those and trust to those whose experience of those movements is more informed or more personal. I do have a rant I can write later on how we each have some form of privilege or power, and the social justice practice of focusing on where we lack power is a self-destructive way of navigating the world we share. If each of us stand in a multi-faceted identity and acknowledge our power and lack thereof, we develop sympathy and alliance with others.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2012-01-19 06:19:552012-01-19 06:19:55Women: Up Down and Around
